On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 10:25 PM, Ryan Lane rlane32@gmail.com wrote:
Assuming a proper implementation of edit/edit source I'm not sure what the big deal is, but I'm not a hardcore editor so I'm likely just not seeing it.
I don't edit that much myself, so I can't speak first-person here, but I think the primary reason some people want this is because they simply don't plan on using VE whatsoever. They are used to clicking on the Edit tab to get to the main editor, among other minor things. Also, from the WMF perspective, another pro of enabling the preference is that you don't piss off the community that is currently asking very adamantly for this.
Like I said before, though, we have to think of this as pros v. cons. Sure, the pros of enabling this user preference are not that huge (unless there's something else outside of what I mentioned above). However, there are seemingly no cons to enabling it. There are claims of it being too much of a hassle to maintain, which is absurd considering MW's extension infrastructure, and their are claims of it causing preference bloat, which is true, but if that's really the reason we would block this, then I think we should start throwing out other preferences while we're here.
In the end, unless there is some demonstrative reason for disabling this preference (especially the way it is now, using $wgHiddenPrefs, which is not what that variable was meant to be used for), the pros outweight the cons.
*-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo@gmail.com