Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 06:15, 11 July 2013

RFC: VisualEditor launch issues

VisualEditor is a clever idea for the Wikimedia, but the software is buggy, slow, and not likely to be fixed anytime soon.

As such, it would seem that we, as a community, should discuss how to move forwards. Now, according to Misplaced Pages:VisualEditor/FAQ, we do not have the right to force them to turn VisualEditor off, but I think that they would be insane, should the community show strong reaction against it, to not at least take the concerns on board.

So, below, are several points to vote on. Please Support or Oppose each point. Feel free to add new points at the bottom. Adam Cuerden 23:04, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

As a point of order, the instructions at WP:RFC include: "Include a brief, neutral statement of the issue in the talk page section...." Do you think that "the software is buggy, slow, and not likely to be fixed anytime soon" is neutral? In fact, I daresay not only is it not neutral, it's blatantly untrue - bug fixes are pushing out almost every day. I understand your frustration, but proceeding with this RFC, launched under this condition, will not end well for anyone. There is no way that a process which is poisoned by a lack of the fundamental desire for neutrality and fair dealing will result in a neutral, fair outcome. Through your language on this RFC, you have contaminated it and prevented it from doing the good that it could have done. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 02:55, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

May I point out that "slow" is listed as known problems on Misplaced Pages:VisualEditor#About_the_VisualEditor; VisualEditor changing markup has its own tag, which is still catching edits, such as , and if you really believe all the bugs are going to be sorted out soon, why didn't you beta it with a set of volunteers, sort out the bugs, then launch it? It frankly seems you're trying to preemptively make excuses to ignore user feedback. Adam Cuerden 03:13, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Why didn't we beta it with a set of volunteers, sort the bugs, and then launch it? Adam, we had a 6 month test that included hundreds of volunteers. We sorted the bugs that we knew about. I note that you didn't make any edits using VE during that period - fair enough, nobody's required to - but please don't suggest that we didn't listen to input then or now. (In fact, it appears that you STILL haven't made any edits using VisualEditor?) Our engineering team has squashed 155 bugs since the beginning of the A/B test. That sounds pretty feedback receptive to me. I'm not making excuses, because absolutely we wish things had run differently, but c'mon... Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 03:54, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

I was one of those volunteers back in May, but I gave up testing after my bug reports were being auto archived without comment. We are not in this mess because the volunteers failed to spot bugs that subsequently came up in the rollout. We are here because someone decided to stick to a schedule rather than first sort the bugs that were reported in user testing. If it was true that fault lay with us testers for not finding problems then the community would be responding very differently. If the bugs that came up when I was just typo fixing had been fixed then I would have gone on to test VE with more complex edits like adding a reference or an image. But when I saw at least four of my bug reports going into the archive without comment there didn't seem much point testing it further - I was shocked and disappointed that this was deployed despite not sorting the bugs that they knew about if they were paying attention to the feedback from the testing. ϢereSpielChequers 06:15, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

1. VisualEditor is a good idea in theory

Having a working VisualEditor will greatly improve Misplaced Pages's usability. Adam Cuerden 23:04, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Support

1. Adam Cuerden 23:04, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
2. ϢereSpielChequers 23:28, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
3. Diannaa (talk) 23:32, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
4. doktorb _words 23:52, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
5. Vegaswikian (talk) 23:54, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
6. Thryduulf (talk) 23:57, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
7. Patrick87 (talk) 00:06, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
8. Carrite (talk) 00:10, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
9. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 00:18, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
10. Kumioko (talk) 00:23, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
11. Mega dittoes.  ;-) TCO (talk) 01:04, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
12. — ΛΧΣ 01:06, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
13. MER-C 01:21, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
14. --Jayron32 01:41, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
15. - MrX 02:13, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
16. - Robert McClenon (talk) 02:14, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Oppose

1. It will make it more usable for some users. Wiki markup is pretty simple, so I don't think anything at the markup level can "greatly" improve usability.—Kww(talk) 01:06, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Neutral

1. I've never been a fan of wisiwig editors, they never have the full power needed. Does any profesional actually use them for HTML/CSS? Why would we expect wikitext to be different?--Salix (talk): 00:40, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Comments

2. Buggy software should not become the default until it reaches a certain level of development.

Rushing forwards with a launch when critical bugs are still unfixed is not acceptable. Not undoing changes when severe bugs, such as the VisualEditor mangling the text of pages with <nowiki> tags, malformed links, and the like, are discovered is unacceptable. If this passes, the WMF is censured, and will be asked never to launch new features in this manner again. Adam Cuerden 23:04, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Support

1. Adam Cuerden 23:04, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
2. If you're going to cram a shitty add-on down our throats, make sure the shitty add-on works at the least. Don't phone it in. —Jeremy v^_^v 23:39, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
3. Vegaswikian (talk) 23:54, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
4. I agree that there were too many large bugs and missing features at the roll out, I'm not sure I support the tone of this question and I certainly don't support Jeremey's tone. Thryduulf (talk) 00:00, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
5. Patrick87 (talk) 00:06, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
6. Carrite (talk) 00:11, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
7. Kumioko (talk) 00:23, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
8. I agree that this should have been deployed first on test wiki, test, and then, when ready, bring here. — ΛΧΣ 01:07, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
9. It's too buggy to turn amateur editors loose with.—Kww(talk) 01:08, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
10. Pointless, though, because this is a recurring problem (remember Echo?). MER-C 01:23, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
11. Yeah, usually you opt in to betas, and don't just have buggy software shoved into your face. This almost feels like how Microsoft thought forcing a touch-oriented UI on everyone was a good idea. Or Gnome 3. ViperSnake151  Talk  01:40, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
12. Developers were allowed to dictate development. They mean well, but there was no defined test role. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:15, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Oppose

1. I think a lot of the sturm and drang (e.g. people wanting to turn off the tab itself for themselves!) is overdone complaining about a change, like people who get upset when a forum changes background color. The issue of "high number of bad edits" is a bigger concern, but I haven't encountered a single one personally, so it must not be that ubiquitous. (Sometimes people are a little sophistic...like those who complaint about fixing image sizes because of those who have a default...this was tracked down and like 300 people out of several million readers actually had a set preference.) Also, to be honest, the thing has been talked about for years and never gotten anywhere. Plus the Community is very over conservative and insular (and doesn't think of current non-editors). So throwing it over the fence and fixing later is a legitimate approach. Sorry, but "ship it". TCO (talk) 01:09, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
2. I strongly object to the statement being made here. While it had many bugs of various degrees of severity, VE did not have "severe bugs" that "mangled the text of pages" at the time when it was enabled for logged-in users. I also object to "censuring" the WMF's wonderful development team in such a way. — This, that and the other (talk) 01:21, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
3. Oppose based on the wording of this. I support the principle broadly, but I think this goes way too far in demonizing people who are working hard. --Jayron32 01:42, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
4. The principle stated in the heading of this section makes sense, but there are degrees of bugginess, which I think may be somewhat exaggerated here. One of the best way to identify bugs and useability issues is to roll software out to a large user base. - MrX 02:23, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Comments

What does "the default" mean? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:28, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

It's now part of everyone's editing of Misplaced Pages, and cannot be completely turned off in any way. This was neither opt-in, and even providing information on a user-created method to opt out was actively discouraged by the WMF team behind it, e.g. statements such as "I feel it would totally undermine the software proper to fire everyone at an instant switch to permanently disable the VE". It's buggy code, it's going to remain buggy code for some time, and to insist that thousands (or is it millions?) of users have to have it active is ridiculous. Adam Cuerden 23:34, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

So Javascript is "part of everyone's editing of Misplaced Pages, and cannot be completely turned off", so do you consider that "the default"? It also frequently has critical bugs open. Shall we remove Javascript? Or is it only software that feels like a change to you that should be bug-free before normal users get automatic access to it? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:41, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

I think what's meant here is software the developers have control over, thus not Javascript. —Jeremy v^_^v 23:42, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

3. VisualEditor should have a way to be turned off fully, easily, and without continuing to leech resources

At the moment, the VisualEditor can be hidden by way of a gadget found in user preferences, but in a location most users will not look, and code for the VisualEditor will continue to be loaded, as it cannot be disabled. According to WP:VisualEditor/FAQ, this is by design, in an attempt to force users to use it, despite the editing section of User Preferences being fairly well-hidden already. The code to allow it to be disabled exists; it was active in the Editing preferences up until the launch. If this motion passes, the Wikimedia Foundation is requested to restore this code immediately. Adam Cuerden 23:04, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Support

1. Adam Cuerden 23:04, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
2. Andy Dingley (talk) 23:26, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
3. Diannaa (talk) 23:32, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
4. —Jeremy v^_^v 23:36, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
5. doktorb _words 23:53, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
6. Vegaswikian (talk) 23:54, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
7. Regardless of how many resources something consumes, disabling something should disable it not hide it. Thryduulf (talk) 00:01, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
8. Patrick87 (talk) 00:07, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
9. Carrite (talk) 00:12, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
10. As much as I like having this option, it still is a bit buggy, so for now this should be an option. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 00:18, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
11. The current method is a workaround only and still launches all the code in the background, wasting resources and increasing loading times. We need a proper off switch, not a hack. Kumioko (talk) 00:24, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
12. Yes a obvious off switch is essential. I'm also concerned about IP's who won't be able to use the gadget, won't know what the difference between Edit and Edit Source is and won't be able to do many editing tasks like mathematics.--Salix (talk): 00:40, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
13. Indeed. — ΛΧΣ 01:07, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
14. Beyond this, it should be disabled in this manner until it works, available only to editors that are committed to repairing any damage that it causes.—Kww(talk) 01:09, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
15. Not sure why this was not provided, really. — This, that and the other (talk) 01:22, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
16. MER-C 01:24, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
17. Choice is always a good thing. I also endorse Salix' comment.- MrX 02:27, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
18. Yeah --Vigyani_talk 05:04, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Oppose

1. Silly, for the reasons as above. You have a little tab on your screen, so freaking what! This is like orange bar whining or edit button on side of page moving whining. You still have very easy access to the way you edited before.TCO (talk) 01:11, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
2. Oppose, because no one ever has to use it or install any gadget or flip any preference switch to avoid using it. Just click the "edit source" link which is available on every single page. I would support changing the phrasing of the edit links (for example, making the "edit" link read "Visual Editor" and making the "edit source" link read merely "edit", but that's not what this is proposing). --Jayron32 01:45, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
3. It can be turned off or ignored. VE has problems, but this is not the problem. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:17, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Comments

For those who like numbers, VisualEditor is responsible for about 4 KiB of what your computer receives when you load (click on/read/view) an article or userpage. That's about 2% of the page (or less: the estimated percentage is pre-Universal Language Selector). WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:32, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

4. The manner of the launch was unduly aggressive

The sections on WP:VisualEditor/FAQ entitled "Can the editors here order the developers to turn this off?" and "Why does no standard user preference to disable VisualEditor exist?", as well as similar behaviour elsewhere, are little more than attempts to bully the community into accepting the VisualEditor, whether they want to or not. This goes against a basic foundation of Misplaced Pages, as laid out in the Five pillars: Civility. The launch should have attempted to be responsive to the attitudes of the Misplaced Pages community. Adam Cuerden 23:04, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Support

1. Adam Cuerden 23:04, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
2. See also WP:Flagged revisions. —Jeremy v^_^v 23:38, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
3. Vegaswikian (talk) 23:54, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
4. Patrick87 (talk) 00:07, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
5. Kumioko (talk) 00:25, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
6. It appears rollout is governed by by a roadmap specifying when things must happen. There is little option to say, wait a moment we are just not ready yet to move out of alpha yet. Concerns of users are nothing compared to the roadmap.--Salix (talk): 00:40, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
7. Support, because the deployment was driven by the developers, and not by interaction between developers and testers.

Oppose

1. High-handed or insensitive I could agree with, "aggressive" I don't. Thryduulf (talk) 00:02, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
2. "Irresponsible" is the adjective I would choose. Once it became apparent that it was corrupting articles, it needed to be disabled until those bugs were fixed.—Kww(talk) 01:11, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
3. This is their ONE AVENUE to improve the site and in the end the encyclopedia. They control the codey stuff. They can't really fix admins/arbs/editors and all the rest of that drama (to include the content itself). Also, Facebook or other sites have gone through many more changes over the last several years. Wiki is stuck in the dark ages. WMF should change, meddle, experiment. Just apologize afterwards...but God NO! don't ask the Communitai for permission.TCO (talk) 01:15, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
4. I don't find it agressive at all. I have been aware of the Visual Editor deployment schedule since long ago. Maybe because I talk too much to the WMF guys or whatever, but "aggressive" is not a correct word to define what happened. I'd prefer "inappropriate" in some sorts, but not "aggresive". — ΛΧΣ 01:19, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
5. Agree with the others. Besides, most of those FAQ entries were written by community members, not by WMF staffers. — This, that and the other (talk) 01:24, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
6. Oppose. Getting 100% buy-in prior to launch is not reasonable. The community has needed a WYSIWYG editor for years, and once one exists, it should not take years of bureaucracy and RFCs to get it installed. --Jayron32 01:47, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
7. Not really. Somewhat aggressive, perhaps, but I don't view that as a negative. - MrX 02:29, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Comments

As the volunteer editor who originally wrote "Can the editors here order the developers to turn this off?", I'd like to say that I thought this question was very responsive to the noisy minority of editors who believe that they ought to have veto power over "their" website's software. "Responsive" does not mean "agree with whatever someone else says" or even "be unfailingly polite to people who feel entitled to be extremely rude to you". And if you look at the number of people who have asked that question in one form or another, I think that its presence in the FAQ is well justified. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:39, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

5. This survey should have been begun by the VisualEditor team

To not launch a wide-scale survey on the VisualEditor experience shortly after its launch, and before the scheduled rollout to other Wikipedias, shows a lack of interest in the views of users that should be censured. Adam Cuerden 23:04, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Support

1. Adam Cuerden 23:04, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
2. Vegaswikian (talk) 23:54, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Oppose

1. It shouldn't have been necessary at all if users opinion was correctly accounted for. Patrick87 (talk) 00:08, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
2. If by "do this particular RFC", hell no. If by "think about usability and patterns and the objective-design-code trade-offs", yeah probably. For instance, I urged them to really understand what and HOW things are bad now. And got brushed of with a "we know it is bad" remark. I think case studies and something a little more ethnography or even industrial engineering based (looking at what goes on) would have given them insights. There was a little bit of "we want to code". I think for instance, this approach would have allowed them to do something a little simpler and quicker wrt table/template/ref callouts (i.e. just display the wikicode itself when someone goes to edit rather than trying to WYSIWYG parallel the functionality.)TCO (talk) 01:22, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
3. Mostly agree with TCO here. I'm not sure what a "survey" is supposed to be, but per Oliver below, surveys are not generally a very useful form of feedback. — This, that and the other (talk) 01:27, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
4. Deployment was too aggressive because the developers wanted a large community of users. A small one was in order. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:19, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Comments

• We're talking about a survey now. Personally, I don't think a survey is a very good way of measuring things. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 23:11, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
• There isn't a section for comments about the position generally, so I'll ask; why do you not think the bugs and slowness are likely to be fixed within a reasonable timeframe? (I say that as the team deploys a set of new patches). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 23:13, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
  • A week is a long time in a very active website, and if the bugs were that easy to fix, there is no way that VE should have been launched unpatched. Adam Cuerden 23:25, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
    • Sure, but by that standard we'd never be able to launch any software. Misplaced Pages will always be active; software will always, to some degree, be flawed. Actually we're doing deployments pretty much daily. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 23:27, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
      • Few of those actively damage the source of pages on the site, but remain in place. Adam Cuerden 23:38, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
        • The same is true of the VE; we've got, off the top of my head, 10 bugs that do that: or did. Three fixes were deployed ~5 minutes ago. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 23:47, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
          • I'm going to have to echo Oliver here in that if we didn't ram it though, a lot of these bugs wouldn't have been spotted. The fact that so many people were able to edit with it and experience the interface is a great thing for developers from the standpoint of bug fixing, even if many people did not like it. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 23:56, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
          • (ec)Too little too late? Look, I worked on releasing software for a number of years. But this was simply not ready for prime time. I would have fired anyone who proposed releasing this in the business world as pure incompetence. Beta testing is fine, but this would fail most everyone's beta! Why did the testing not reveal bugs? Simply put the software was too buggy to use. Vegaswikian (talk) 23:59, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
            • Because there are a vast number of permutations of user actions. We had a lot of beta testing - starting in December 2012, the VE was opt-in here. At one point we had 1,000 users using it. But that doesn't account for every possible use case in a highly editable environment. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 00:14, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
              • Your right, we did have a long beta test, at the end of which several editors including me told you and the WMF that the product wasn;t ready for launch. We already knew there were problems and they were actively being discovered. So the innocent school boy act is disingenuous. No one was surprised this blew up in the WMF's face. We told them it was going to happen and we were ignored. Kumioko (talk) 00:29, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

6. Wikimedia should disable this software by default

Enabling buggy software for the editors least able to recognize that they are dealing with a software bug or that they have corrupted an article is irresponsible. The English Misplaced Pages community does not have the bandwidth, inclination, or responsibility to check every edit made by the Visual Editor and repair it. Until the Visual Editor is far more stable and the majority of identified bugs have been corrected, it should be disabled except for editors that are consciously intending to test it.

Support

1. —Kww(talk) 01:16, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
2. For now, its too buggy, missing too many feature to be more than at a test state. I've been building a state of play document at Misplaced Pages:VisualEditor/Known problems which makes it clear how incomplete it is. Revert back to an opt-in, fix the bugs, implement the features, and then when it works to a better level resume the roadmap.--Salix (talk): 01:35, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
3. New users are deleting references due to VE, when trying to insert some new text.--Vigyani_talk 05:01, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Oppose

1. What's done is done. — This, that and the other (talk) 01:28, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
2. Onwards and upwards! You haven't presented the case for the volume of bad edits and I'm not experiencing it in my edits around the 'pedia. Also, a fair case needs to also show the positive effects (whatever they are, show the trade off, be two-sided). Also, your statement of action is a little disconnected from the smaller text below which is "platitudey". But that's a nit, man. Don't get mad and please keep fixing my pictures and sounds please.  ;-) (I can't produce good content on my own...hmmm...maybe there is a tiny thing to the idea of Wiki collaboration). TCO (talk) 01:33, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

   Filter 550 monitors only one class of common problem with VE: its inability to cope with editors that directly insert wikimarkup in visual mode. That volume of problems alone would justify my opinion.—Kww(talk) 01:38, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

3. Oppose: As noted above, no user has to use it at all, and only has to move their mouse a few millimeters to the right before clicking to avoid using it forever. No one is being forced to use it, despite the false impression given by the tone of many of these questions, and while it has faults and problems, none of these questions does any good in resolving these faults, but seems to merely be a means for some community members to vent about not being personally consulted at every step along the way for their singular approval before roll-out. I wouldn't mind seeing many improvements to the Visual Editor, but there's no way this questionnaire is a useful medium to achieve those needed changes. --Jayron32 01:50, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Comments