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

[Erik Moeller]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 5:36 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Certainly. However, it's the obvious question to ask, and a curious
> question to spend several paragraphs not answering.
>
> Erik, James - how did de:wp convinced you when en:wp hasn't?

Hi David,

I don't really agree with your framing - it's not about who's
convincing who, but being on a sustainable path to making VisualEditor
continually better, with an appropriately diverse and large base of
users. That's a balancing act with any community. In the case of
dewiki, it became clear pretty quickly that any additional benefit of
continued feedback would be outweighed by strife and upset about the
change to the default experience. In enwiki and other deployments, in
spite of upset, we've received a ton of useful and actionable feedback
through all of July that's enabled us to continually improve, but
given the enwiki RFC on default state, it's clear that the full-on
change of the default experience isn't yet sustainable in the long run
as a way to run the beta. So we're looking at alternatives, as per my
prior note, rather than waiting for the RFC to come to a close. Once
again, the only way to continually improve VisualEditor is to ensure
that we have a large base of continued use from a diverse group of
users, minimizing self-selection bias, but we'll explore different
ways to get there.

I don't believe in hard and fast rules - in managing big and complex
changes, we need to be patient with each other. On your end, we ask
for forgiveness because we're going to sometimes do things that get in
your way, confuse and annoy you in the process of finding ways to
improve the user experience. On our end, we need to show flexibility
and willingness to find a workable solution for the main problem:
ensuring we're making development decisions in a real world context,
not in a laboratory.

All best,
Erik

-- 
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation