Sounds like your suggestion would be a perfect contribution to some kind of community discussion to try and decide a framework to decide if or when we might want to re-deploy visual editor, much like Pine was suggesting in the first place :-)
*Edward Saperia* Chief Coordinator Wikimania London http://www.wikimanialondon.org
On 3 June 2014 16:37, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 3 June 2014 09:05, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 3 June 2014 03:02, ENWP Pine deyntestiss@hotmail.com wrote:
Because VE has repeatedly been mentioned in this list as something that is improving and may help us with acquisition of editors and their knowledge, I have started to draft an RfC about re-enabling VE on
English
Wikipedia.
I am not proposing any specific outcome in the RfC. My goal is to set up a framework which the community can use to decide which of several
paths we
would like to take.
Okay, further to what I've said above....I think that before having an RFC, we should seek community assistance to carry out a small-scale study so that there is some evidence on which people can base their decisions. This is what I would suggest.
- Create a "sample article" that includes an infobox, an image or two,
some references, a template or two, and at least three editable sections. Editors will be asked to copy/paste this page into a personal sandbox to carry out the experiment, so that their individual results can be observed through the page history, and problems can be more easily identified.
- Identify about 15-20 *basic* editing tasks that an inexperienced
editor would be likely to try. Some that come to mind: - Remove a word - Add a word - change spelling of a word - add a link to another article - remove a link to another article - move a sentence within a section - move a sentence across sections - add a [new] reference (multiple tests for website, newspaper, book references) - edit an existing reference - re-use an existing reference - edit existing information in the infobox - add a reference to the infobox - add a new parameter to the infobox - add an image - remove an image - add an image description - modify an image description - add a commonly used template (such as {{fact}}) - remove a template - add several symbols and accented characters that are not available on their standard keyboard (e.g., Euro and GBP symbols for US keyboards, accented characters commonly used in German or French)
- Ask the "testers" to complete a chart outlining their results for each
of the editing tasks being tested, and any comments they have about each of these editing features.
If we can persuade even 25 people to work through these basic tasks, and the results are aggregated well, the community will have some useful data on which to base next-steps decisions. It will also provide the VisualEditor team with comparatively unbiased information about their progress. The key emphasis in the experiment is that it should focus on straightforward, elementary editing activities rather than complex tasks, and the purpose is to see whether or not these features work in an expected way or not.
Thoughts?
Risker/Anne