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

[Ziko van Dijk]

Dear Steven, I think I understand what you mean, and I am concerned about a
certain conservatism among the editors, too. Some editors complain all the
time anyway. But when 87% reject such a software feature I suppose they
cannot be all wrong (by the way, I am one of this huge majority). There are
two groups among the "rejectors": Those who object a VE in general, and
those who are eager to have one but have experienced major problems using
it (I am one of them).
One of my compatriots has expressed it as I feel it: we often see "beta
phase" software, and sometimes after the beta phase there has never been a
"final version". But those beta versions usually work well. This is
different to the VE version we have experienced.
I do appreciate Erik's explanations from above, see that the Foundation
does notice what happens, and I agree that the existing community should
not have an absolute veto power with regard to the "potential community of
the future". I do have the impression that people were used as guinea pigs
who did not ask for being that. :-)
Kind regards
Ziko








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Ziko van Dijk
voorzitter / president Wikimedia Nederland
deputy chair Wikimedia Chapters Association Council

Vereniging Wikimedia Nederland
Postbus 167
3500 AD Utrecht
http://wikimedia.nl
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2013/7/30 Steven Walling <steven.walling at gmail.com>

> 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
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