Wikipedia talk:WikipediaWeekly/Episode102

Wow

I was actually quite shocked at how incredibly biased the discussion about VisualEditor was in this episode. Tawker hasn't done a single VE edit, but has the nerve to point fingers at people who have actually tested it out? Keilana hasn't tested it with newbies (as I did - they all thought it was useless since they couldn't add references as easily as in wikitext), but says it's better for them? The WMF has all kinds of statistical information that it doesn't share (such as the percentage of users who click the edit button but don't succeed in editing), so it seems rather ludicrous to make them up.

There was NO user testing of the most important features before it became the default editor: references and templates. They had zero user testing before they made it the primary way to edit. They did not work properly then, and they're not a heck of a lot better now. And you're also wrong about the purpose of VisualEditor. It is intended fully to be the primary editing interface for ALL users at ALL times. Flow has been designed to use VisualEditor.

Perhaps one of the key problems here is that a lot of the users who are complaining about VisualEditor's initial and current state of development are the very users who work with new users and get them going. Many of them have helped out at edit-a-thons and other special events designed to attract new users. They know how hard wikitext is to use and learn. They also know that VisualEditor is fine for fixing typos, but even to this day is horrible for adding references. (Keilana, your experienced editorship is showing when you say it's easy. It's not intuitive in any way, and the parameter system makes no sense to a newbie. Heck, it barely makes sense to me, and I know what they are and what they're supposed to do.)

This is software in late alpha/early beta testing. It is slow, it is not intuitive (although it is slowly getting better), and the features that newbies need the most help on - templates, references and files (not images, we changed that terminology years ago) - need to work particularly well. We do not need a visual editor that's only good for fixing typos. And we shouldn't need to have to examine in detail the 7000 pages a day that were being edited with VE because pyramids and snowmen showed up in weird places and templates broke without the new users knowing that it had happened or (if they did see something wrong) knowing what to do about it. There is a reason why every responsible software developer in the world does beta testing with experienced, knowledgeable users who understand what the end result of an action should be before they send it out into the wild. It's called respecting your users. On this, I include the newbies who found that it doesn't do what it says on the tin.

Oh, and just to make this perfectly clear - the WMF had the option of making tweaks to the user levels so that all but the newest users and IPs would have had full access to VE as an equal choice (i.e., experienced users would have had exactly the same interface, and would have remained at opt-out). This would not have been particularly difficult to do. It is the WMF that decided to make it opt-in for everyone, not the English Wikipedia community. The current level that we have is their decision, it's not the decision that was embraced in the RFC. Risker (talk) 03:24, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

It's actually pretty close, Risker. The RFC asked them to make it opt-in for everybody and to switch all established users back to disable and have them opt-in again. The RFC would permit them to develop an interface to allow anons to opt-in, and that's the only difference. FWIW, I've been invited to rebut this nonsense. I'm a little concerned that it would be the equivalent of a Republican volunteering to be interviewed on The Daily Show.—Kww(talk) 04:22, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Access to episode

Is this only available through YouTube? The links to archive.org are struck through and don't work. I'd like to listen to this as an mp3. Thanks, SchreiberBike talk 01:53, 12 October 2013 (UTC)