[Wikimedia-l] Visual Editor "temporary" opt-out

[Todd Allen]

I realize this was brought up a couple of weeks ago and I apologize for the
late response on this, but it was just recently brought to my attention
that the VE opt-out was intended to be only temporary.

Firstly: Currently, as per the overwhelming consensus on en.wikipedia at
least, VE needs to be opt-in, not opt-out. It's not even stable or usable
to the beta stage, but it might be ready for some early user tests. Even
beta testing, however, should only be opt-in. Opt-out should only occur
once the product is feature-complete and has no (yes, zero) known major
flaws or incomplete features. That means it should be capable of making
-any- edit to -any- page, and in the manner that its user would want it to,
including parsing, not no-wiki'ing, of wikimarkup, as the community has
clearly stated.

That aside, it's now come to my attention that the "opt-out" is meant to
last only until the project is out of "beta". There are some problems with
this.

First, your (and by "your", I specifically mean the project managers)
judgment on project readiness is obviously way off. VE isn't even -in-
beta. It's not feature-complete, it's not ready, and it's got massive
numbers of known bugs. It could be barely described as ready for alpha. Yet
it's being treated as release-ready, such as being released as the default
for most users. That calls into serious question the judgment of the
project managers on this project. I, and many others, do not trust you to
properly determine when this project should be released, as you've already
made a hugely premature release of software that wasn't even near ready.

Secondly, even if VE worked perfectly, some editors will never be
interested in using it. An opt-out clarifies that the development team
recognizes a significant group of those editors exists, and will ensure
their wishes are respected. Some editors will just want raw-text editing,
some will be running bots or scripts that depend on it, some just won't
want to change, some will be doing tasks VE has been explicitly noted not
to support. All must be respected, and raw editing must remain supported,
not be squashed by yet another heavy-handed gesture from the same team
that's already made far too many of those. I don't want to hear, in a year
or two "It works great! Source editing is deprecated and we'll be removing
it soon!". And believe me, many of us, me included, expect just that,
absent a firm commitment.

Thirdly, a confirmation that VE will always include opt-out will clearly
notify editors not interested in using it that it will always remain
optional, and that source editing will remain supported. Currently, given
the "ram it through" approach by WMF and its technical staff, such trust is
severely eroded. A clear statement that "You may always opt out of VE"
would go a long way toward rebuilding it, while "You may only opt out while
we say you can" further erodes that already damaged trust.

Please make a clear statement that VE will always have an officially
supported opt-out for editors who would like to use it, not only during
"beta".

Regards,

Todd Allen