[Wikimedia-l] a compromise proposal for visual editor dogfooding

[Andrew Gray]

On 3 August 2013 17:51, Kevin Wayne Williams <kwwilliams at kwwilliams.com> wrote:

> That's one of the biggest chicken-and-egg problems in this whole deployment:
> those help pages are exclusively maintained by editors. Until there's a
> substantial body of volunteers that believe that updating the help pages to
> match VE is a worthwhile endeavour, the pages will remain at the current
> version, which means that all new editors can only get help if they don't
> use VE. That makes it hard to ever find a group of people that thinks
> updating the documentation is worth the effort.

At the moment we seem to have a marvellous inconsistency (perhaps this
is A/B testing help pages...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutorial/Editing - "new
environment", noting both and recommending VE,  but only updated 9th
July

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing - old style, with 135 word
(!) notice at the top about VE

I wonder sometimes if maintaining help/documentation pages would be a
sensible thing for WMF to have a (part?) time staffer working on, but
I guess this gets into the muddy area of "paying people for volunteer
tasks"

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk