On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 1:41 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Oh my goodness, this thing is so not ready for newbies yet. It would confuse them utterly. ("But *why* can't I edit the infobox?" "What's these changes mean?" etc.)
People who think that not editing the images and infobox would be more confusing than wikitext need to go watch some of the many usability tests we've run, including all the way back to 2009-10. We run usability tests with every iteration of the Getting Started experiment we launch these days, and every time new people who click Edit for the first time are quite literally shocked by the crazy mess that is wikitext. In this workflow, we're specifically asking newbies to do something that doesn't involve anything other than simple text changes (the most advanced markup we ask them to work with is links), so VisualEditor may actually be quite appropriate to A/B test. It may have extreme limitations, but at least it is roughly what new editors expect to see after hitting edit, instead of a garbled mass of incomprehensible code.
Steven