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

[Andreas Kolbe]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 7:28 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 31 July 2013 19:27, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 5:36 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> Erik, James - how did de:wp convinced you when en:wp hasn't?
>
> > 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
>
>
> This comes across to me as a full and reasonable answer. Thanks :-)
>
>
> - d.



Commiserations. If would hazard a guess that 450+ clear and indignant votes
against the VisualEditor on the German Wikipedia, collected within the
space of a weekend, spoke much louder than a trickle of moans by a few
dozen people on the English Wikipedia, where almost everybody was at first
inclined to be polite and "assume good faith". Most people did not want to
rain on the Foundation's parade.

I mean, look at how Jimbo sold the VisualEditor to the press at the start
of the roll-out:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/10196578/Wikipedia-introduces-new-features-to-entice-editors.html

---o0o---

“VisualEditor is a user interface that is much more familiar to people.
When you click edit you get something that looks very much like any word
processor, and you can change things and do whatever you want.”

---o0o---

"Whatever you want" indeed. Except add a citation:

http://www.dnaindia.com/blogs/1863070/post-wikipedia-editing-session-for-journalism-students-at-sophia-polytechnic

---o0o---

"After spending a bit of time dealing with connectivity issues and *finding
out that the Visual Editor doesn’t function on mobile devices and Internet
Explorer*, everyone started rolling on the demo-cum-live editing session.
The volunteers had chosen two biography articles for creation on the
English language Wikipedia, based on a list of possible subjects provided
by the department. Rohini did a step-by-step demo of how to create a page,
how to ensure there are enough third-party references available etc, and
created a biographical stub on Dina Vakil. The exact same exercise was
given to the students, who followed the same process in their groups, and
created a stub article on Ritu Menon. *All the groups got stuck at using
the reference/ citations templates on the Visual Editor, so we switched
back to wiki syntax.*"

---o0o---

In part, the German Wikipedia had the advantage of seeing the problems
accumulate on the English Wikipedia before it was "their turn" to
experience the same horrors. They had a chance to see the reality as
opposed to the PR spin, and to see how big the gap was between what was
promised and what was delivered. Seeing the mountain of unfixed bugs
assembled as a result of the English Wikipedia's feedback, they wisely said
"nein, danke".

I also don't understand why the Foundation would need any more feedback at
this point in time. Developers haven't even fixed bugs that have been known
for months. It seems just catching up with Bugzilla would be enough to keep
them busy for a while.

For example, I just learnt that it was reported almost two months ago that
you cannot take a reference into the clipboard. If you try, you either
can't do it at all, or you actually end up accidentally deleting the
reference content, leaving Wikipedia with just the plain-character string
"[1]". This is a problem that can do pretty nasty damage to an article,
besides angering editors, or making newbies feel incompetent if the next
person shouts at them because they deleted a perfectly good reference.

That bug was first reported on 13 June.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49396

It was reported again on 2 July.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50594

It was reported again on 29 July (by me).

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52212

It still hasn't been fixed. I fail to see the point in having the same
error reported time and again, and having developers spend their time
marking reports "Resolved" because they are duplicates of earlier reports
of the same, still unsolved issue, rather than spending their time actually
fixing the bug.

Andreas