Wikipedia:井戸端/subj/Does the community of ja-wiki have problems with the visual editor?
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Does the community of ja-wiki have problems with the visual editor?[編集]
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Hello all, I write this message to inform you about the visual editor and the problems other Wikipedias have with it, so that the Japanese speaking community can inform themselves and decide if this is a concern for this Wikipedia as well or not.
On the Dutch community, most users really like the idea of getting a visual editor. A visual editor may help inexperienced (new) users or users who experience the wikisyntax as difficult to edit. In the past weeks we have tested the visual editor and we noticed big problems that concern the majority of the articles. We reported all these problems a month ago. The day before yesterday we heard that the developers plan to launch the visual editor for all logged in as anonymous users on the Dutch Wikipedia (nl-wiki) coming Monday 22 July. We checked again all problems we reported and noticed that all these articles still have major problems in the visual editor. The second concern we have is the user friendliness of the current visual editor, sure most of the basic edits work fine with it, but the more difficult edits (where this piece of software is designed for!) are certainly not user friendly. Our third concern are the templates. On the Dutch Wikipedia we have been working hard to make and keep almost all templates as easy as possible to edit and change for most users (KISS principle), so that as many as users can update templates. The coding the visual editor requires for editing templates in articles makes it impossible for regular users to update those templates any longer. Something that is unacceptable to us. Software should make editing easier, not more difficult. All the problems with the software will cause thousands of bad edits which other users can clean up afterwards. We think software should make the workload less in stead of enlarging it. As a result of all problems we have started a voting to hide the visual editor until the problems are solved. A big majority is in favour.
In the past weeks, the visual editor was already launched to the English Wikipedia. Many many many problems occurred and are still occurring, like this and this. On thousands of articles this goes wrong. As result of all these problems the community has set up an comment page at en:Wikipedia:VisualEditor/RFC. Someone summarizes it with: "It's a very good alpha, but it should never have been launched outside of a test deployment."
From the beginning the developer team promised all communities to make it possible for all users to opt-out the software if they do not want to use it. With the launch on the English Wikipedia it appeared that the opt-out was removed. The only thing users can do is hide the visual editor for themselves via the common.js. This means that everyone, including those users who do not want to use the visual editor, have to deal with an extra layer of code that is loaded each time you visit a page and can't be switched off.
The community of the Dutch Wikipedia want the developers to delay the launch of the visual editor until all big issues and concerns are solved. The Dutch community does not want to clean up the mess the visual editor produces on all these thousands of articles. Yes, most users like the idea of a visual editor, but that must be one which doesn't cause problems and really helps to make editing easier. As the visual editor is not yet ready to be deployed, and no replies have been received from the developers, the community will hide the visual editor (using this in here) (and make an opt-in for those who wish to use/test it) to prevent problems. (De facto this means that the current opt-in is restored back.) It will give a signal to the developers/Wikimedia Foundation that the current deployment is unacceptable to the Dutch community and the community feels itself ignored and forced to cope with the problems we did not cause.
I noticed that also ja-wiki is scheduled to get launched the visual editor coming Monday 22 July. I really doubt that seeing the problems on the English Wikipedia and the Dutch Wikipedia, that the launch here will be without major issues.
It is up to the local community to check for problems and to ask themselves if this acceptable to you or not? I would also suggest you test the visual editor with editing articles (like the ones which use the most used templates to see if they all work), in particular the ones with tables, templates and references.
If you wish to translate this message, please do, so that more users can understand what they have to deal with coming Monday and later.
If you want to know more about the situation on nl-wiki, please ask. Greetings - Romaine（会話） 2013年7月19日 (金) 16:18 (UTC)
- Like the Dutch Wikipedia, editors at the Japanese Wikipedia are happy about the possibilities and will be happier when some of the most common bugs are fixed. (So will I.)
- Romaine has posted this note to many Wikipedias. He is refusing to allow the Dutch Wikipedia to use mw:TemplateData, which is required to make templates easy to use in Wikipedia:VisualEditor.
- I wish that Romaine's facts were more accurate. VisualEditor does not have "an extra layer of code that is loaded each time you visit a page and can't be switched off." It has one small piece of code (0.5% of one page) that loads into the cache one time (until you clear your cache).
- Furthermore, any editor can easily refuse to use VisualEditor at any time. The only step necessary is to click the button for the older editor. Refusing to use VisualEditor is as easy as refusing to use the page history or the discussion pages: If you don't want to use it, then simply do not click those buttons. There is no programming or CSS or prefs switch required at all. It may take a few days or a week for many editors to get used to the presence of two buttons, but I think that the Japanese Wikipedians will have little difficulty with this in the end. Whatamidoing (WMF)（会話） 2013年7月19日 (金) 19:58 (UTC)
- Hello Whatamidoing. I have a question. Doesn't the visual editor have any major bugs now? If the visual editor produces the mess code as Romaine said, your approach (simply not clicking the new edit button) doesn't work well. I think people don't want to clean up the mess on thousands of articles. If there are no such problems, we would be happy with it. --Penn Station (talk) 2013年7月19日 (金) 21:14 (UTC)
- Hello Penn Station,
- There are a couple of problems that have affected up to 10% of edits in some cases. By far, the most common one is due to people not following the instructions. In that case, VisualEditor works as it was designed, but not as some people expect. These problems are being worked on now.
- The schedule has changed, and VisualEditor will not be released to ja.wp for about a month. I hope these problems will be solved by then. Also, I have personally checked every edit to an article in the last 30 days that used VisualEditor, and none of the users made these mistakes, so perhaps. The only bug in the entire last month at ja.wikipedia was this one, which was fixed a few hours later by an IP editor. The most common problems do not appear to have affected ja.wikipedia at all. Whatamidoing (WMF)（会話） 2013年7月20日 (土) 22:10 (UTC)
- Thanks for your answer and info, Whatamidoing. I personally think the rescheduling is maybe good as long as there are still major problems (though I don't know severity of the current existing problems). In my opinion, deploying new functionalities onto a production system should be done very carefully. I hope the existing problems will be solved by new date. Anyway, according to the recent changes, only few people have used the beta on very few number of edits. So possibly potential bugs have not been revealed yet.. Maybe we should have more beta testers here. --Penn Station (talk) 2013年7月21日 (日) 18:03 (UTC)
- Yes, more beta testers would be very helpful! The software developers have delayed the Japanese introduction because they are concerned about unicode letters. It is possible that if the font on your computer is different from the font on another editor's computer, then some articles would get very confused. The WMF would very much appreciate it if many Japanese editors tried to use VisualEditor. Wikipedia:ビジュアルエディター has information and links to the directions. Any registered editor may become a beta tester by clicking the box at the bottom of 特別:個人設定#mw-prefsection-editing. Whatamidoing (WMF)（会話） 2013年7月23日 (火) 18:02 (UTC)
- Thanks for your answer and info, Whatamidoing. I personally think the rescheduling is maybe good as long as there are still major problems (though I don't know severity of the current existing problems). In my opinion, deploying new functionalities onto a production system should be done very carefully. I hope the existing problems will be solved by new date. Anyway, according to the recent changes, only few people have used the beta on very few number of edits. So possibly potential bugs have not been revealed yet.. Maybe we should have more beta testers here. --Penn Station (talk) 2013年7月21日 (日) 18:03 (UTC)
- Hello Whatamidoing. I have a question. Doesn't the visual editor have any major bugs now? If the visual editor produces the mess code as Romaine said, your approach (simply not clicking the new edit button) doesn't work well. I think people don't want to clean up the mess on thousands of articles. If there are no such problems, we would be happy with it. --Penn Station (talk) 2013年7月19日 (金) 21:14 (UTC)
- Update: the community of the Dutch Wikipedia has voted with about 80% against the launch of the visual editor until the problems are solved as the reported bugs are breaking thousands articles. The community does not want to be forced to deal with the problems the visual editor causes. We understood that the reason for this early launch is because too little time for developing was scheduled. The community hopes in general that the problems are solved fast so that a fully functional visual editor can be launched as soon as possible. Romaine（会話） 2013年7月22日 (月) 20:27 (UTC)
- Was your poll advertised via Sitenotice?--miya（会話） 2013年7月23日 (火) 22:10 (UTC)