[Wikitech-l] Not much usage of the Visual Editor?

2013-05-11 Thread David Gerard
Well, that's disconcerting - is this actually all the edits with the
Visual Editor?

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChangestagfilter=visualeditor

I'll have to make a point of hammering on it more ;-)


- d.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Not much usage of the Visual Editor?

2013-05-11 Thread Steven Walling
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 12:29 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

 Well, that's disconcerting - is this actually all the edits with the
 Visual Editor?


 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChangestagfilter=visualeditor

 I'll have to make a point of hammering on it more ;-)


Yes the RecentChanges tag should be comprehensive.

I think part of this is due to the opt in nature of the tool, and the
rest is due to some well-known limitations. It doesn't yet handle
templates, images, or references very well, and it's pretty slow on English
Wikipedia still. I think the VisualEditor and Parsoid team are aware of all
these, and have work in progress or on the near-term roadmap.

One thing we could experiment with is turning on VisualEditor as the
default for new people who've just signed up. We'd need to do this
carefully with guidance from James/Trevor et. al., and with a close eye on
the conversion rate. At the very least we could run a few remote usability
tests to see if it made a positive difference or just totally confused
people. My team could perhaps tackle this as part of our work on the
Getting Started workflow we're presenting to newly-registered folks on
English Wikipedia.

Steven
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Not much usage of the Visual Editor?

2013-05-11 Thread Mark Holmquist
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 01:01:05PM -0700, Steven Walling wrote:
 One thing we could experiment with is turning on VisualEditor as the
 default for new people who've just signed up. We'd need to do this
 carefully with guidance from James/Trevor et. al., and with a close eye on
 the conversion rate. At the very least we could run a few remote usability
 tests to see if it made a positive difference or just totally confused
 people. My team could perhaps tackle this as part of our work on the
 Getting Started workflow we're presenting to newly-registered folks on
 English Wikipedia.

Actually, if you wanted to really streamline the copyediting tasks, you could
just link to the veaction=edit version of the edit form rather than the page
itself, maybe with a special token that VE could use to notify the user that
they were editing the page, instead of the default notification that just says
hey, you're using VisualEditor, which is probably not the most helpful text
for a totally-brand-new user.

-- 
Mark Holmquist
Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation
mtrac...@member.fsf.org
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:MHolmquist



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Re: [Wikitech-l] Not much usage of the Visual Editor?

2013-05-11 Thread Bartosz Dziewoński

On Sat, 11 May 2013 22:01:05 +0200, Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.com 
wrote:


One thing we could experiment with is turning on VisualEditor as the
default for new people who've just signed up. We'd need to do this
carefully with guidance from James/Trevor et. al., and with a close eye on
the conversion rate. At the very least we could run a few remote usability
tests to see if it made a positive difference or just totally confused
people. My team could perhaps tackle this as part of our work on the
Getting Started workflow we're presenting to newly-registered folks on
English Wikipedia.


As much as I love VE myself, this seems like an extremely bad idea given its 
current state.

--
Matma Rex

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Not much usage of the Visual Editor?

2013-05-11 Thread phoebe ayers
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 1:01 PM, Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.comwrote:

 On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 12:29 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

  Well, that's disconcerting - is this actually all the edits with the
  Visual Editor?
 
 
 
 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChangestagfilter=visualeditor
 
  I'll have to make a point of hammering on it more ;-)
 

 Yes the RecentChanges tag should be comprehensive.

 I think part of this is due to the opt in nature of the tool, and the
 rest is due to some well-known limitations. It doesn't yet handle
 templates, images, or references very well, and it's pretty slow on English
 Wikipedia still. I think the VisualEditor and Parsoid team are aware of all
 these, and have work in progress or on the near-term roadmap.


Yeah, I expect the overlap between people who follow wikimedia news enough
to know they can opt-in and people who do fairly complex formatting work
is pretty high. E.G. I have it installed, but rarely use it because most of
my on-wiki work is fixing references, which the VE can't cope with yet (or,
it's simply faster for me to do it by hand, as I can write markup in my
sleep).

Would it be helpful for the dev team to have more people using it on a
regular basis?
-- phoebe

-- 
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers at
gmail.com *
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Not much usage of the Visual Editor?

2013-05-11 Thread David Gerard
On 11 May 2013 21:01, Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.com wrote:

 One thing we could experiment with is turning on VisualEditor as the
 default for new people who've just signed up.


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.)

I suggest propagandising it with current editors. I'll pitch in ;-)


- d.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Not much usage of the Visual Editor?

2013-05-11 Thread Steven Walling
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 1:41 PM, David Gerard dger...@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
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Not much usage of the Visual Editor?

2013-05-11 Thread David Gerard
On 11 May 2013 21:59, Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.com wrote:

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.


This is true. I am a Level 20 Wizard or whatever in computery stuff
and I *still* find it incomprehensible computer guacamole, so I
suppose this may well not actually be worse.


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.


Well, yes :-) Perhaps big banners (big orange banners?) for THIS IS
ALPHA, WHICH IS THE STAGE BEFORE BETA ...


- d.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Not much usage of the Visual Editor?

2013-05-11 Thread Juergen Fenn
2013/5/11 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com:
 Well, that's disconcerting - is this actually all the edits with the
 Visual Editor?

 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChangestagfilter=visualeditor

In German Wikipedia there seem to be slightly more users who give the VE a try:

https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spezial:Letzte_%C3%84nderungentagfilter=visualeditor

Regards,
Jürgen.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Not much usage of the Visual Editor?

2013-05-11 Thread MZMcBride
Steven Walling wrote:
One thing we could experiment with is turning on VisualEditor as the
default for new people who've just signed up.

I won't call it wikitext corruption, but the current (live) version of
VisualEditor is actively harming articles by inserting pawns into them:

* https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/48346
* https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=553360286oldid=540708795

Until issues like this are completely resolved, VisualEditor use should be
decreased, not increased, in my opinion.

MZMcBride



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