On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 6:09 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Greg Grossmeier wrote:
- On Tuesday VisualEditor team will enable an A/B test, where half of
new accounts created on English Wikipedia will get VisualEditor enabled by default. This is to test performance and features before the larger rollout in July.
As I commented at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/49604, the (apparent) lack of an easy means of opting out of this experiment and the increased frequency of severe VisualEditor-related bugs being reported recently both make it appear that an A/B test of this nature would be premature and potentially very damaging. Dirty diffs, inadvertent section removals, etc. are still common when using VisualEditor. Are we really expecting our newest users to be able to spot and correct these issues?
I'm also quite surprised to see that VisualEditor could be activated by default for some new accounts.
I tried again VisualEditor on frwiki, and I don't see how it could be effectively used by new users : * VE is still very limited : for example, not being able to edit template is clearly a big limitation. How a new user will react when he tries to edit an article for a first time and see many parts that he can't edit ? * VE is still doing dodgy things in some situations : how a new user can deal with modifications done by VE without his knowledge ?
Currently, I think that VE should only be activated voluntarily, so that people know what they are doing, are prepared to fix incorrect modifications made by VE, and can easily work outside of VE to overcome its current limitations. I think that new users would quickly get a bad first impression if using VE.
For me, VE is currently a good start for a more user friendly editor, but as it still lacks a few important features and still has a few bugs, it should stay in opt-in mode and clearly not in opt-out mode.
Nico