Visual editor demo launched, hailed as "most important change to our user experience ... ever"; but elsewhere over-hasty deployments criticised

Tuesday saw an announcement at the Wikimedia tech blog of the deployment to a sandbox of what many see as having the potential to be a major breakthrough in making it easier to edit Wikipedia. The Visual editor project, which will provide an integrated "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) interface for wikitext, may well be in its early stages, but its demonstration version (released this week) has already attracted a great deal of attention (see "In the news" for media reaction).

At the moment, the visual editor team have focused on support for basic formatting such as bold, italics, section headings and lists, though they are continually adding to the list of supported wikitext structures. Having found native browser support lacking, they have also been forced to reimplement many features that people take for granted, including arrow-key scrolling, cut/paste, and undo/redo. A number of bugs with the editor have already been found in this round of early stage testing; many have since been fixed.

The WMF team responsible for the editor were keen to stress that the editor, which is set to launch to its first wiki in June, will allow for the seamless switch between visual and old-style direct editing modes. Nonetheless, it seems likely that hand-constructed pages will be subject to a one-off normalisation program, after which all manual edits will be silently normalised. Whole wikitext-template structures could also be phased out as part of the transition process.

The most significant limitation with the demonstration is undoubtedly that the interface only allows users to edit a small number of predefined articles, thus avoiding the problem of understanding potentially difficult wikitext. It has been this concern over backwards compatibility that has long been seen as the challenge for developers of WYSIWYG editors, of which a number of competing designs are already available. The difference this time, developers say, is that the introduction of the radically improved new parser will make all the difference when it comes to the provision of a truly comprehensive editor.

[See "In the news" for reactions from outside of the Wikimedia universe.]

While the visual editor project may have received little criticism so far, it seems that a number of other projects have not been so treated.

On Wednesday, Siebrand Mazeland – the project manager attached to the WMF localisation team – reported in his summary of the preceding WebFonts deployment (covered in brief last week) that he had received complaints over the speed of the deployment. Srikanth L, a self-admitted "critic" of the deployment, explained that one issue was whether "sufficient testing to a large user base" had really been carried out before the rollout. Mazeland responded by stressing that the Localisation team had for some time been trying to build up dedicated "language support" teams to consult with, although to little avail.

The comments came only hours after Lead Platform Architect Tim Starling relayed that he "had been hearing a lot of resentment from community members about the features team deploying extensions" without taking the time to "properly consult the community". On Monday, the recent change to image rotation had also led one upset commentator to deplore a state of affairs where staff developers seemed to make design decisions unsupported by reason (see also previous Signpost coverage). (Starling later pointed out that the recent image rotation adjustment had been a volunteer-led project that WMF developers had only been involved with in a review capacity.)

Starling's comments were made in a wider discussion about the deployment process faced by volunteers and staff developers. He recommended that to restore parity, staff developers focus on gaining wider community input, which would also yield "a huge amount of design input".

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.

• 

  ArticleFeedback version 5 goes live: As trialed last week, on 19 December the fifth version of the ArticleFeedback extension went live to a little over 11,000 articles. A number of bugs (one of which forced the extension to be temporarily disabled) were quickly identified and fixed; the extension will now undergo a series of technical tests before being rolled out further. The performance of the various interfaces will also be compared during this phase, with the winning interface going onto phase 2 of the testing.
• Git migration takes step forward: The migration from SVN to Git, scheduled in September this year, has taken a step forward with the creation of a test repository holding core MediaWiki code (wikitech-l mailing list). Changesets pushed to the test Git repository can be viewed on gerrit.wikimedia.org. IRC meetings to discuss the Git migration are in the process of being held this week, with a preference for many, smaller repositories emerging in the first such meeting (full IRC log).
• Android app nears release candidate: Lead Software Architect Brion Vibber noted on his blog the imminent release of a release candidate of the official Wikimedia app for Android phones. However, in a second post later in the week, he also confirmed worries that much of the code powering the app would need substantial revision for compatibility with the latest version of the Android operating system (4.0, codenamed "Ice Cream Sandwich").
• A code review Christmas ahead?: Official figures show that, as many Wikimedia developers enter holiday periods in their part of the globe, code review figures for MediaWiki 1.19 are considerably behind target. As of 19 December, over 500 revisions are left to review, 200 (or approximately 10 days) off the figure of 300 penciled in as a target (full statistics).
• No more planetary problems on https: With the resolution of bug #32028, visitors attempting to view certain Wikimedia blog "planets" will no longer be redirected away from the main site when trying (manually or automatically) to switch to the secure, https version of the site.

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Web fonts

If you are looking for a detailed report / feedback on the Webfonts deployment, please read mail to India list that we had sent. We have moved forward after this and have already seen improvement with WMF (Mazeland and team) communicating more and I hope such a thing will not happen in future deployments. Srikanth (Logic) 04:44, 21 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the link. - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 10:53, 21 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• It's good that we're finally at the point in WYSIWYG where the community is able to play with it in a sandbox. This is a good sign for Wikipedia's future, and will do more for editor retention than charging clumsily into India, Brazil, and U.S. colleges ever will. I wonder how much sooner we'd have the visual editor functional if even half of the time and money spent on those other failed efforts was spent on this? Sven Manguard Wha? 05:25, 21 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

WMF takes flak ...  ??? — billinghurst sDrewth 05:34, 21 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Feel free to make minor grammatical corrections yourself. Our copyeditors are human, they miss things from time to time. Sven Manguard Wha? 05:47, 21 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That's not a mistake, that's British usage. Just like "Liverpool are playing well this year" or "the Orchestra are often blamed for the current Ukulele revival which is sweeping the globe". Angr (talk) 07:55, 21 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, to clarify, I wrote "WMF take...", which was then corrected to "WMF takes..." by Tony. Per BBC guidelines, one is not "right" or "wrong", but they have different nuances. Here, I think you could defend both options. - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 10:56, 21 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

WYSIWYG

• WYSIWYG? - finally! Bulwersator (talk) 07:53, 21 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• "Whole wikitext-template structures could also be phased out as part of the transition process." Unless I'm misreading that, that's major step in itself, with massive implications. Where can we learn more about, and discuss, this proposal? What about the metadata currently emitted by our templates? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:43, 21 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I believe the main complaint it with templates that emit HTML output that is unbalanced (i.e. templates which cannot 'stand alone'). This includes templates such as {{s-start}}, which presumably would be merged with {{s-end}} to create a single overarching template. I dare say the effect on microformats would be negligible. - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 15:58, 21 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

https

Only issue is that while it may be true about the retaining secure login there is an issue in that there is NOT a current security certificate and that is not going to be resolved at this time. — billinghurst sDrewth 12:27, 22 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yep!

Newbies will no longer have problem with editing. Nice work done, WMF! Dipankan ^{In the woods?} 15:48, 16 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]