[Wikimedia-l] Let's have the courage to sit down and talk about VisualEditor

[Steven Walling]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 10:24 PM, Kevin Wayne Williams <
kwwilliams at kwwilliams.com> wrote:

> If you had followed that, and understood that the Minimum Viable Product
> included cut-and-paste, table editing, and maybe the ability to
> successfully and completely edit the hundred or so most edited articles out
> of all the millions, you wouldn't have hit the level of pushback you've
> encountered. You released a sub-viable product, which is what caused the
> storm you encountered.


Minimum viable product does not mean "anything and everything works
perfectly" just like you want right out of the box, and it definitely does
not mean feature parity with an existing product (i.e. wikitext editing).
The purpose is to release something that can help us gather feedback and
test the concept behind the product in the real world instead of in a
lab.[1] Table editing and other advanced markup is not really necessary to
test the concept with the target audience, and decide whether to move
forward.

We all know VE didn't and doesn't edit everything in a way that's perfectly
up to snuff. No one has been claiming it doesn't have warts. What the team
is pushing back against is the idea that they can just turn it off and
develop a great new editor in a vacuum, away from real use by a
representative swath of current editors (registered and anonymous, new and
old). The lack of use by a sufficiently large and representative group of
editors is a big part of why the _seven months_ of original opt-in use
didn't fix most issues.

Erik and James have clearly admitted we can achieve our goals while moving
at a slower pace than the initial rollout and making other concessions.
Despite this, the attitude of some seems to be that they should be
committing seppuku for daring to release something not 100% perfect
according to [insert personal criteria for editing perfection here]. That's
not the kind of reaction that drew me to Wikipedia back in 2006, not by a
long shot. Rather, most of us find Wikipedia so rewarding because there is
room to be bold in the name of helping the encyclopedia. Which is precisely
what the VE team has been attempting to do.

Do I really really wish editing references and tables and templates was
easier when I'm writing articles in my off hours? Holy smokes yes. Is it
helping us get there to be making bitter comments about how Erik or anybody
else at WMF doesn't care about editors? No.

Steven

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVR82uP_f6Q