So, one more (last) time:
1) I profess no "love" for the old interface, and
2) I do not compare merits of old and visual interfaces at all.
I say that
3) you won't get your indirectly expected results (participation) but
you'll surely get unexpected (?) results (breakage) because
4) introducing new I/O component of that kind of complexity will surely
break things in existing text corpus formed with the previous component,
such as it was.
What, am I stating the obvious? Sorry, then.
I seem to be misunderstanding you, then, and for that I apologise :). I
think there
is a risk of breakage (I'm not a technical person, but doing
pretty much *anything* creates some risk of breakage) but I disagree that
we're not going to get the expected results.
There are two problems with getting users to participate with Wikipedia
(well, 3, but we won't get into "most people don't know they can
edit").
The first that concerns us is the technical hurdles; the fact that markup
is complex and most people don't understand it. The second is the social
hurdles; the community is not, quite a bit of the time, a fun place to be -
nor is it something that can be understood easily (we have policies out the
wazoo, mostly in technical and internal terms). To "fix" Wikipedia's
participation issues, we need to fix both problems.
The technical hurdles are at least partly fixed by the visual editor. This
is a necessary component if we want to improve things - it's not, however,
the only component. Even with the visual editor, getting people to stick
around is going to be difficult because of the social issues (although the
New Editor Engagement Project is working on ways to solve those, too). We
might get more people, but that's only because we're exposing more people
to the possibilities of editing: I doubt the ratio of success:failure in
terms of long-term participation will dramatically alter. That's where the
second element comes in; fixing social problems. Hopefully those efforts
will succeed, and the result is we'll have an interface that's open to
newbies, and a community that is as well. All this is going to take a long
hard slog though.
Crucially, however, just as the technical improvements won't work without
social improvements, the social improvements won't work without technical
ones. We're not going to see a massive boost in numbers from exposing lots
and lots of people to a culture marked "here be dragons", but similarly
we're not going to see a massive boost in numbers if we don't expose them
at all. We need to fix both the technical hurdles and the social ones - and
that's precisely what we're doing. I don't think anyone is claiming that
the visual editor will, in and of itself, be the solution to our woes. But
it is an essential component of that solution.
--
Oliver Keyes
Community Liaison, Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation