The Visual Editor is a huge failure

[No Ledge]

There's a transient bump up this time of year as the WikiEd students, who are instructed to use VisualEditor, file their class-assignment articles before their end-of-semester deadlines. I see them when I remove their {{dashboard.wikiedu.org sandbox}} templates from mainspace.

See how much the % of VisualEdits drops over the holidays.

[Vigilant]

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

tim

On en.wp, about 5.3%.

Up significantly, but still insignificant.

RfB

Within 1 standard deviation.

[Vigilant]

If you want to see how badly it's still broken after 6-7 years of full time development, look here.

Many of these issues are years and years old.

If you want to see the next incarnation of AuntFlow, look here.

They never learn and they never give up.

[Ritchie333]

Why don't they outsource the development to Google? It's a non-core activity (the core seems to be for Jimbo and friends to hob-nob around the world and occasionally appear on Question Time as a political pundit) and they certainly don't seem to be able to cater for it in-house.

[Vigilant]

Why don't they outsource the development to Google? It's a non-core activity (the core seems to be for Jimbo and friends to hob-nob around the world and occasionally appear on Question Time as a political pundit) and they certainly don't seem to be able to cater for it in-house.

Why would google want any part in Visual Edsel?
It's a terrible design with shitty architecture and a technical debt load that's almost unbelievable.
Dozens of mediocre engineers, lead by unqualified managers, have shit up this code base for 7 years.

If google were going to do VE, they'd convert the entire wiki to html5 and use standard tools.

[No Ledge]

If google were going to do VE, they'd convert the entire wiki to html5 and use standard tools.

Wikipedia:HTML 5 (T-H-L) and Wikipedia:Linter (T-H-L)

Their problem is in relying on volunteers to help them remove the obsolete tags.

It doesn't help that the volunteers chased off some of the guys who most enjoy making these sorts of edits because they were making too many "cosmetic edits" that upset patrollers' watchlists.

And it didn't help that management was too much in a hurry to showcase the user-facing stuff that gets the glory, and didn't have the patience to wait for all the backend groundwork (gruntwork) to get done.

I listened to that guy's entire talk from last winter; he didn't sound all that bad to me.

[rhindle]

Google seems to be having their own issues at the moment.

[Vigilant]

Each time I try to publish my changes, I get an error - Error contacting the Parsoid/RESTBase server (HTTP 400)

VE producing {{safesubst:...}} inside ref in frwiki

Hi. I tried to report this problem on Phabricator, but quickly closed without investigating... On frwiki, it has been several weeks/months that VE is creatings things like <ref>{{Lien web|langue=|auteur1=|titre=Red Star 93|url=https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_ ... =|consulté le={{safesubst:Aujourd'hui}}}}</ref>. The {{safesubst:...}} (Aujourd'hui means today) is supposed to be initialized with the date where the reference has been added (it's the access date). The template doesn't define this default value in the TemplateData (cf. API call: "autovalue": ""), but in some situations it seems to be added nonetheless by VE. Any idea on where to look and how to fix this problem? --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 18:56, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

Text of page disappears after opening Visual Editor

Sir i am compeletly ending my article and press the publish buttun but my article is not show in other google and even my google why ?

Editor has lines mis-spaced, changes made to page do not appear where expected

Error contacting the Parsoid/RESTBase server (HTTP 403)

Oldie but goodie!
Editor retention WIN!

I can't save!

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36
I worked on this article for 3 hours but I can't save!!!!!! Please HELP!!

JakeTheIV (talk) 19:59, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

They're so happy with the feedback here that they've made the Phabricator reporting page require a unified login.
lol

Thankfully, editing the URL directly gets you past this stupidity.
Home page for the worst project ... EVAR!

List of shit that's currently on fire.

La la la ...

T243860 Clicking on a slug while the selection is inside a table causes an exception

T243852 Switching a new Bullet point to Numbered list corrupts user input in VisualEditor

T243748 Merging table cells in Visual Editor destroys the content of all cells but one

T243723 Wikitext editor toolbar and welcome dialog give the option to switch to visual editor even if it's disabled in user preferences (or not enabled, on opt-in wikis)

T242891 Clicking a redlink to a protected page causes VisualEditor to load, but hold any information about the page being protected

lol

T242514 Disable VisualEditor on Polish Wiktionary

T242466 [Research spike] Why does posting a new comment delete `</span>` from a previous one?

T242362 [Regression] None of the options under any drop down are visible on mobile VE

lol

T241961 VisualEditor was removed from Wikitech because Parsoid/PHP isn't yet compatible with how Wikitech is set up

T241933 Simple page transclusions are wrongly treated as templates in VisualEditor

T241472 Target of search/replace is hidden beneath the toolbar.

T240955 Firefox CI tests keep failing in VE

T240529 Visual editor text bug with list

T240372 VE shoudn't replace empty values with autovalue in parameters that already exist

T240327 Browser spellchecking broken in VE for words with special characters

T240280 Parsoid removes all newlines from the page when editing a table inside a list item `:{|`

T239846 Visual Editor suggests irrelevant autocomplete for section names

T236440 Focus keeps jumping up and down inside the context menu while trying to edit a node on mobile VE

You get the idea.

We are SEVEN years into development and the above GIANT list is cherry picked from the FIRST PAGE of outstanding bugs.

Visual Edsel is still really only a beta level product.

[Vigilant]

Flash from the past

I disagree. I think it fairly obvious that the inferior experience of the wikitext editor will be strongly opposed by virtually everyone once the visual editor is good enough (and it isn't yet).--Jimbo Wales (talk) 23:11, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Is it good enough yet?

3.3% usage on en.wp... the consensus is that it's still not good enough.

[DanMurphy]

That is a great Jimboism (Jimboism, noun: A phrase even more banal than a tautology, ex. I predict people will prefer a clearly superior option when it is made available.)

[Vigilant]

That is a great Jimboism (Jimboism, noun: A phrase even more banal than a tautology, ex. I predict people will prefer a clearly superior option when it is made available.)

Well, he's a thoughtful thinker, dontchaknow?

[Earthy Astringent]

I’ve been using VI for a few years now. At its core it’s a markdown editor, and it compares fairly well to other markdown editors. VI is a live editor, presenting the document in a WYSIWYG format. It does a decent job, but where VI excels is tools specific for Wikipedia, such as the cite feature. It’s rare for me to have to use the source view anymore, which is a testament to how well VI works for me.

[Randy from Boise]

I’ve been using VI for a few years now. At its core it’s a markdown editor, and it compares fairly well to other markdown editors. VI is a live editor, presenting the document in a WYSIWYG format. It does a decent job, but where VI excels is tools specific for Wikipedia, such as the cite feature. It’s rare for me to have to use the source view anymore, which is a testament to how well VI works for me.

Vig, what's the usage rate of Visual Editor these days?

t

[Vigilant]

I’ve been using VI for a few years now. At its core it’s a markdown editor, and it compares fairly well to other markdown editors. VI is a live editor, presenting the document in a WYSIWYG format. It does a decent job, but where VI excels is tools specific for Wikipedia, such as the cite feature. It’s rare for me to have to use the source view anymore, which is a testament to how well VI works for me.

Vig, what's the usage rate of Visual Editor these days?

t

68/1000 = 6.8% : last 1000 human(not bot) page edits and creations.

It's going up, but not very fast and not among the experienced.

[Osborne]

I’ve been using VE for a few years now. At its core it’s a wikitext editor (mediawiki syntax), and it compares fairly well to other markdown editors. VE is a live editor, presenting the document in a WYSIWYG format. It does a decent job, but where VE excels is tools specific for Wikipedia, such as the cite feature. It’s rare for me to have to use the source view anymore, which is a testament to how well VE works for me.

FTFY: the bold parts. It's great to hear that there are people satisfied with VE. Sometimes I feel like its shortcomings are over-emphasised. I also try to use VE whenever possible instead of the source editor which I hate.

A bit of a correction to your comment:
VE is a wikitext editor, not a markdown editor. Specifically for mediawiki's format (other wikis use cleaner syntax).
Markdown is a cleaner, well thought-out syntax. Mediawiki's is an ad-hoc (patched together) syntax with inconsistencies that trip up editors and developers alike.
Markdown has many parsers. The only usable third-party parser for mediawiki is called "Parser from hell". Literally.
There are many visual markdown editors, but only one visual mediawiki editor afaik.

VE is better than source editing in some cases. The citation tool is one such case, which sadly is not integrated with the source editor, although it could be. If I have to go back to edit the template generated by the citation tool - or any template in particular -, then I finish faster by switching to source editing and I won't mess up the template with the visual template editor which was designed like "My first bootstrap application".

The most common reason for me to switch to source editing is, however, to avoid the loading time measurable in seconds, up to a half minute when wikipedia's praised (by the developers...) 3-layer caching infrastructure - that allegedly (by the lead developer) saved millions of dollars for the donors - manages to produce a response in 2 seconds instead of 100ms.
No other visual editor still in use does this many roundtrips to load. When loading VE first the wiki page is loaded, then VE's application code, then the page again in editable format.
That's the kind of design any random "HTML developer" will create after trying for a long time: it works (somehow...).

Still, I think having VE is better than nothing and I don't think it deserves the knee-jerk rejection that's the response of some enwiki "social influencers" who call themselves "the community". It's a contemptible design architecturally and in terms of user experience, but it's usable in some cases, making wiki editing a bit more accessible to people who have lives besides wiki editing.
Using VE is comparable to using Internet Explorer or Windows 95, 98, Vista back in the day. It sucked, but we used it and we were happy to be out of the DOS era.

[Vigilant]

For all of the reasons it was proposed, funded and developed, the Visual Editor is still a Huge Failure.


The entire saga is a cautionary tale against letting weak engineers with delusions of grandeur and near fatal Dunning-Kruger set the development agenda.

[Osborne]

For all of the reasons it was proposed, funded and developed, the Visual Editor is still a Huge Failure.

From an engineering standpoint it is. A testimony to the WMF's competence.

The entire saga is a cautionary tale against letting weak engineers with delusions of grandeur and near fatal Dunning-Kruger set the development agenda.

Unfortunately, it seems there's no other way. There were professional developers and team leads, who actually added something lasting that fundamentally improved the "editing experience". They were capable of getting another job, so they fled this toxic cauldron for greener pastures. Most notably Trevor Bolliger, who laid the foundation for the partial blocks (that has been implemented now) and the user reporting system (which is of course delayed).
Many of those who stay, do so because this is their only chance and here they can act like they know what they are doing, not because they create anything worthy of mention. I have never seen as much technical nonsense made up by developers as some wmf developers produce. Unfortunately, they managed to become team leaders in this company. That explains the appalling state of the software projects.

Anyway, when dining in the free soup kitchen, accept what is given. This is what's available and unless the community can give feedback to the wmf of which developers' work is beneficial, it will remain the same. Besides the bottlenecks choking progress, there are diligent, hard-working developers too in the wmf. In this and the last year the communication with the community improved, the projects are more agreeable and clearly improve the status quo. Not by much, but every step counts. I think that's worth mentioning, to give a neutral critique of wmf development.

[Poetlister]

I check the last 100 edits every so often and the proportion using the VE varies a lot. One editor doing a string of edits with it obviously distorts the total. I've seen figures recently varying from 53 to 368 per thousand. On average, it's rather under 10%. It's hard to say whether more experienced editors use it less. However, if newbies are using it more and find it easier, then it's fulfilling its function to some extent.

Has anyone used it to produce a table or format complicated maths?

[Osborne]

Has anyone used it to produce a table or format complicated maths?

I know about a developer who uses it specifically for tables, nothing else, so that might be one feature that came out right.

[Death To Wikipedia]

I have never seen as much technical nonsense made up by developers as some wmf developers produce. Unfortunately, they managed to become team leaders in this company.

Have you seen an WMF strategy document lately? If you can't speak corporate nonsense, you clearly aren't getting any kind of promotion in that place. Are you even sure the nonsense you're reading is even coming from the developers? I doubt there are enough coders even willing to work at that place, to ensure their managers are also coders.

I have enormous sympathy for the developers. It was obvious from the outset that a task like this would stand or fall on the ability of the community to a) actually accept they needed a simpler editor, b) work with developers to come up with a specification, and c) let them know in advance about all the hacks they'd done to wikicode, that no developer who wasn't also a wiki-nerd fuck would have had any reason to suspect existed, so they could be factored into the new code.

It also obviously can't be assumed that a low usage rate is because it doesn't work. It could equally be the case that most Wikipedia editors, even now, are doing their editing on desktops, if not all the time, then enough for it not to be worth their whole to learn to use an alternative editor that, because of all the junk it eventually needed to work, isn't all that usable on a small screen. I also suspect the business case massively underestimated how easy it is to edit wikicode even on a small screen, if you're the sort of gimp who knows his [] from his {}.

Lastly, I note with some amusement, that even after all this time, the mobile view doesn't have a link to the talk page of an article, and only a very obscure link to the edit history. This seems an obvious barrier to anyone really even wanting to switch to VE, or anyone sticking with it if they start to use it as a novice. Not sure exactly who is responsible for that, but it seems like developers are the least likely to be the ones to blame.

[Poetlister]

I have never seen as much technical nonsense made up by developers as some wmf developers produce. Unfortunately, they managed to become team leaders in this company.

Have you seen an WMF strategy document lately? If you can't speak corporate nonsense, you clearly aren't getting any kind of promotion in that place. Are you even sure the nonsense you're reading is even coming from the developers? I doubt there are enough coders even willing to work at that place, to ensure their managers are also coders.

I think that the developer manager is also a coder. That may be a bad thing. If he's one of the better coders (and I have no idea whether he is), he's being distracted by management tasks from doing coding. If he's a rubbish coder, he is dispiriting for the staff (what's he doing managing me when he can't do my job properly?) and may find it hard to tell if they're doing their job well.

[Vigilant]

I have enormous sympathy for the developers. It was obvious from the outset that a task like this would stand or fall on the ability of the community to a) actually accept they needed a simpler editor, b) work with developers to come up with a specification, and c) let them know in advance about all the hacks they'd done to wikicode, that no developer who wasn't also a wiki-nerd fuck would have had any reason to suspect existed, so they could be factored into the new code.

You're talking out your ass here.
This was another of the WMF projects that were mandated internally by the dipshits at the WMF and run entirely by the engineering department with zero consultation with the community. In fact, the WMF engineering team was regularly at odds with their customers, to the point of open rebellion.

FFS, it's all in this thread to begin with.
Read the fucking thread you lazy turd so you don't embarrass yourself so often.

It also obviously can't be assumed that a low usage rate is because it doesn't work. It could equally be the case that most Wikipedia editors, even now, are doing their editing on desktops, if not all the time, then enough for it not to be worth their whole to learn to use an alternative editor that, because of all the junk it eventually needed to work, isn't all that usable on a small screen. I also suspect the business case massively underestimated how easy it is to edit wikicode even on a small screen, if you're the sort of gimp who knows his [] from his {}.

The low usage rate is because the WMF released it in pre-alpha and it broke all the time and broke the wiki content all the time and the brand of the Visual Editor was forever fucked.

Why don't you head back to sucks where you'll stand out less as a complete fucking moron.

It must really suck to be you.

[Death To Wikipedia]

I have enormous sympathy for the developers. It was obvious from the outset that a task like this would stand or fall on the ability of the community to a) actually accept they needed a simpler editor, b) work with developers to come up with a specification, and c) let them know in advance about all the hacks they'd done to wikicode, that no developer who wasn't also a wiki-nerd fuck would have had any reason to suspect existed, so they could be factored into the new code.

You're talking out your ass here.
This was another of the WMF projects that were mandated internally by the dipshits at the WMF and run entirely by the engineering department with zero consultation with the community. In fact, the WMF engineering team was regularly at odds with their customers, to the point of open rebellion.

FFS, it's all in this thread to begin with.
Read the fucking thread you lazy turd so you don't embarrass yourself so often.

It also obviously can't be assumed that a low usage rate is because it doesn't work. It could equally be the case that most Wikipedia editors, even now, are doing their editing on desktops, if not all the time, then enough for it not to be worth their whole to learn to use an alternative editor that, because of all the junk it eventually needed to work, isn't all that usable on a small screen. I also suspect the business case massively underestimated how easy it is to edit wikicode even on a small screen, if you're the sort of gimp who knows his [] from his {}.

The low usage rate is because the WMF released it in pre-alpha and it broke all the time and broke the wiki content all the time and the brand of the Visual Editor was forever fucked.

Why don't you head back to sucks where you'll stand out less as a complete fucking moron.

It must really suck to be you.

Whatever dude. As anyone who was there at the time knows, no consultation is required to change code they are 100% responsible for writing and maintaining, and the alpha release clearly worked on the un-community-fucked version of mediawiki, as you would expect. The design, implementation and testing would would have gone smoother had the community accepted the basic premise that no, they couldn't just keep their piece of shit wikitext interface and pretend like they aren't techno-geek-freaks, because keeping Wikipedia as a closed shop for the sole enjoyment of techno-geek-freaks, was clearly harming the product, namely low participation and systemic bias. That harm still exists, which is unsurprising, because the project was a failure, because in the end, the community never did accept this basic premise of the project, never did accept the Foundation is solely response for fundamental re-engineering projects if they are to ever be finished, much less on time and in budget, and frankly never really saw any problem with asking professional developers to workaround their myriad of conflicting hacks and feature requests and bug fixes. Go figure. All this is obvious to anyone who can read, assuming they weren't following along at the time. So what's your excuse? Did the project touch a raw nerve with you or something? Interfere with your hobby, maybe? Strike a little too hard at your sense of self, even?

[Midsize Jake]

...no consultation is required to change code they are 100% responsible for writing and maintaining, and the alpha release clearly worked on the un-community-fucked version of mediawiki, as you would expect.

Your definition of the word "worked" is obviously not the one the rest of us are using. And no, we wouldn't expect that, at least not from them.

Just to be clear though, are you trying to tell us that the Visual Editor would have worked better, or simply just worked, if they had taken away the option of using the Wikitext "interface" at the outset? I mean, sure, it would have been great if they had done exactly that, because all the users would have left, Wikipedia would have essentially folded, and we could all be doing something else right now. If only... However, I don't see how you can come to that conclusion based on the facts.

[Moral Hazard]

the last year the communication with the community improved

Fewer autistic persons with bipolar disorder provide customer support, and instead the WMF hired a professional?

[Death To Wikipedia]

...no consultation is required to change code they are 100% responsible for writing and maintaining, and the alpha release clearly worked on the un-community-fucked version of mediawiki, as you would expect.

Your definition of the word "worked" is obviously not the one the rest of us are using. And no, we wouldn't expect that, at least not from them.

Just to be clear though, are you trying to tell us that the Visual Editor would have worked better, or simply just worked, if they had taken away the option of using the Wikitext "interface" at the outset? I mean, sure, it would have been great if they had done exactly that, because all the users would have left, Wikipedia would have essentially folded, and we could all be doing something else right now. If only... However, I don't see how you can come to that conclusion based on the facts.

You do get that the VE doesn't replace the wikitext at all, right? It edits it. The shite underneath is all still there, and whether wikigimps can still hack at it or not, is entirely a matter of configuration. Thus, "working" is measured on both its ability to edit, and also persuading people who aren't wikigimps to use it, perhaps even to persuade wikigimps to to dispense with hacking wikicode at all, or most of the time. The former is 100% down to coding, the latter, not so much.

[Midsize Jake]

You do get that the VE doesn't replace the wikitext at all, right? It edits it. The shite underneath is all still there, and whether wikigimps can still hack at it or not, is entirely a matter of configuration. Thus, "working" is measured on both its ability to edit, and also persuading people who aren't wikigimps to use it, perhaps even to persuade wikigimps to to dispense with hacking wikicode at all, or most of the time. The former is 100% down to coding, the latter, not so much.

I do get that, thanks. I'm just saying that for lots of other folks, "working" also involves getting the converted/rendered results to look very, very close to what they see in the VE edit pane, without a lot of confusing error messages, and without extremely long wait times in order to see those results. Also, not crashing the browser is a nice-to-have.

[Death To Wikipedia]

You do get that the VE doesn't replace the wikitext at all, right? It edits it. The shite underneath is all still there, and whether wikigimps can still hack at it or not, is entirely a matter of configuration. Thus, "working" is measured on both its ability to edit, and also persuading people who aren't wikigimps to use it, perhaps even to persuade wikigimps to to dispense with hacking wikicode at all, or most of the time. The former is 100% down to coding, the latter, not so much.

I do get that, thanks. I'm just saying that for lots of other folks, "working" also involves getting the converted/rendered results to look very, very close to what they see in the VE edit pane, without a lot of confusing error messages, and without extremely long wait times in order to see those results. Also, not crashing the browser is a nice-to-have.

Well your definition is the same as mine then.

[Randy from Boise]

Why don't you head back to sucks where you'll stand out less as a complete fucking moron.

It must really suck to be you.

Whatever dude. As anyone who was there at the time knows, no consultation is required to change code they are 100% responsible for writing and maintaining, and the alpha release clearly worked on the un-community-fucked version of mediawiki, as you would expect. The design, implementation and testing would would have gone smoother had the community accepted the basic premise that no, they couldn't just keep their piece of shit wikitext interface and pretend like they aren't techno-geek-freaks, because keeping Wikipedia as a closed shop for the sole enjoyment of techno-geek-freaks, was clearly harming the product, namely low participation and systemic bias. That harm still exists, which is unsurprising, because the project was a failure, because in the end, the community never did accept this basic premise of the project, never did accept the Foundation is solely response for fundamental re-engineering projects if they are to ever be finished, much less on time and in budget, and frankly never really saw any problem with asking professional developers to workaround their myriad of conflicting hacks and feature requests and bug fixes. Go figure. All this is obvious to anyone who can read, assuming they weren't following along at the time. So what's your excuse? Did the project touch a raw nerve with you or something? Interfere with your hobby, maybe? Strike a little too hard at your sense of self, even?

Crow long has operated from the premise that the most anti-social thing he can do is defend WMF at all times in all circumstances.

Vig's hobby is baiting Crow.

happy to help,

RfB

[Vigilant]

Crow long has operated from the premise that the most anti-social thing he can do is defend WMF at all times in all circumstances.

Vig's hobby is baiting Crow.

happy to help,

RfB

Honestly,

That wasn't it this time.
My disgust with his stupidity just boiled over.
There seems to be no topic that he's ill informed on that he won't pontificate about.

Crow has become knockoff of Abd.

[Giraffe Stapler]

You do get that the VE doesn't replace the wikitext at all, right? It edits it. The shite underneath is all still there, and whether wikigimps can still hack at it or not, is entirely a matter of configuration. Thus, "working" is measured on both its ability to edit, and also persuading people who aren't wikigimps to use it, perhaps even to persuade wikigimps to to dispense with hacking wikicode at all, or most of the time. The former is 100% down to coding, the latter, not so much.

Just curious - do you use the Visual Editor (tm) or do you use the "wikicode" editor? I ask because you have been editing Wikipedia for a long time and you are surely familiar with the markup by now. If you use the VE, why?

[Randy from Boise]

You do get that the VE doesn't replace the wikitext at all, right? It edits it. The shite underneath is all still there, and whether wikigimps can still hack at it or not, is entirely a matter of configuration. Thus, "working" is measured on both its ability to edit, and also persuading people who aren't wikigimps to use it, perhaps even to persuade wikigimps to to dispense with hacking wikicode at all, or most of the time. The former is 100% down to coding, the latter, not so much.

Just curious - do you use the Visual Editor (tm) or do you use the "wikicode" editor? I ask because you have been editing Wikipedia for a long time and you are surely familiar with the markup by now. If you use the VE, why?

I don't think Mr. Crow is a longtime WP editor. He had a short and unhappy career there, which was revelatory to him and had an effect not unlike that upon Greg Kohs when he was unjustly banned off by the sanctimonious Jimmy Wales.

Don't bite the newbies, Wikipedians. Some of them will stick around and bite you back.

Oooo, I'm gonna quote myself on that.

RfB

[Poetlister]

I don't think Mr. Crow is a longtime WP editor. He had a short and unhappy career there, which was revelatory to him and had an effect not unlike that upon Greg Kohs when he was unjustly banned off by the sanctimonious Jimmy Wales.

Greg had some reason to regard his ban as unjust, and has had great fun trying to get his own back. Can Mr Crow tell a similar story?

[Randy from Boise]

I don't think Mr. Crow is a longtime WP editor. He had a short and unhappy career there, which was revelatory to him and had an effect not unlike that upon Greg Kohs when he was unjustly banned off by the sanctimonious Jimmy Wales.

Greg had some reason to regard his ban as unjust, and has had great fun trying to get his own back. Can Mr Crow tell a similar story?

He's got a story, but he doesn't link accounts — even the 4 (or 5?)† Wikipediocracy accounts he has held over the last few years. Preserving plausible deniability, or something like that...

Let's just say he came and edited in good faith and that Drmies and others treated him like shit and it really pissed him off.


RfB



——————
† - I count 4: Mighty Morphin' Army Ranger, Slacker, Crow's Nest, Death to WP. Vig thinks there was a fifth.

[rhindle]

I don't think Mr. Crow is a longtime WP editor. He had a short and unhappy career there, which was revelatory to him and had an effect not unlike that upon Greg Kohs when he was unjustly banned off by the sanctimonious Jimmy Wales.

Greg had some reason to regard his ban as unjust, and has had great fun trying to get his own back. Can Mr Crow tell a similar story?

He's got a story, but he doesn't link accounts — even the 4 (or 5?)† Wikipediocracy accounts he has held over the last few years. Preserving plausible deniability, or something like that...

Let's just say he came and edited in good faith and that Drmies and others treated him like shit and it really pissed him off.


RfB



——————
† - I count 4: Mighty Morphin' Army Ranger, Slacker, Crow's Nest, Death to WP. Vig thinks there was a fifth.

So you don't think MickMacNee (T-C-L) was him as Katie suggested?

[Randy from Boise]

I don't think Mr. Crow is a longtime WP editor. He had a short and unhappy career there, which was revelatory to him and had an effect not unlike that upon Greg Kohs when he was unjustly banned off by the sanctimonious Jimmy Wales.

Greg had some reason to regard his ban as unjust, and has had great fun trying to get his own back. Can Mr Crow tell a similar story?

He's got a story, but he doesn't link accounts — even the 4 (or 5?)† Wikipediocracy accounts he has held over the last few years. Preserving plausible deniability, or something like that...

Let's just say he came and edited in good faith and that Drmies and others treated him like shit and it really pissed him off.


RfB



——————
† - I count 4: Mighty Morphin' Army Ranger, Slacker, Crow's Nest, Death to WP. Vig thinks there was a fifth.

So you don't think MickMacNee (T-C-L) was him as Katie suggested?

I missed that suggestion. That's an old name. No, I doubt that's him.

t

[Moral Hazard]

CrowsNest /Death to Wikipedia / MMAR should consider whether he really wants to continue pissing off the regulars here.

I would not want to make enemies of some of our more talented members.

[Randy from Boise]

CrowsNest /Death to Wikipedia / MMAR should consider whether he really wants to continue pissing off the regulars here.

I would not want to make enemies of some of our more talented members.

Then again, if Crow was awakened one morning by the pecking of a rubber mask on the front door of his flat and opened it to find a man in a gi who smelled like dirty old roses, he'd instantly know who it was...

RfB

[Poetlister]

CrowsNest /Death to Wikipedia / MMAR should consider whether he really wants to continue pissing off the regulars here.

I would not want to make enemies of some of our more talented members.

From his gleeful tone, I expect that he's enjoying himself do much that he's heedless of the consequences. It's a bit like an addiction.

[Vigilant]

Such hubris.

[Bezdomni]

Such hubris.

That is pretty rich. Didn't the WMF recently pull a Viktor Orbán type emergency powers move to keep Maria & DocJames on as trustees despite their involvement in the FramGate & the Medicine ArbCom cases respectively? (I thought this was based on the problem of not being able to meet, having half-time employees...) Cf. Bylaws to be amended

What was that annual travel budget again? And what does this have to do with VE?

Fun that Captain Maar hasn't banned Kumioko from her Twitter...

[Vigilant]

Such hubris.

That is pretty rich. Didn't the WMF recently pull a Viktor Orbán type emergency powers move to keep Maria & DocJames on as trustees despite their involvement in the FramGate & the Medicine ArbCom cases respectively? (I thought this was based on the problem of not being able to meet, having half-time employees...) Cf. Bylaws to be amended

What was that annual travel budget again? And what does this have to do with VE?

Fun that Captain Maar hasn't banned Kumioko from her Twitter...

It's a bit loose, but the VE highlights the acme of engineering failure and yet the WMF head has the unmitigated gall to attempt to preach to silicon valley companies that have built far more and far better products than anything the WMF engineering swamps have ever conceived of.

And I didn't feel like making a new thread...but I will now.

[Poetlister]

Didn't the WMF recently pull a Viktor Orbán type emergency powers move to keep Maria & DocJames on as trustees despite their involvement in the FramGate & the Medicine ArbCom cases respectively? (I thought this was based on the problem of not being able to meet, having half-time employees...) Cf. Bylaws to be amended

Surely the WMF of all organisations could arrange online elections. They seem to work for ENWP Arbcom. And of course meetings can easily be held by Skype or similar software, though the WMF prefers to use only crowdsourced products.

[Osborne]

Surely the WMF of all organisations could arrange online elections. They seem to work for ENWP Arbcom.

It worked well this year, but what about recent years with last year's do-nothing ArbCom reaching a new record of ineffectiveness?

[Vigilant]

lol

WMF employee lies about shit some more.

The Visual Edsel is a dream!

If I look at where things are now versus where things were
when I first started editing, it's amazing the amount of progress the
editing experience has made. Even some of the projects with the bumpiest
entries into the movement have been profoundly impactful. Some might raise
an eyebrow in my use of it as an example, but I am astounded by how much
easier the visual editor makes writing articles. Especially with the tools
that are built into like Citoid. It is a dream to use.

Pray tell, why does it still have a 4.2% usage rate on en.wp then?

The rest of his post is filled with other, equally ridiculous, lies about 'products' that the WeMakeFailures engineering team has bungled.

[Osborne]

The Visual Edsel is a dream!

Joseph Seddon - Senior Community Relations Specialist - has a very interesting resume.
First real job: director of Wikimedia UK 2009-2011. Quite a start...
Then became "Production Coodinator" (sic!) at WMF and "Created and tested fundraising banners, landing pages, and donation pages".
2 short gigs locally, then back to WMUK as Trustee, then "Systems Officer" in Government Administration then back at WMF fundraising. Also took a stab at software engineering for 5 months, but quickly returned to being a "Specialist".

This sounds like a person who always coordinated other people, but didn't stay for long and probably never completed anything by themselves. By his standards, he might be honestly thinking "the Visual Edsel is a dream".

Seems like a fun guy though. Note the shirt:

67892654_10162460134280727_4306125105638932480_o.jpg

[Osborne]

At the same table with the former product manager of Visual Dream. Recognize?

[Randy from Boise]

Facts are the foundation of clear though.

Scientologist slogan?

RfB

[Poetlister]

It might be interesting to find out whether the proportion of edits using VE differs much between article and other pages. Is there an easy way to do that? Presumably, the VE is mainly used by newbies, who are less likely to be editing non-Mainspace stuff, so the proportion of VE edits should be higher for articles.

[No Ledge]

What namespaces can VisualEditor visually edit? Last I knew, it couldn't edit talk pages; FLOW was their solution for that.