On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 01:01:05PM -0700, Steven Walling wrote:

One thing we could experiment with is turning on VisualEditor as the default for new people who've just signed up. We'd need to do this carefully with guidance from James/Trevor et. al., and with a close eye on the conversion rate. At the very least we could run a few remote usability tests to see if it made a positive difference or just totally confused people. My team could perhaps tackle this as part of our work on the "Getting Started" workflow we're presenting to newly-registered folks on English Wikipedia.

Actually, if you wanted to really streamline the copyediting tasks, you could just link to the veaction=edit version of the edit form rather than the page itself, maybe with a special token that VE could use to notify the user that they were editing the page, instead of the default notification that just says "hey, you're using VisualEditor", which is probably not the most helpful text for a totally-brand-new user.

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 1:01 PM, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.comwrote:

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 12:29 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:

...

Well, that's disconcerting - is this actually all the edits with the Visual Editor?

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&tagfilt...

...

I'll have to make a point of hammering on it more ;-)

Yes the RecentChanges tag should be comprehensive.

I think part of this is due to the "opt in" nature of the tool, and the rest is due to some well-known limitations. It doesn't yet handle templates, images, or references very well, and it's pretty slow on English Wikipedia still. I think the VisualEditor and Parsoid team are aware of all these, and have work in progress or on the near-term roadmap.

Yeah, I expect the overlap between "people who follow wikimedia news enough to know they can opt-in" and "people who do fairly complex formatting work" is pretty high. E.G. I have it installed, but rarely use it because most of my on-wiki work is fixing references, which the VE can't cope with yet (or, it's simply faster for me to do it by hand, as I can write markup in my sleep).

Would it be helpful for the dev team to have more people using it on a regular basis? -- phoebe

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

Steven Walling wrote:

One thing we could experiment with is turning on VisualEditor as the default for new people who've just signed up.

I won't call it "wikitext corruption," but the current (live) version of VisualEditor is actively harming articles by inserting pawns into them:

* https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/48346 * https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=553360286&oldid=540708795

Until issues like this are completely resolved, VisualEditor use should be decreased, not increased, in my opinion.

MZMcBride