[Wikimedia-l] Feedback for the Wikimedia Foundation

[Erik Moeller]

On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 10:06 PM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:

> This particular ongoing saga (refusing to provide an opt-out mechanism for
> VisualEditor) seems to largely echo past issues with treating Wikimedia
> editors as customers instead of colleagues.

That's not the intent, and I'm sorry if that's how it comes across.
The "Just make it go away if you don't like it" solution of saying
"Tick this checkbox if you don't want to deal with VisualEditor ever
again" seems to me to be more problematic in creating distance between
WMF and its most active users. As this dialog hopefully demonstrates,
distance is the last thing we want to create.

We want to actually make sure that the default user experience we can
offer _works_ for power users, rather than just making it easy to
freeze the experience in time and having us not worry about "those
users" anymore. Like I said in my response to Adam, that was the
approach taken to Monobook->Vector, and it's not one we want to
repeat.

As I've noted in my response to wikitech-l just now, there's also the
issue of what "opt-out" should mean as VE becomes increasingly more
pervasive in the user experience.

But as I've noted in [1], I do not think a compromise on the
preference question is necessarily out of reach. I've asked James and
team to deliberate on some of the possibilities here, and offered the
same suggestion I noted in [1].

Erik

[1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-July/070643.html
-- 
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation