[Wikimedia-l] Let's have the courage to sit down and talk about VisualEditor

[Steven Walling]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 11:13 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> de:wp convinced you. What would it take to convince you on en:wp? (I'm
> asking for a clear objective criterion here. If you can only offer a
> subjective one, please explain how de:wp convinced you when en:wp
> hasn't.)
>

[Speaking personally, not for the VE team in any way.]

Why should a consensus of any arbitrary number of power editors be allowed
to define the defaults for all editors, including anonymous and
newly-registered people? Anonymous edits make up about 1/3 of enwiki edits,
IIRC. Every day, 3,000-5,000 new accounts are registered on English
Wikipedia. These people are not even being asked to participate in these
RFCs. Even if they were, they typically don't know how to participate and
find it very intimidating.

This system of gauging the success of VE is heavily biased toward the
concerns of people most likely to dislike change in the software and
frankly, to not really need VE in its current state. That doesn't mean
they're wrong, just that they don't speak for everyone's perspective. The
sad fact is that the people who stand to benefit the most from continued
use and improvements to VE can't participate in an RFC about it, in part
because of wikitext's complexities and annoyances. It is a huge failure of
the consensus process and the Wikimedia movement if we pretend that it's
truly open, fair, and inclusive to make a decision about VE this way.

In WMF design and development, we work our butts off trying to do research,
design, and data analysis that guides us toward building for _all_ the
stakeholders in a feature. We're not perfect at it by a long shot, but I
don't see a good faith effort by English and German Wikipedians running
these RFCs to solicit and consider the opinions of the huge number of
new/anonymous editors. And why should they? That's not their job, they just
want to express their frustration and be listened to.

To answer David's question: I think we need a benchmark for making VE
opt-in again that legitimately represents the needs of _all the people_ who
stand to benefit from continuing the rapid pace of bug fixing and feature
additions. I don't think an on-wiki RFC is it.

Steven