On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 12:37 PM, Bartosz Dziewoński matma.rex@gmail.comwrote:
The bug for that patch was just WONTFIXed, synchronizing information. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.**org/show_bug.cgi?id=50929#c16https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50929#c16
Just to accomodate people too lazy to chase through two links, in the interests of having a synchronized discussion I'm cut and pasting from the rationale given there:
{{Ping|Adam Cuerden}} Thanks for the thoughtful note. Some initial thoughts
-- I'll jump in more when I can, but also pinging [[User:Okeyes (WMF)|Oliver]] and [[User:Whatamidoing (WMF)|Whatamidoing]] who can help with clarifications.
Our overall concern, and the reason we did not offer a preference, is that
"out of sight, out of mind" makes it very hard for us to address the kinds of efficiency issues you mention. It makes it too easy for us to ignore the needs of users such as yourself as we improve VisualEditor. I actually do ''not'' agree that the kind of task you describe needs to be inherently less efficient in VisualEditor, but I do agree that it'll take us a while to make VisualEditor a good tool for that case.
I really would like us to be increasingly scientific and systematic about
this -- enumerate the types of tasks that users perform frequently, and measure the relative task performance in VisualEditor and source mode. I will personally not be satisfied with the product until we can exceed task efficiency in the vast majority of cases.
If you've followed the deployment a bit, you'll note that even this week,
we've made some changes to improve task efficiency for templates and images. Inserting an image used to take two clicks; now it takes one. Filling in a template used to require manually selecting all parameters; now required parameters (as defined by templatedata) are pre-selected, and it takes a single click to add a new parameter. Etc.
So, in other words, we ''do'' care, a lot, about making this not only an
easy-to-use tool, but an efficient one. Many of us at WMF are Wikipedians, and we hate tools that don't do the job. Where VisualEditor doesn't get the job done, we need to know. Our hypothesis is that we ''can'' build a tool that's both powerful and discoverable, not just a nice UI for newbies.
And to be honest, we made the mistake of offering a quick and easy "out of
sight, out of mind" preference before. When we did the Vector skin rollout in 2010, we offered a trivial "Take me back to the old look" option -- which lots of users took. Almost any change to a user interface [ http://www.designstaff.org/articles/how-to-avoid-mitigate-change-aversion-20... be met with resistance and objections]. As a recent non-WMF example, did you see the reactions to Flickr's design change? I've rarely seen so much hatemail for a company in one place.
By making it easy to switch back, we effectively created two generations of
users: the pre-Vector generation and the post-Vector users. Pre-Vector users, by and large, stayed with Monbook; post-Vector users stayed with Vector. There may have been legitimate efficiency reasons to stay with Monobook - things we could have improved in Vector, but didn't. In our drive to increase usability, we didn't pay sufficient attention to the needs of advanced users. And because of the "out of sight, out of mind" effect, we didn't have to.
To avoid this effect, with VisualEditor, you can't make it disappear
completely without resorting to gadgets or user scripts. You don't have to use it, but we encourage you to give it a try every once in a while to see the improvements and changes, and to point out those annoying bugs which we should have long fixed and haven't. And to the extent that there are things about the new default user experience that we have to fix to not interfere with normal editing (the current section editing behavior is definitely still not ideal), please keep us honest and remind us about it.
I hear you on the subject of muscle memory and confusing edit tabs. There
are a couple of things I'd say right now which may help mitigate this issue going forward, and I'd appreciate your suggestions as well.
1) We can reduce the issue by avoiding inconsistency between "Edit" and
"Edit source". I believe this is already on [[User:Jdforrester (WMF)|James']] agenda, and there was some community energy around this as well on [[WP:VPT]]. What I mean here is that right now, some namespaces still use wikitext by default. If those namespaces consistently had the tab labeled "Edit source", visually scanning for the right tab to click would be a lot easier. (Having VisualEditor on all Wikimedia projects, as it soon will be, will also help with those consistency issues.)
2) This is more of a personal tip for you: To support muscle memory, we
ensured that VisualEditor does not take over the existing keyboard shortcut for editing in source mode. If you've never given keyboard shortcuts a try, I strongly suggest it; they should work in all modern browsers. When you mouse over the tab, it gives you the shortcut indicator. So, I can just press Alt+Shift+E on any page to edit, and it will always edit in wikitext mode (Alt+Shift+V will edit in VisualEditor).
Finally, on the earlier point of measuring task efficiency -- this is
something anyone can help with. We may do some specific community outreach around this, but any efforts to document "It takes me X steps/seconds to do this in VisualEditor, Y steps/seconds in wikitext" helps ''a lot''. It's worth noting that VisualEditor has its own set of keyboard shortcuts, which can help with common tasks such as linking (which I actually already find faster in VE). And I do think tasks like updating image links should ultimately be well-supported in VE (even if it's by means of plugins), so we should start tracking these types of use cases in Bugzilla.
--[[User:Eloquence|Eloquence]][[User:Eloquence/CP|*]] 07:19, 17 July 2013
(UTC)