[Wikimedia-l] Feedback for the Wikimedia Foundation

[Romaine Wiki]

You say you are not ignoring feedback. Then how did it happen that all the feedback we have been given on nl-wiki in the past month is still nothing done with, including some major bugs? Nothing is done with it, you can say you do not ignore feedback, but we would like to see the proof for that. The liaisons and developers make the visual editor already look nicer than it actually is, so we really like to see that it is no fairy tale.

But thanks for assessing the bugs of nl-wiki. Keep what that in mind that in general the community of nl-wiki likes the idea of a visual editor and still 80% voted for delaying launch due problems/bugs.

You say that we have typically template constructions. Let me say a few things about that, at first: it is wikisyntax and parser functions used for those things we got them for. Second, we try to keep our templates as KISS as possible. No gigantic constructions like en-wiki, but max 2 layers of templates. 

Largethumb has as goal that all images under an infobox have the same width as the infobox itself, so that they are aligned at each other. The template contains very basic codes, like you describe here. It is one of the most simple templates on nl-wiki, and the visual editor can't cope with that. Sorry that only one interwiki is added, I haven't searched for it on other Wikipedias. The largethumb came into existance as we missed an image parameter for that. In the past we also had a template for borders around images, until the software got |border| as parameter for images. 

If templates are going to bite, maybe it would have been a better idea to keep then green shaded, like the gallery currently is. It is better to have a good working visual editor which is not able to edit some aspects of articles (like templates) than having a visual editor which breaks templates.

And if project specific templates will bite, perhaps it is an better idea not to aim for many Wikipedias at the same time but to spread that in time, so that developers have the time to pay attention to project specific bugs.

Still it all sounds strange to me. Why?
* One of the most easiest templates appears to be the most difficult one for the visual editor.
* The MediaWiki own <gallery> still doesn't work in the visual editor. 
* I heard from the Korean wiki that the visual editor couldn't handle some characters in the Korean alphabet.
* But also a lot of tables can't be handled, not the most difficult tables.

Basic things! 
So no weak excuses please, the visual editor isn't ready, that is the onliest conclusion I can draw if very basic things still do not function well. On top of that are also enough more complex bugs.

Also our appendix template, to add manual or showing <ref> sources in articles, it is a very easy template but very difficult in the visual editor. And above all our very nice wrapper template. The wrapper is there because WMF still doesn't fix a bug of pushed down images. 

Another problem the visual editor has is that it makes it too easy for users to change the size of images. The MediaWiki software has a thumbnail feature in it what enables users with bad eyes to make images larger in their preferences (second tab), or for users with very large or very small computer screens to resize the images to give them a better perspective in the screen. If you add a px to the thumb, that feature is broken. On the Dutch Wikipedia we like very much that basis feature in the software as we can serve more people in a better way with information, but the VE makes it too easy to change that and stimulates bad behaviour. I have seen also other examples of stimulating bad behaviour. The software certainly should not stimulate that. 

I still think you aim too high for now, with all kinds of complex things. MediaWiki itself took years to get in the current stable version, the development of visual editor seems to try to match that level of development, which seems to me an utopia. It needs time than only a few months to get a fully ready editor.

The communities are in general willing to adopt the visual editor, but the way how WMF is acting with the launch is greating the gap. The way how it is going now enlarges the gap between the community and WMF. I know some developers have editing experience, but still I think it would be good to have a non-developer (or two) in the developing team, someone with much editing experiences and is able to oversee the consequences, so that creating gabs is prevented, as well as "déformation professionnelle". [1] 


Romaine


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9formation_professionnelle


Erik Moeller erik at wikimedia.org
Tue Jul 23 06:05:50 UTC 2013

On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 9:42 PM, Romaine Wiki <romaine_wiki at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I still don't see a reflection in your mail that you take the feedback from local communities seriously.

Romaine, we're not ignoring feedback. I'm asking James to weigh in
with some details relative to the issues raised that are specific to
applying VisualEditor to the Dutch Wikipedia content and template
corpus, so we can make a final assessment on whether these issues are
severe enough to justify a delayed deployment there.

>From what I'm seeing on the feedback page, these are (as is often the
case) typically related to specific template constructions. That's
generally what's going to be most likely to bite us during the
cross-language rollout: each Wikipedia uses a very different set of
templates, and some template constructions are inherently fragile.

For example, from the feedback page, it doesn't surprise me that a
construction like

[[File:Bla.jpg|{{largethumb}}|Some caption]]

where {{largethumb}} contains only the text "260px|thumb", may cause
problems in VE :-). It is somewhat reassuring to only see a single
interlanguage link to nds-nl on that template.

To be clear, as we go forward, we'll need to determine what kinds of
uses of templates we can and want to support. As noted earlier,
templates are used in some truly mindboggling ways, some of which
we'll simply never be able to support well.

Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation