The numbers are important. And perhaps what isn't being reflected well here is the genuine disappointment felt by so many in the enwiki community; there was more excitement about this project than probably any other that WMF has undertaken in the past 5 years. The sudden leap from feature-deficient alpha to deployment as default with untested major features eroded a great deal of the goodwill the community had for this much-requested feature. There still isn't any good explanation of why it didn't go alpha --> opt-in beta with the referencing and templates --> debug, debug, debug --> default deployment. It may not be coming through very clearly, but the editorial community *does* want this to work, and there's a lot of disappointment with what they got.
This was an error in judgment, but it does not need to be a fatal one. The important thing is to do some learning and apply it. Hold off on deploying this software as default editor on other projects until more of the bugs (especially performance related bugs) are resolved, but proceed with opt-in beta on more projects. They'll find bugs that enwiki hasn't found, and those bugs will be found by editors who are interested and motivated to test all kinds of use cases. Enable the opt-out button as a preference on enwiki, and give thought to making it not-default for IPs and new users. English Wikipedia has still paid the price of being the primary launch site, but there's no point in compounding it by making VisualEditor the default for all projects and all editors.
The knock-on effects of this problematic deployment will be felt for a long time, particularly its impact on other products that need VisualEditor to be widely accepted by the community to succeed (such as Flow). The portrayal of editors (and now volunteer and staff developers and engineers) as simply not understanding, or having unreasonable expectations, is not realistic. This was ready for beta testing on July 1; it wasn't ready for deployment to default. Your own internal memoranda (as can be seen by some of the links provided in this thread) indicate serious problems with performance. The publicly available data on Limn[1] is consistently showing less than 10% adoption by experienced users, and only 12% of all edits being done using VE.
Please reconsider the course of action. There is no benefit in putting other projects through this when you have more than enough issues to fix.
Risker
[1]http://ee-dashboard.wmflabs.org/datasources
On 23 July 2013 00:01, David Cuenca dacuetu@gmail.com wrote:
I'm glad that Tim is bringing some facts and numbers that back up what the community is demanding. To do otherwise will be to play tug-of-war which will lead to an even worse outcome.
Besides of enabling the preference, a good approach would be to activate or deactivate that preference depending on how much an user has been using (or not) Visual Editor in their last edits and to ask new users if they want to use VE or the plain text system. "New users" are not that new, since many of them have been editing anonymously before.
When there are more compelling reasons to do the switch (like real-time collaboration), users can have a higher incentive to do the switch.
Micru
On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 11:44 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling@wikimedia.org
wrote:
On 23/07/13 11:35, James Forrester wrote:
It would imply that this is a preference that Wikimedia will support. This would be a lie. We have always intended for VisualEditor to be a wiki-level preference, and for this user-level preference to disappear
once
the need for an opt-in (i.e., the beta roll-out to production wikis) is over.
The feedback from established users [1] and the results from Aaron Halfaker's study [2] suggest that opt-in would be the most appropriate policy given VE's current level of maturity. That is, disable it by default and re-enable the preference.
A proponent of source editing would claim that the steep learning curve is justified by the end results. A visual editor is easier for new users, but perhaps less convenient for power users. So Aaron Halfaker's study took its measurements at the point in the learning curve where you would expect the benefit of VE to be most clear: the first edit. Despite the question being as favourable to VE as possible, the result strongly favoured the use of source editing:
"Newcomers with the VisualEditor were ~43% less likely to save a single edit than editors with the wikitext editor (x^2=279.4, p<0.001), meaning that Visual Editor presented nearly a 2:1 increase in editing difficulty."
On the Wikipedia RFC question "Wikimedia should disable this software by default?", there were 30 support votes and 17 opposed. But many of those 17 oppose votes assumed that VE is beneficial to new users. Now that we know that that isn't the case, the amount of support for enabling VE by default would surely be very small indeed. If it's not beneficial for either established or new users, why have it?
It's not like the VE team are sitting around with no testing to do, no features to add, and no bugs to work on. So the argument that you need people looking at VE in order to provide feedback seems shallow.
Round-trip bugs, and bugs which cause a given wikitext input to give different HTML in Parsoid compared to MW, should have been detected during automated testing, prior to beta deployment. I don't know why we need users to report them.
Perhaps the main problem is performance. Perhaps new users are especially likely to quit on the first edit because they don't want to wait 25-30 seconds for the interface to load (the time reported in [3]). Performance is a very common complaint for established users also.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor/RFC
[2] <
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:VisualEditor%27s_effect_on_newly_re...
[3] https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/VisualEditor_user_tests
-- Tim Starling
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