On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 1:41 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Oh my goodness, this thing is so not ready for newbies
yet. It would
confuse them utterly. ("But *why* can't I edit the infobox?"
"What's
these changes mean?" etc.)
People who think that not editing the images and infobox would be more
confusing than wikitext need to go watch some of the many usability tests
we've run, including all the way back to 2009-10. We run usability tests
with every iteration of the Getting Started experiment we launch these
days, and every time new people who click Edit for the first time are quite
literally shocked by the crazy mess that is wikitext. In this workflow,
we're specifically asking newbies to do something that doesn't involve
anything other than simple text changes (the most advanced markup we ask
them to work with is links), so VisualEditor may actually be quite
appropriate to A/B test. It may have extreme limitations, but at least it
is roughly what new editors expect to see after hitting edit, instead of a
garbled mass of incomprehensible code.
Steven