On 12/13/2011 10:27 PM, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
Here's the demo, where you can edit some canned texts (but not actual Wikipedia articles, yet):
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:VisualEditorSandbox
Something that looks like a working prototype is exactly where LiquidThreads were two years ago, and we got all excited and wanted so hard to try this for the Swedish community, and asked to have it installed first in the Swedish Wikisource. We had to wait for months until it was finally made available. But this enthusiasm turned out to be a really big mistake. It never worked, and the WMF never invested any effort in fixing the problems. At last, in October this year, we gave up and are now using old-style talk pages for all discussions again. This most painful experience will make me advocate against any attempt to use the Swedish projects as a pilot to try out the new visual editor. I do mistakes, but I learn from them.
Your timeline (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Visual_editor) does mention the WMF annual plan for 2011-2012, http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2011-2012_Annual_Plan_Questions_and_Answ... which states "first small wiki default deployment by June 2012." But the important part is the plan for the year 2012-2013, and what effort and budget the WMF will spend on rescuing the roll-out, even in the casethe main developers suddenly leave the project.
My mistake, from which I learned, was that I didn't ask for that kind of plan, when I first heard about LiquidThreads. I couldn't imagine that such a major usability improvement as getting rid of indented talk pages could be a zero priority for the WMF, one that was allowed to depend on the personal schedule of a single main developer. Even today, as we lament the decline in contributors, how can it not be important to fix LiquidThreads?