Thank you for flagging this for us, Andrew. I have been unsuccessful in
accessing this page and have been told by others who tried to do so that
they were also getting various error messages. I will try again later
using different technology - the problem may be that the blog doesn't come
up well certain types of phones. Personally, I have always been a bit
heartbroken that I missed out on the chance for a "Magnus Manske has a
Posse" t-shirt a while back; his work has genuinely changed the course of
our project on more than one occasion, and his reputation is solidly
earned.
With that in mind - that I've not yet got the full context of Magnus's
comments, but that I believe anything Magnus says is worth listening to and
considering - I'm a bit concerned about any suggestion that "the community"
rejected Visual Editor because it was "new".
The English Wikipedia community rejected it because it was really bad
software that was causing so much damage to the project that even editors
whose focus was on content writing and improvement wound up wasting their
time fixing the errors inserted into the text by VisualEditor. We went
from a somewhat-difficult-to-use text editor (wikitext) as the default to a
not-even-beta-level default editor that could not carry out even basic
editing functions and was actively damaging existing content - without even
a way for editors to select a "no VE" preference, which had to be written
after implementation. While it was available to IP editors, the community
wound up reverting almost 100% of their edits because the VE-generated
problems were so severe. This was not a failure of the community to accept
change. This was the failure of the WMF to understand what a minimal
viable product should be. The poorly thought out implementation of
VisualEditor has caused a huge amount of damage to the reputation of the
software - remember, the community had been asking for something along this
line as far back as 2003, so it wasn't that we didn't want this type of
editing interface - and it also caused an entirely predictable backlash
from the community of 2013. Remember, this was not the community of 2003
that understood almost everyone involved in software creation was a
volunteer too, and thus would tolerate less refined software releases. The
community of 2013 (quite correctly, I think) expected much higher quality
work from paid staff. Bluntly put, not even when almost all of the
software was being written by volunteers did we see such a problematic
"upgrade".
The Visual Editor of January 2016 bears little relationship to that which
was released on July 1, 2013 - it is dramatically better, easier to use,
and has some really great features that even experienced editors will find
useful. I hope more experienced users will give it another try.
I often find it ironic that the great concern about attracting new editors
and thus creating VisualEditor is then immediately dumped to the bottom of
the drawer when it comes to Wikidata. First we'll make it easy for them to
edit. Then we'll include a whole pile of data that they can't edit -or at
least can't edit on the website they logged into. They're pretty opposite
ideas, but of course that's considered luddite thinking.
Risker/Anne
On 18 January 2016 at 08:34, Andrew Lih <andrew....@gmail.com> wrote:
There’s an excellent profile of Magnus Manske in the Wikimedia blog
today.
It’s hard to think of people more important to the movement than Magnus
has
been since 2001.
Selected quotes: "...we have gone from slowdown to standstill; the
interface has changed little in the last ten years or so, and all the
recent changes have been fought teeth-and-claw by the communities,
especially the larger language editions. From the Media Viewer, the
Visual
Editor, to Wikidata transclusion, all have been resisted by vocal groups
of
editors, not because they are a problem, but because they represent
change... all websites, including Wikipedia must obey the Red Queen
hypothesis: you have to run just to stand still. This does not only
affect
Wikipedia itself, but the entire Wikimedia ecosystem... if we wall our
garden against change, against new users, new technologies our work of 15
years is in danger of fading away... we are in an ideal position to try
new
things. We have nothing to lose, except a little time.”
Link:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/01/18/fifteen-years-wikipedia-magnus-manske/
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