Tyler Romeo,
On Jul 23, 2013, at 8:55 PM, Tyler Romeo tylerromeo@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 9:55 PM, James Forrester jforrester@wikimedia.orgwrote:
I hope that as few users as possible will choose this way to degrade their experience and deprive the community of their input. Instead of endlessly arguing the point about this, I'd rather my team and I spending our time working to make our sites better.
I don't understand. Are you purposely trying to instigate this matter?
Whoa. Them's fighting words! :-D
All of a sudden just because somebody prefers editing source code they're "depriving the community".
I prefer editing in source mode (at least based on my edit history). But I don't feel the need to turn on this preference. I didn't find it too hard to click "Edit Source" after the first day. We are not talking about people who prefer to edit source at all. We are talking about people who find clicking "Edit Source" so inconveniencing that they need to enable a gadget to remove it completely from the UI. Unless you really want to go all phoenixoverride on how 2.9K is the end-of-wikipedia-as-we-know-it.
For full disclosure, the VE team reports to me so maybe that makes me biased. I don't know. I think this makes me embarrassed and a little guilty that I don't use VE more. :-D
Or do you seriously believe that there is literally nothing better than VE and that VE is the choice for everybody?
You may not have meant it, but this is a fallacy of False Choice. What is being talked about isn't "forcing" people to use VE, but hiding VE from the UI completely. There's a lot in the UI on the wikis, I have never used, nor plan to, so really this sturm and drang among engineers about what makes correct UI or good product design. Engineering has weighed in as to the patch as it stands, and this is a product decision. As you put it earlier:
The real root of this discussion is whether or not the method through which VE is disabled is done as a Gadget or as a user preference. Both methods are already implemented, it's just a matter of a configuration variable.
With that said, I'd like to see more points on what real motivation there is to force users to have a gadget to do something that an existing user preference already does.
Which is really a way of saying, "This isn't an engineering issue (yet), so what is the product and UI reasoning here?"
The reasoning from product (James and Erik earlier in this thread, as well as the FAQ linked to by C Scott) was well thought out in the choice to refuse this patch. Equally well thought out was the reversal of such a decision.
(By well thought out I mean better reasoned than either I personally would have made, or seen in the discussion on this thread. But then again, I'm an engineer, I don't go dictating to product mangers how to design the product or designers how to do UI. Instead I, and I expect the same from my team, to inform product managers and designers as the engineering consequences and costs. I believe if we make decisions that are informed from (but not dictated by) engineering, product, design, data and the community, we end up with a better outcome. Weird as it may sound, I assume good faith on their part and they have yet to let me, or my teams, down.)
Once VisualEditor is out of 'beta', this preference will be removed.
What you meant to say is that when VE comes out of "beta", you'll post to this mailing list again so we can discuss whether the user preference is still appropriate. And if it's decided that it's no longer needed, then it will be removed.
No. I may be wrong, but I think he said what he meant to say exactly as he said it.
It's a valid interpretation of good faith complaints about the VE rollout. E3 has a opt-out preference against experimental features. To the extent that VE is a beta product, which nobody denies, then it would behoove us to make a similar option available to VE for when VE is in "beta." That reasoning is very sound.
I've read the discussion on this thread, and I found none of it actually addresses the reasoning guiding the VE feature to not allow this preference. Erik has given a long discussion why, from an engineering perspective, a no-op right now would add technical debt in the future and complicate the product roadmap today. James has given a long discussion why, from a product perspective, adding the opt-out would be lying to the users about VE. All of that is nearly identical to the FAQ reposted by Scott. Even James's reversal on the opt-out is consistent with that original reasoning (same reasoning, different outcome).
What I read in direct response to those three e-mails often (not always) consisted of a lot of snark, and a fundamental mistrust of product experts to be experts in…product. I read some data and studies that were linked to that were misused and against specific admonitions by the data analysts (I prefer to think it was an accidental misreading of the studies), I read some discussions that disputed some other data that informed the reasoning that were, while factual, deceptive (e.g. taking page times on huge pages that even the best HTML editors die on). BTW, I do not think any of that was necessarily bad faith, I feel that people here, in their passion of the moment, did not read closely what was being said. I know I've been guilty of selective reading, when I am emotional.
I also read a lot of very good faith complaints and discussion. Some of it was deemed off-topic on a thread that is entirely on-topic for an engineering list. But none of this refuted the actual reasoning and a good amount of it supported it. It did, however, speak to the fact that a preference vs. none is a choice that should be re-examined. A number of my engineers took those good faith issues and lobbied on your behalf for the preference to be added. They lobbied based on the reasoning product used in their original decision.
On Jul 23, 2013, at 12:12 PM, Bartosz Dziewoński matma.rex@gmail.com wrote:
On a side note, I find it interesting how none of the actual VE and Parsoid developers replied here, apart from Roan, Chris and Subbu on off-topic technical issues (thanks for that).
I am glad that they stuck to actual engineering issues too. With their discipline to stick to engineering, they make me look far better than I deserve as their "manager." And, if you saw their behavior off-list on your behalf, you'd be surprised even more.
I'll take exception to them being "off-topic technical issues" on a mailing list that is [Wikitech-l]. But that's me. :-D
Take care,
terry