[Wikimedia-l] Feedback for the Wikimedia Foundation

[Craig Franklin]

Hi Erik,

On 23 July 2013 17:01, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> 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


A warm and genuine thankyou for this.

I just want to basically endorse some of the other comments being made
here, which I think are quite insightful.  If the goal of this project was
to get the Visual Editor deployed on time and on budget, then the goal has
been achieved.  But if the goal was to gain acceptance from the community,
then I think that the polls on enwiki and nlwiki show that it has been
quite a failure.  And if the goal was to make it easier for newbies to
edit, which I believe was the whole point of the VE in the first place,
then the statistically significant decline in edits from new users
discussed in the other thread would indicate that VE has failed to meet
that goal.  Ultimately in its current state it's a tool that very few
people, whether newcomers or power users, seem to like very much.

As is usually the case, I'm not saying this to have a go at the developers
or anyone else involved (who are obviously doing their best), but I think
that some of the communication on this topic has been a bit clumsy and has
caused a lot of unnecessary angst that could probably have been avoided if
it had been planned for in advance.  Does the Foundation have formal
communication plans for things like this that focus on gaining community
buy-in?  If not, then you probably should.  Obviously more testing and
specifically more user acceptance testing would have been helpful in this
case, although I understand the political pressures in getting the product
shipped on time.

Cheers,
Craig Franklin