The Visual Editor is a huge failure

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Wed Jul 26, 2017 7:51 pm

Midsize Jake wrote:I was gonna say that one sampling of 500 article-space edits probably isn't enough to draw a fair conclusion, but I tried it just now and only got 13.

I do this about once a month.
The usage rate varies between 2-5%.

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Wed Jul 26, 2017 7:53 pm

thekohser wrote:
Randy from Boise wrote:This I do not understand.
And based on my long-term (and lovable) observation of your opinions about Wikipedia, this is not the only thing about Wikipedia that you do not understand!

Zing!!!

RfB

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Wed Jul 26, 2017 8:03 pm

Looking at the French and German wikis, you see usage in the 10-15% range.
What's different?

I have a hypothesis: uptake and usage of the VisualCowpat is inversely proportional to the number of WMF 'community liaisons' who speak the target wiki's language natively.

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Thu Jul 27, 2017 1:24 am

Vigilant wrote:Looking at the French and German wikis, you see usage in the 10-15% range.
What's different?

I have a hypothesis: uptake and usage of the VisualCowpat is inversely proportional to the number of WMF 'community liaisons' who speak the target wiki's language natively.

I suspect it has to do with the wording and steps necessary to opt out to the default editor. Just making that shit up.

Yes, Greg, I hear you smirking.

RfB

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Thu Jul 27, 2017 7:34 pm

Randy from Boise wrote:Yes, Greg, I hear you smirking.

If you can hear someone smirking, you have sharper ears than most. Does that go with having a horsehead?

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Thu Jul 27, 2017 11:27 pm

Poetlister wrote:
Randy from Boise wrote:Yes, Greg, I hear you smirking.
If you can hear someone smirking, you have sharper ears than most. Does that go with having a horsehead?

Kohs guffaws while he smirks.

RfB

Cedric · Unread post by **Cedric** » Fri Jul 28, 2017 10:07 am

Poetlister wrote:
Randy from Boise wrote:Yes, Greg, I hear you smirking.
If you can hear someone smirking, you have sharper ears than most. Does that go with having a horsehead?

I don't think so. But there is a fair amount of screaming involved.

thekohser · Unread post by **thekohser** » Fri Jul 28, 2017 12:50 pm

Randy from Boise wrote:
Poetlister wrote:
Randy from Boise wrote:Yes, Greg, I hear you smirking.
If you can hear someone smirking, you have sharper ears than most. Does that go with having a horsehead?
Kohs guffaws while he smirks.

RfB

It's more of a chortle, really.

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Fri Jul 28, 2017 1:30 pm

thekohser wrote:
Randy from Boise wrote:
Poetlister wrote:
Randy from Boise wrote:Yes, Greg, I hear you smirking.
If you can hear someone smirking, you have sharper ears than most. Does that go with having a horsehead?
Kohs guffaws while he smirks.

RfB
It's more of a chortle, really.

Hey!

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Wed Aug 01, 2018 8:27 am

:dusts off the furniture:

WP:Recent changes (1000 over 7 days)
"(Tag: Visual Edit)"
Incidences 42

Just about where we left off

Further refining things to article space by humans only shows us a 48 incident hit over 1000 edits.

Visual Editor is still under 5% uptake after five years and untold dollars of 'effort'.
I'm sure those WMF engineers are still 'working hard' on this.
Well, not all of them.
A bunch got shown the door.

Anyone still think the WMF is going to push this turd out to completion any time soon?

P.S. Hey Brandon Harris, I am still up for fisticuffs at a location and time of your choosing.
P.P.S. Same for you Oliver 'throatpuncher' Keyes.

Jim · Unread post by **Jim** » Wed Aug 01, 2018 9:22 am

Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback (T-H-L)

This page is not actively monitored by Wikimedia Foundation staff.

Still, from the same page, nice to see they've got that user-friendly, basic, logical workflow sorted out...

Show Preview
The 'Show Preview' button should be visibile and readily accessible.

While trying to find it, 'Publish changes' was the last place I looked for it, because I had no intention of publishing yet, so why would i hit a publish button? (my internal logic while looking)

But who cares? In WikiWorld you don't choose VE - VE chooses you...

I have "Temporarily disable the visual editor while it is in beta" checked. Last night everything was fine. This morning, VE is my editor for all pages, talk and non-talk. I did not change my settings, nor log out (I have since this problem came up logged out and back in to try to make it go away). — SMcCandlish 21:57, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

I had to go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures, turn on "Set a local exception for this global preference" at page top, then turn off "New wikitext mode". "Automatically enable all new beta features" must also be off. Something seems to have changed in how the global prefs are managed. I haven't made any changes to mine in over a week. — SMcCandlish 22:37, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

Kumioko · Unread post by **Kumioko** » Wed Aug 01, 2018 6:00 pm

This may seem overly pessimistic but I believe the staff don't monitor that page is because a) the staff don't care and will do what they want regardless of what the community wants and b) most of them don't edit and those who do don't care about that page

Dysklyver · Unread post by **Dysklyver** » Wed Aug 01, 2018 7:24 pm

It's possible the issue is simply that that page should not exist, because feature requests and bug reports should be filed on phabricator.

But the WMF don't care enough to tell anyone that, and no one who knows about phabricator wants a ton of traffic about a normally buggy software where broken is the default.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of VE, but the implementation of it simply doesn't work for me.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Wed Aug 01, 2018 8:45 pm

Dysklyver wrote:Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of VE, but the implementation of it simple doesn't work for me.

I totally agree, and no doubt many people would too.

Moral Hazard · Unread post by **Moral Hazard** » Tue Aug 07, 2018 8:53 pm

Vigilant wrote::dusts off the furniture:

Welcome back

Moral Hazard · Unread post by **Moral Hazard** » Tue Aug 07, 2018 8:55 pm

Jim wrote:In WikiWorld you don't choose VE - VE chooses you...

I have "Temporarily disable the visual editor while it is in beta" checked. Last night everything was fine. This morning, VE is my editor for all pages, talk and non-talk. I did not change my settings, nor log out (I have since this problem came up logged out and back in to try to make it go away). — SMcCandlish 21:57, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

I had to go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures, turn on "Set a local exception for this global preference" at page top, then turn off "New wikitext mode". "Automatically enable all new beta features" must also be off. Something seems to have changed in how the global prefs are managed. I haven't made any changes to mine in over a week. — SMcCandlish 22:37, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

Which is a worse stain on the resume, the Trump White House or WMF engineering?

Kumioko · Unread post by **Kumioko** » Tue Aug 07, 2018 9:32 pm

I would say that it's the Trump White House. Most of the WMFers are at least unquestionably democrat so they can't be insulted or questioned without being called a racist and misogynist.

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Mon Nov 26, 2018 12:30 pm

Visual Edsel: November 2018

A large number of freshly reported bugs on WP:VEF, many of them related to poor state management between client and server.

Low uptake still on en.wp
1000 most recent not-bot article edits yields 39 Visual Editor edits.

4% uptake after how many years, how much money, how much drama and opportunity cost?

It's just embarrassing.

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Mon Nov 26, 2018 3:35 pm

Vigilant wrote:Visual Edsel: November 2018

A large number of freshly reported bugs on WP:VEF, many of them related to poor state management between client and server.

Low uptake still on en.wp
1000 most recent not-bot article edits yields 39 Visual Editor edits.

4% uptake after how many years, how much money, how much drama and opportunity cost?

It's just embarrassing.

It's a pity we haven't been tracking this stat monthly.

I suspect that the actual use level on non-English Wikis -- where they shove VE down people's throat by default -- is probably higher than 4%.

RfB

P.S. Welcome back, Vig.

Jim · Unread post by **Jim** » Mon Nov 26, 2018 3:50 pm

Randy from Boise wrote:I suspect that the actual use level on non-English Wikis -- where they shove VE down people's throat by default -- is probably higher than 4%

Which is, of course, why they fought tooth and nail to get en.wiki to accept the non-functioning POS as default - even an extra 1% usage there represents a lot of edits. The thing is still pushed with a pop-up box to every new account - the fact that the take-up is still negligible speaks volumes.

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Mon Nov 26, 2018 3:56 pm

Randy from Boise wrote:
Vigilant wrote:Visual Edsel: November 2018

A large number of freshly reported bugs on WP:VEF, many of them related to poor state management between client and server.

Low uptake still on en.wp
1000 most recent not-bot article edits yields 39 Visual Editor edits.

4% uptake after how many years, how much money, how much drama and opportunity cost?

It's just embarrassing.
It's a pity we haven't been tracking this stat monthly.

I suspect that the actual use level on non-English Wikis -- where they shove VE down people's throat by default -- is probably higher than 4%.

RfB

P.S. Welcome back, Vig.

Thanks.

I needed a break from this place and wikipedia.
I was getting too salty.

I've been working at taking a startup public and doing some travel.

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Mon Nov 26, 2018 4:12 pm

This list of wikis List_of_Wikipedias#List (T-H-L) by order of magnitude of active users provide a fair estimate.

en.wp : 10^5 active users : 4% uptake

de.wp : 10^4 active users : 11% uptake

fr.wp : 10^4 active users : 23% uptake

es.wp : 10^4 active users : 11% uptake

ru.wp : 10^4 active users : 19% uptake

ja.wp : 10^4 active users : 9% uptake

Dysklyver · Unread post by **Dysklyver** » Mon Nov 26, 2018 4:22 pm

It doesn't work well on non-wmf wikis, the way they built it requires hosting a rather process intensive parsoid service on a node server in addition to your normal mediawiki setup. This is far from convenient and adds another point of failure to the system which fails enough as it is.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Mon Nov 26, 2018 9:23 pm

Dysklyver wrote:It doesn't work well on non-wmf wikis

It doesn't work all that brilliantly on WMF wikis, certainly not on the French and German WP.

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Sat Jan 12, 2019 4:46 pm

Visual Edsel update:

on iPhone Auto citation tool produced access-date with TZ code and time that produced an error
Auto citation tool produced access-date with TZ code and time that produced an error
For no apparent reason, the WMF dingdongs decided to change the date format generated in VE. This is something you ABSOLUTELY wouldn't want a simple test case for...
Can't submit for review?
I've tried to submit this article I created numerous times but it always tells me the draft has not been submitted.
Also something that TOTALLY doesn't need a test case.
impossible to use drop down menus
Drop down menu is unclickable when overlaying text input field. The text selection cursor stays active instead.
Wonderful UI design!
Messing up the placement of "citation needed" template
How difficult can it be to just enter "December 2018" rather than that convoluted syntax? After all these years, still not getting it right.
SUPAR Hard when you don't have the faintest clue WTF you're doing.
But, fear not, brave editor, Jimbo says, "They're working REALLY hard on this!"
Spurious nowiki tag replacing space
when adding a wikilink, VisualEditor might spuriously replace a space with a nowiki tag
Oh god, it's non deterministic code time at the WMF corral again.
Shades of random chess pieces showing up in edits! Good times, good times.
I'd like to be able to rename references
I have to switch to source mode to rename references' names
Seems like something reasonable...
What's the WMF response?
*crickets*
Source Editor : Syntax Highlighting changes editor font
TL;DR - Syntax highlighting in VE screws up the font in the source editor... Nice.
Crap
I have spent an hour on the Wikipedia editor page and it's utterly crap. Can't even apply a biography template. Whoever designed this is a fuck wit
Welcome to the WMF's best effort. One cross each, line on the left.
On huge pages, the Chrome "aw snap" face appears within the visual editor, and I can't see anything below the gray screen it creates.
Oh dear, resource allocation failures that break modern Chrome.
Well done, WMF. Well done.

Is summary, VE continues to disappoint.
Basic features still aren't implemented.
The bug backlog continues to grow.
Customers may not, ever, receive a reply about a reported bug on the official WMF feedback page.
Testing and validation seems as broken as ever in the VE team.

I have a sneaking suspicion that it was the VE team the drove Coleman, suspiciously close to Mo:leMan, from the ranks of the WMF.

Dysklyver · Unread post by **Dysklyver** » Sat Jan 12, 2019 5:04 pm

If you move references around on the same article using VE then it create duplicate references that cause cite errors.

example.

It doesn't seem to be possible to fix these cite errors again without using the source editor.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sat Jan 12, 2019 5:49 pm

Dysklyver wrote:If you move references around on the same article using VE then it create duplicate references that cause cite errors.

example.

It doesn't seem to be possible to fix these cite errors again without using the source editor.

We've long ago concluded that VE is hopelessly buggy and the WMF is not exactly doing a great job fixing it. Maybe that's why the CTO left.

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Sat Jan 12, 2019 6:09 pm

Poetlister wrote:
Dysklyver wrote:If you move references around on the same article using VE then it create duplicate references that cause cite errors.

example.

It doesn't seem to be possible to fix these cite errors again without using the source editor.
We've long ago concluded that VE is hopelessly buggy and the WMF is not exactly doing a great job fixing it. Maybe that's why the CTO left.

It's worse than hopelessly buggy.

The architecture is broken.
Nobody seems to understand testing or validation.
They don't have regression tests to prevent old bugs being reintroduced into the code base.
They don't appear to be able to talk to their customers.
I seriously doubt they have any long term plan with any meaningful chance of success.
The WMF engineering teams don't follow 'best practices' process anywhere.

It's got to be hugely demoralizing if you're working there and do know how things are supposed to be done in the real world.

VE cannot be 'fixed' with the current situation of broken architecture, massive technical debt, broken process and incompetent leadership (which keeps changing).

Unread post by **tarantino** » Tue Jan 22, 2019 9:11 pm

Dan Garry, who was lead product manager for editing, quietly left the wmf last November. No one noticed until he edited his staff account user page a couple of days ago. Since the foundation moved their official website to wordpress, there's no way to monitor staff changes, unless you take snapshots.

Kumioko · Unread post by **Kumioko** » Tue Jan 22, 2019 9:23 pm

tarantino wrote:Dan Garry, who was lead product manager for editing, quietly left the wmf last November. No one noticed until he edited his staff account user page a couple of days ago. Since the foundation moved their official website to wordpress, there's no way to monitor staff changes, unless you take snapshots.

The Wikimedia foundation is probably the only organization on the planet that shows everyone that the software they make isn't suited for their own uses.

Of course then they choose an ugly site that shows the same world how grossly incompetent they are at webdesign...so there's that.

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Wed Jan 23, 2019 5:03 am

tarantino wrote:Dan Garry, who was lead product manager for editing, quietly left the wmf last November. No one noticed until he edited his staff account user page a couple of days ago. Since the foundation moved their official website to wordpress, there's no way to monitor staff changes, unless you take snapshots.

Pretty sure that's a feature

Dysklyver · Unread post by **Dysklyver** » Wed Jan 23, 2019 11:11 am

Vigilant wrote:
tarantino wrote:Dan Garry, who was lead product manager for editing, quietly left the wmf last November. No one noticed until he edited his staff account user page a couple of days ago. Since the foundation moved their official website to wordpress, there's no way to monitor staff changes, unless you take snapshots.
Pretty sure that's a feature

Of course that would be a feature.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Wed Jan 23, 2019 9:04 pm

Dan's Linkedin profile still says "Lead Product Manager at Wikimedia Foundation"

Anroth · Unread post by **Anroth** » Mon Feb 18, 2019 10:43 pm

30 pages in, does it work yet?

Dysklyver · Unread post by **Dysklyver** » Mon Feb 18, 2019 11:24 pm

Anroth wrote:30 pages in, does it work yet?

Nope.

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Tue Feb 19, 2019 7:04 am

Anroth wrote:30 pages in, does it work yet?

Fuck, 30 YEARS in and it's not gonna work...

RfB

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Tue Feb 19, 2019 3:22 pm

You can't fix bad architecture and design by fiddling with the implementation.

Kumioko · Unread post by **Kumioko** » Tue Feb 19, 2019 7:05 pm

Vigilant wrote:You can't fix bad architecture and design by fiddling with the implementation.

And let us now forget about bad management.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Tue Feb 19, 2019 9:05 pm

Kumioko wrote:
Vigilant wrote:You can't fix bad architecture and design by fiddling with the implementation.
And let us now forget about bad management.

Yes, since he's gone and presumably been replaced by an excellent manager.

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Sun Mar 17, 2019 8:57 pm

Visual Cowpat usage on en.wp appears to be tailing out towards zero.

The last few checks at recent changes yielded a 2.7% usage rate, down from roughly 4%.

No Ledge · Unread post by **No Ledge** » Mon Mar 18, 2019 1:32 am

2.7% may seem like a relatively small percentage, but man it feels like a lot more when I check the Pages with disallowed DISPLAYTITLE modifications. Visual Editors are disproportionately responsible for populating this maintenance category. I worked hard to clear this category out around New Years but now the Visual Editors have pumped its population back up to 186. __DISPLAYTITLE__ used to be an esoteric "magic word" that only a few experienced editors knew about. It's used to make a few cosmetic changes to article titles such as italicizing all or part of a title, or making the first character of a title a lower case letter (e.g. eBay). But now it's a VisualEditor feature that novice editors are finding, and trying to use to substantially change an article title. I guess VisualEditor never implemented page moving capabilities. Nor the ability to populate our actual page for requesting title changes, WP:RM. Instead they dump their title-change requests into a backwater that virtually nobody but me patrols, and I'm tired of cleaning up, as a volunteer, after messes that the paid developers enabled.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Mon Mar 18, 2019 8:58 pm

That is a very good condemnation of the faults of the Visual Editor. Any sensible outfit would disable it until these and other major faults are fixed. Alas, the WMF is not always known for being sensible!

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Fri Mar 22, 2019 8:02 pm

From the top of the main page at WP:VEF

This page is not actively monitored by Wikimedia Foundation staff. You may consider leaving your feedback on mediawiki.org or filing a task on the bug tracker.

Looks like the WMF has thrown the towel in on en.wp...

The Garbage Scow · Unread post by **The Garbage Scow** » Tue Mar 26, 2019 6:49 pm

link https://youtu.be/7hx4gdlfamo?t=65[/link]

WBG · Unread post by **WBG** » Thu Apr 25, 2019 5:53 pm

https://medium.com/freely-sharing-the-s ... 346478dd42 -- User-feedback of encountering a shitty software over a shitty interface.

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Sat Jun 01, 2019 6:11 pm

en.wp : 1000 latest edits : Article space only : search for Tag: Visual edit

28 results. 2.8%

VE usage is steadily dropping on en.wp.

SIX YEARS LATER, VE is still a time and money sink with a massive number of outstanding bugs, enormous technical debt due to extremely poor architecture, and an entire stable of grossly sub par developers.

No Ledge · Unread post by **No Ledge** » Tue Dec 17, 2019 3:02 am

The Long and Winding Road

This tech presentation is months old, but I just ran into it when I noticed it was linked from the most recent bots newsletter.

The long and winding road to making Parsoid the default MediaWiki parser

Parsoid started in 2012 as a project to support Visual Editing and since then has gone on to support a number of products (Flow, Content Translation, Kiwix, Android app). Given that (a) Parsoid's annotated HTML output enables clients to infer things about wikitext without having to parse wikitext, (b) the PHP parser cannot support Visual Editor and other products, and (c) we cannot continue to have two parsers, it is inevitable that Parsoid will be the default parser for MediaWiki. This has been known since at least 2015 but while we are nearer that goalpost, we are still not quite there yet. In this talk, we'll talk about what else needs to be completed, and what the porting of Parsoid to PHP means for this goal.

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Tue Dec 17, 2019 3:32 am

Hey Vig, what's the VE usage rate these days?

tim

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Tue Dec 17, 2019 3:37 am

Randy from Boise wrote: ↑
Tue Dec 17, 2019 3:32 am
Hey Vig, what's the VE usage rate these days?

tim

On en.wp, about 5.3%.

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Tue Dec 17, 2019 3:44 am

Vigilant wrote: ↑
Tue Dec 17, 2019 3:37 am

Randy from Boise wrote: ↑
Tue Dec 17, 2019 3:32 am
Hey Vig, what's the VE usage rate these days?

tim
On en.wp, about 5.3%.

Up significantly, but still insignificant.

RfB