Wikipedia:VisualEditor/VisualEditor RfC 2014 part 1

VisualEditor was deployed to English Wikipedia in the middle of 2013. It was later removed after two community Requests for Comment, Wikipedia:VisualEditor/RFC and Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Default State RFC. Changes have been made to VisualEditor since the VisualEditor was removed. The English Wikipedia page Wikipedia:VisualEditor says that "The Wikimedia Foundation developers expect to make it available to almost all Wikimedia Foundation projects by the end of 2014" although the latest I have heard is that the Foundation is not rushing to push this project onto English Wikipedia against community consensus and "there is no 'official plan' at all with regard to the English Wikipedia".

This request for comment asks the community what additional changes or fixes we want WMF to make before we would consider re-enabling VisualEditor under a set of conditions that we could specify through a later RfC such as Wikipedia:VisualEditor/2014 RFC or User:Pine/drafts/VisualEditor default state 2014 part 2.

I am not personally voting in this request for comment but I may make comments, probably responding to any points about the format of the RfC, the close of the RfC, or future action to be taken after the close. --Pine✉ 07:35, 7 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  • List change or fix here
  • Support
  • Oppose
  • Neutral
  • Discuss and comment
  • List change or fix here
  • Support
  • Oppose
  • Neutral
  • Discuss and comment
  • Other discussion and comments

Well, I have absolutely no idea what the current state of the Visual Editor is in, but the following would be my prerequisites before ever considering moving VE to opt-out or to make it available to IPs:

  1. It would have to natively support all fields in an {{image:}} tag.
  2. It would have to natively support all templates, and all template parameters, without exception. Usage of newly programmed templates or lua modules would need to be as fully functional as any other.
  3. It would have to support all wiki-syntax and not interpret, for example, brackets around a web address, or multiple quotation marks, as plain text.
  4. It would have to support section editing without loading any content other than that section into memory.
  5. It would have to support editing and the addition of tables.
  6. It would have to display comments during editing.

It is entirely possible that there have been other problems that have since cropped up, but those are the ones I remember from last year that were completely unacceptable in the initial rollout. VanIsaacWScont 08:21, 7 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  • I think this RFC is premature. I think there is significant benefit in first having experienced editors assess the current status of VisualEditor, so that the community has the opportunity to base decisions on whether or not to expand access to VisualEditor on recent data instead of their memory of VisualEditor from a year ago. Further, the mere fact that the RFC is suggesting that VE should be the default state (instead of having it as an option for editing) is severely problematic. There have been several discussion points on-wiki and on mailing lists recently about re-evaluating VisualEditor, and not one of them has proposed that it be the default editing interface. I would prefer to see this RFC archived until such point as the community has an opportunity to review VE's current abilities. Risker (talk) 16:15, 7 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • The comment "I think there is significant benefit in first having experienced editors assess the current status of VisualEditor, so that the community has the opportunity to base decisions on whether or not to expand access to VisualEditor on recent data instead of their memory of VisualEditor from a year ago." is exactly the kind of feedback that this RfC is intended to gather from the community.
  • This RfC does not presuppose for whom, if anyone, VisualEditor's default state will include making it the default editor. That discussion is intended for the second RfC, which would most likely start only after a significant percentage of the community's consensus or comments on this first RfC are addressed. --Pine✉ 18:09, 7 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
You don't need an RFC, which will last weeks, to do this. A conversation on the village pump or the VE talk page would have been sufficient to say "shall we try to do some user testing with experienced wikipedians?" RFCs are intended to draw broad community comment in order to make a decision. We don't need broad community opinion on whether or not to invite the community to do some testing. We'll need broad community opinion to decide what to do next afterward. And I still very much object to the implied suggestion that VE should be default, which is built right into the title. If anything, the title is likely to inflame community response rather than result in considered discussion. Risker (talk) 01:43, 8 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • One of the points of having a 30-day RfC is to give as many users as possible an opportunity to participate.
  • I agree that someone could suggest on the VE talk page that doing some user acceptance testing by experienced Wikipedians would be a good idea, and that can happen concurrently with this RfC if you would like to do that. By having the suggestion in this RfC, especially if multiple editors support it, I feel that the results of the testing are likely to be seen as more legitimate and useful by the wider community.
  • The evidence so far is that there has been a muted response to this RfC, but as I said above the RfC isn't intended to imply that activating VE as the default editing interface for all users is the intended goal of this RfC, so I will change the page name to VisualEditor RfC 2014 part 1. --Pine✉ 06:25, 8 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Generally, I'm reasonably happy with the current state of VE and think it ready for have wider rollout as a beta. The serious bug which have been a problem in the past have mainly been fixed:
  • Only four edits triggered visualeditor-needcheck edit filter in the last 30 days. One of these added a extra <nowiki> [1] the other three look like false positives.
  • The nowiki edit filter has been turned off since Jan. I've switched it back on so we can see if VE is still breaking edits. If VE is still inserting junk then that is the one blocker for me.
There are many things I would like to see added. I'm decidedly unhappy with the support for mathematics, as the edit box is too small, obscures what your trying to edit and does not work with mathjax. While this and many other features would be nice it does not mean its serious enough to block a wider rollout as beta-software.--Salix alba (talk): 14:00, 8 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • I don't get the reason for this RfC. The developers of the tool already stated that they have little interest in deploying this on English Wikipedia in the near future... With a launch here, would be claiming time from them to support our community and it seems they already have enough volunteer communities. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:39, 8 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]