I have now used the visual editor for more than a hundred edits since the speed 
up. I agree that the classic editor is generally faster and I suspect that will 
be especially true for anyone editing large articles as V/E's still lacks 
section editing.

I like the way V/E supports infobox editing, one of the things I sometimes do 
is add images to articles and with the classic editor you usually have the pain 
of having to check the template documentation to find out what the parameters 
are for image and caption (sadly and for no obvious reason these parameters are 
unlikely to be "image" and "caption"). V/E is actually quite intuitive here in 
allowing you to run through the unused parameters of the infobox.

Table editing is more nuanced, on the one hand there are handy looking options 
that come up inviting you to delete or add columns or rows and I'm sure at some 
point I will find an opportunity to use them. But editing the contents of a 
cell in a table is challenging, not a task I would suggest to a newbie and far 
less intuitive than using the classic editor.

Adding images from commons is really quite impressive in V/E, I haven't yet 
been in the situation of having to work out which Newcastle V/E is prompting me 
with and it would be good to know whether V/E is using wiki data links, 
keywords, geocodes or some combination. But however it does it the images it 
has prompted me with so far have been pretty good.

Not sure between Joe and Andy's positions re showing diffs. I have had very 
little to do with the education program, but I appreciate for educators knowing 
how to look at the contributions of a student is important. I think that V/E 
would be a better entry point for technophobes whilst clearly the classic 
editor is better for the technoscenti. How you recruit one or other group for 
an editathon without stereotyping is an interesting conundrum. If you have 
access to a large mailing list of people who might be interested then you could 
do two sorts of sessions, one emphasising that this was Wikipedia editing for 
anyone, especially people who tried it in the past and found it technically 
arcane. Another promising a session led by a "power user" showing how to be an 
effective editor on Wikipedia perhaps billed as "this session is suitable for 
anyone with any programming experience, however rusty or archaic".

Alternatively if you have a good ratio of experienced editors to newbies you 
can guard people and show them the editor most suitable for them.

Regards

Jonathan


> On 9 Aug 2015, at 01:03, Richard Farmbrough <rich...@farmbrough.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> I guess when it is sufficiently fast that I don't have time to hit "edit 
> source" instead before it loads, I will start using it on other projects.  
> Until then, a good character editor beats a good WIMPS editor - pity it's not 
> a good character editor.
> 
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