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

[Marc A. Pelletier]

On 07/31/2013 10:52 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:
> I think it would be helpful, if possible, to give some guesstimates of
> this, i.e.: how longer a wait it would cost us to reach some rank of
> quality if the deployment was downscaled; or, what would be the
> "deadline" for feedback on aspects X and Y to be actually able to be
> processed and worked on, before previous development decisions become
> irreversible or the developers move on to something else.

Is it even possible to quantify this without just pulling numbers out of
one's ass?  It's not just a matter of "10 times the number of users
means 10 times the number of bugs found" since the /profile/ of the
users changes drastically as well.

For instance, allowing the VE only for registered editors is guaranteed
to never reveal bugs/issues that only affects anonymous editing or
interaction between anons and registered editors.

Likewise, requiring opt-in or allowing opt-out changes the makeup of the
users a great deal (the former making certain that only editors with at
least some familiarity with how we work use it and thus preventing
usability issues for "true newbies" from being found, the latter by
allowing the more vocal and knowing segments of editors to "hide" the VE
and no longer see issues they alone are well-equipped to notice or
evaluate).

-- Marc