On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 9:23 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.orgwrote:
I know that this crafty UI was introduced to encourage users to use the new editor. The trouble is, this assumes that users have no idea which editor they want to use, and thus will happily use whatever editor the JS can trick them into clicking. But, I suspect, most users have decided which editor they want to use before they start moving their mouse.
I think users should be encouraged to use VE by making VE really awesome, and by promoting its awesomeness, rather than by trying to trick them into using it.
You could not be more wrong in this case, and it's a pretty stunning case of bad faith on your part, Tim.
This interaction was committed by a volunteer not on the VE team.[1][2] Ideally,VE would be good enough that we wouldn't need edit source links on sections at all. Personally I advocated for not including them by any method. However, people felt that it was important to give users a choice on section edit links, and that as opposed to a dropdown or simply displaying both links statically, using a progressive display was the more elegant way of showing both options. MatmaRex could not have been clearer about this on the patch.
I think everyone would probably agree that there are some annoying things about the way it currently works, namely that it activates the display action anytime you scroll past the section, even very far away from the normal section edit target area. This is a detail that can be fixed. But I can assure that the current section edit behavior was a compromise with community developer support, to make sure that people who don't want to edit sections with VE can do so.
1. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49666 2. https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/69984/