[Wikimedia-l] Feedback for the Wikimedia Foundation

[Tom Morris]

On 23 July 2013 at 17:03:07, Erik Moeller (erik at wikimedia.org) wrote:
On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 6:16 AM, Craig Franklin
<cfranklin at halonetwork.net> wrote:

> 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.

At no point did we expect that VisualEditor would see significant
adoption among experienced editors initially. It's very clear that
initially, for a user experienced with markup, a completely new
editing tool that sometimes introduces new types of errors (either
inevitably because it's a different editing mode, or avoidably due to
bugs or UX issues) will in most cases represent primarily a new
cognitive burden and not increased ease. It's to the credit of our
community that we nonetheless see strong support for developing a
VisualEditor even from users who are unlikely to use it in the near
future.

I'm hearing some of those users say "It's easier for me right now to
do simple copyedits", and I've seen some examples of users who weren't
active come back and say "I'm editing again now because I was never
able to figure out markup". But for users who are very comfortable
with the current mode of editing, it will take us a long time to both
provide a consistently superior experience (which I do think is
possible, but very hard) and to win them over. It will take users some
time, as well, to discover features in VisualEditor that make their
lives easier (keyboard shortcuts, templatedata, default parameters,
etc.).


Should that even be a concern? I mean, if lots of newbies and technophobes start using the Visual Editor and a bunch of us dorks who love writing markup don't, would that matter?

I'm very happy that the Visual Editor exists and glad that the Foundation have invested the time and resources building it, but have absolutely no intention of using it, and have disabled it on my account. Not because it is bad, but because it is Not For Me. That's because in my work life, I spend most of my day inside a text editor.

The same is true for OpenStreetMap: they recently rolled out the iD editor, an in-browser editor that makes it significantly easier for newbies to edit. It has a built-in tutorial mode and a much nicer UI for managing metadata. But the keyboard commands of JOSM, the desktop editing tool have been wired into my brain and are better suited for a power user. (One simple thing: there's keyboard commands to change from 'select' mode and 'draw' mode - the S and A keys. Which means drawing lots of small fiddly objects doesn't require me to move my mouse over to the tool panel.)

If lots of grizzled wiki-veterans try out the Visual Editor, realise it isn't for them and stick with editing markup, that's not a failure for the Visual Editor, that's a win for freedom of choice.

--
Tom Morris
http://tommorris.org/