I'm glad to see this discussion getting started. The points raised in this thread so far are well stated, and this is an important issue to talk openly about at a core level.
I'm the lead developer of the visual editor, so I've been involved in this space for some time now. I've heard the following argument many times before - and I would like to respond to it in particular:
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 10:58 PM, Pavel Tkachenko <proger.xp@gmail.com> wrote:
First of all, if editors can't master even the simplest wiki markup
(without templates and the C/HTML mixture) than what good he's for as
an editor? Basic Wikipedia markup contains a dozen of tokens, if not
less.
On the contrary, those who've mastered the basics have passed the
first and unobtrusive"editorial filter".
I think it fails to take into account a few things:
- It's getting harder to edit - The relative difficulty of contributing to Wikipedia compared to other ways to publish content online has changed over time because other sites have made usability improvements
- We've done our research - There are many ways to improve usability, the decision to move towards a visual editor was based on usability research conducted in a lab and through remote user testing
- The status quo is failing us - We know that fewer people are editing Wikipedia than they used to, and reversing this trend has become a priority for the Wikimedia Foundation
I would also like to offer some perspective from "the visual editor team".
- We understand that if we make editing easier without also making reviewing easier, the Wiki will become littered with unreviewed edits and the backlog will strain the capacity of the community
- We view this as unacceptable
- There are other projects addressing the usability and scalability of review
- We view these as critical
- Our goal is to increase the number of people who are able to contribute and to improve the productivity of people who already contribute
- This must not be at the expense of contribution quality
I hope this effectively illustrates an alternative perspective on this subject. This is a very hard problem, and any course of action will involve some level of risk. We are trying our best to manage this risk, mostly by conducting a great deal of research and development.
- Trevor