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

[Brad Jorsch (Anomie)]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 12:47 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Quality like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. One thing that I learned
> today is that the Visual Editor will have functionality that only the more
> accomplished editors will enter directly or they will use templates. With
> VE these templates are redundant.

Some, perhaps. But would you rather use a template or remember the
multiple buttons in VE and the right CSS style/class string (if that's
even possible in VE?) to do the same thing manually?

> From my perspective, the future will be with the VE and not with the
> horrible tortuous templates that require study to use. One of the reasons
> why I prefer Wikidata over Wikipedia is that Wikidata does not have
> templates and is certainly as relevant. When I notice the improvements in
> the Wikidata experience, I can only applaud the improvements made.

Wikidata also deals with discrete bits of usually-unformatted data,
rather than heavily-formatted encyclopedia articles. I'm not sure
you're comparing apples to apples there.