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

[Fred Bauder]

> 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

Let me confess, I hate all new things. I hate the constantly changing
complicated wiki markup and I hate the new editor, cause I don't know how
to work it even if it would be simpler if I were starting from scratch.
The point was to design an editor that would be better for casual and new
editors; I have nothing whatever to add from my own experience because I
can't duplicate from my experience that of a casual or new editor.

Fred