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

[Robert Rohde]

It is absolutely true that the power users can't directly speak for
the new users or anons.

That said, it would be unusual (though not impossible) if 85% of one
group held an opinion without a large fraction of other related
communities also sharing that view.  If the WMF or someone else wants
to commission a study of anon and new users opinions, that would
definitely be interesting to see.  Personally, I think VE is probably
still too immature to be spending a lot of money asking people about
it.  (In other words, many of the problems and missing features are
pretty obvious and we don't need to query large numbers of people to
hear about things we already know.)  Once it is a bit more stable and
the low hanging fruit have been addressed, it could be quite
instructive to get some user interaction studies on how people think
it could be made better.

We also might be able to get some useful data by further A/B testing.
For example, if VE is disabled, then assigning some anons to a VE
enabled group (perhaps by a cookie) could provide a valuable
comparison that we don't presently have.

For the moment, the thing we do have is edit counts over time (and
similar data).  Such data is certainly subject to various confounding
influences, but the data we do have for anons and new users isn't
exactly exciting.  New users are only choosing VE at the 30-40% level
for article edits, while anons are at the 20% use level.  Not exactly
a sign of wild enthusiasm for the new editing platform.  By itself,
these lowish use numbers are probably enough to conclude that neither
group is overwhelmingly excited by VE, though admittedly both numbers
are much higher than the 6% usage seen by established users.

The number I worry a bit more about is that total anon editing of
articles has fallen 9% in the two weeks since introduction (compared
to the prior two weeks).  During the same time period total editing of
articles by registered users rose 2%.  Again, correlation is not
causation, but if novice editors really liked VE then I would rather
have expected total anon editing to increase relative to established
users.  Even though anons and power user undoubtedly have different
needs.  I can't help worrying that the bugs, missing features, and
sluggish performance that power users complain about might also be
discouraging some of the anonymous and new users.  If the present
state of VE is actually discouraging new editors then that would be a
good sign that it isn't yet ready for wide deployment.

If I were designing a research program to study VE, I would certainly
make getting additional information on anon behaviors a high priority,
either by conducting new comparison trials or by finding better ways
to tease out patterns in editing trends.

-Robert Rohde





On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 1:47 PM, Steven Walling
<steven.walling at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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