Hi,
The interest of the VE team is not the only one to take into account I think... The impact on the new wikipedia editors should be a more important parameter in my opinion.
I tried VE a few times, and clearly think it's not yet in a situation where it could be rolled out to unexperienced users : * VE is still very limited in what you can do with it (no templates, no references, ...). What will be the reaction of a new user when he sees that he can't edit some parts of the article ? * VE is still quite buggy (adding nowiki tags, deleting references, modifying templates, ...). While it's not a problem with users that opted-in for testing, it's quite different for users that don't even know what VE is. * Beta testers made a few suggestions for enhancements that would be quite helpful for editors (like being able to choose between VE and wikitext when editing a given section and not globally, ...)
Why do you want to rush a forced test on new users when VE is not yet a stable, fully functional product ?
You mentionned the low number of edits with VE currently. I think it's low because of the problems mentionned above, not because of a lack of testers. I saw several users do like me: try it, see that many editions can't be made or end up with side effects, report the problems, and use again the wikitext waiting for the problems to be solved in a next version. I do believe than once VE is stable and has more features, people will start to use it more widely.
Has there been any analysis done to foresee the impact on new users that would have VE enabled by default ? Like taking a few hours or a day of modifications on enwiki, keeping only the modifications made by users registered in the last few days, and try to do the exact same modification with VE : * What percentage of modifications could be achieved with the current set of features available in VE ? * What percentage of modifications would have been done without undesired side effects ? That would give an idea on how many new users would run into problems with VE (for me, they are very low, but I'm not a new user). With the current version of VE, I believe both those percentages will be low, implying many new users will have problems.
Nico
On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 12:12 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.comwrote:
The fact that there are known issues doesn't mean that finding new, unknown issues will slow down the work on the known; it's up to the team to decide what sort and what amount of feedback they'll be able/need to process (and to adjust if they were wrong).
Gradually enabling a feature is not an "experiment" on some poor victims, it's a normal development strategy (as opposed to sudden revolutions/waterfalls on the wikis). I still don't see any indication of why it should raise the end net harm of the VE development on the wikis.
I don't know how to enable the preference at some point of users' lifecycle; probably, in the same way you do it for half new users. A hook I assume, it was mentioned in some Echo and enotif bugs.
Nemo
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