I'd like to say thanks to the folks who have been working on VisualEditor, Citoid, and Parsoid in the past few years.

When I first started to work in 2015 on what I eventually called the LearnWiki project https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Motivational_and_educational_video_to_introduce_Wikimedia, I was a bit hesitant to recommend VisualEditor due to it having some rough spots in performance and reliability, but I knew that VE was probably the way of the future for new Wikipedia contributors. As I've been writing scripts recently for a 2019 small pilot project that will teach users how to create citations with VE https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Rapid/Pine/Continuation_of_educational_video_and_website_series, I've been impressed by how much has improved. The VE's performance seems to be faster, the automatic citation tool can be easy and enjoyable to use, and the system (VE + Parsoid + Citoid) seems to be generally stable on ENWP.

I think that you made the desktop user experience significantly better for new contributors on ENWP who use VE.

While I'm writing, I'll ask a couple of related questions. If someone knows of recent research that analyzes the productivity and longevity of new users who try the VE and/or New Wikitext Editor ("NEWT") interfaces, I would be appreciative if that information could be added to this project talk page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:Project/Rapid/Pine/Continuation_of_educational_video_and_website_series so that I can take a look. Especially interesting would be research that shows points in workflows on English Wikipedia where new editors who use VE seem to become stuck. (The sticking points may have more to do with policies than with interfaces.) Also, Guy Macon has asked some questions here (a secton of the same talk page) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:Project/Rapid/Pine/Continuation_of_educational_video_and_website_series#Measures_of_success_discussion,_copied_from_this_page_on_English_Wikipedia regarding the percentage of editors that use different editing interfaces. Please participate on the talk page if you have the time and interest.

Thanks again for the good work on VisualEditor and related systems.

Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )