Thanks for the explanation about the opt-in. It wasn’t a problem – just a surprise for me.
However, the Captcha problem isn’t the issue of whether or not there are Captchas. I was expecting Captchas on a new user account. But I wasn’t expecting some bug that prevented the user from Saving the Page despite being presented with Captcha after Captcha after Captcha … without end. There’s a software bug which is either 1) incorrectly determining the user response to the Captcha challenge is in error when it is correct or 2) some control flow error in relation on what to do in the event of getting it right. Kerry From: WereSpielChequers [mailto:werespielchequ...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, 17 August 2015 3:41 PM To: kerry.raym...@gmail.com; Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Visual Editor experiment might have a problem ... Hi Kerry, there is an experiment going on that randomly opts half if new users into V/E and leaves half using the classic editor. That should account for why one of your newbies had been opted in but not the other. Captcha when adding citations is a longstanding problem, we need Captcha on account creation to keep the spam bots at bay, but somehow it also applies to newbies adding external links as cites, so we have a software feature that doesn't effect the vandals but instead targets the best of our newbies. My suspicion is that if we could work out when that was introduced and then compare it to subsequent recruitment and retention we would find that this was one of the most damaging mistakes we've made. Regards Jonathan On 17 Aug 2015, at 04:56, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raym...@gmail.com <mailto:kerry.raym...@gmail.com> > wrote: I ran my first training session using the Visual Editor this morning and hit what appeared to be a show-shopping bug. It appeared that the two new users (thankfully I had only 2) could not create a citation. They found themselves in an infinite loop of Save Page with Capcha when they tried to create a citation. By the end of the session, I managed to refine the bug to a combination of “new user”, “new article” (although created by me, not the new users), and citations involving a live URL, duly reported at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback#New_users_unable_to_create_citation_with_a_live_external_link_in_it Ironically it first happened on their newly created User Pages where we were practising our new Wikipedia skills because tackling “real articles”. Then on the “real articles” I had created earlier for them to use (a training approach that has the benefit of not unleashing a horde of angry watchlisters when they make some silly mistake, which occurs if you let new people make their early edits on “popular articles”). (Spot the pattern, both were new articles!). Now if this had happened to a new user sitting at home, they would have been stymied. Because I was there to hold their hands in a training setting, I found a way around the problem by logging them in as me and we continued the training session on that basis (but not an option to the user sitting at home frustratingly typing in Capcha responses until they got frustrated and walked away). So, Aaron, it may be that your research on the impact of the VE was impacted by this bug. I imagine that users affected would have eventually aborted the edit as they were unable to save, unless by chance they were able to realise that the problem was caused by their citation and either removed the citation and just saved the text changes. It’s hard to say what the likelihood of a new user being affected is, as the problem seemed to relate to the age of the article (I am autopatrolled so I don’t think the new articles would have any “might be dodgy” status flags on them, but I am not familiar with how that side of things works). Also, is this experiment (or one similar) currently running? It’s just that when we went into the Preferences of the two new user accounts to enable the VE, one of them already had it enabled (yet I had seen both new user accounts created in front of me a couple of minutes earlier), so there was no possibility that this was anything other than a default setting for one of the two users. I thought enabling the VE was normally strictly opt-in? Kerry _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
_______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
