The Visual Editor is a huge failure

[Vigilant]

That's gonna leave a mark.

I was going to test this and detail the individual shortcomings, but really, what's the point? Either you come here and ask for "what would you like to see and get in a 'special character insertion tool'", or you deliver us an at least half-finished but well-thought out product. Now, you present us with something that may not produce instant errors, but which has zero functionality for 99% of the wanted edits. The number of special characters, even for editors at enwiki, is minimal to the extreme; capital letters are missing; you can't add more than one character at a time; and so on.

Go back to the drawingboard, get some user expectations first (it looks as if you don't know what this tool is really supposed to do), look at the "special characters" insertion tool in normal editing mode, but don't bother use with this nonsense. You are only making a fool of yourselves, and aren't winning any souls for VE, while the actual practical benefit of these responses to you will be minimal. Really, you have developers, you always claim to have a QA team, you have enough people willing to give feedback if you simply ask "what would you like to get in this tool", you have an existing example, and still you dare to come here with this? Please, find the one who asked you to get input on this tool, and (assuming it is a paid WMF employee) fire him or her for gross incompetence. How many times will you (WMF) make the same errors before anything changes there? Just leave us alone and do your job. Fram (talk) 12:44, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Entirely agreed with Fram. It clearly shows that nothing has been learned by the 6 months+ fiasco of VE deployment. The new widget seems so badly thought over, and tries to reinvent the wheel where there's already a working, useable gadget for the wikitext editor. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 13:04, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

If people ever talked about my code like this, I would die of fucking shame.

[Vigilant]

Entirely agreed with Fram. It clearly shows that nothing has been learned by the 6 months+ fiasco of VE deployment. The new widget seems so badly thought over, and tries to reinvent the wheel where there's already a working, useable gadget for the wikitext editor. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 13:04, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

I disagree with your claim that there are "enough people willing to give feedback if you simply ask". I asked for feedback on this character inserter over a month ago in the en.wp newsletter, and it was also mentioned in Tech/News last month (along with instrutions on how to change its contents to be more useful to the local project). Between them, that request reached more than a thousand users. I received exactly zero responses. Furthermore, without an existing example (i.e., what we have now), most non-technical users have trouble giving feedback. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:42, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

What that might suggest to you, and certainly suggests to me, is that everyone is getting bored with this VE crock. Eric Corbett 00:26, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Stomp your foot some more, Sherry Snyder.
Those people won't do my job for me. Can you believe that?!

[Vigilant]

For some wikis (although perhaps not any of the Wikipedias or Wiktionaries), the need for special characters may be small enough that no selector is needed. The devs are, however, aware of the need for a selector on the Wikipedias. In keeping with their agile programming philosophy, they are requesting feedback as early as possible, not when the product is nearly finished. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:20, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Uh huh. Here we are years later with a badly broken project that nobody uses and you're going to try to point to early customer engagement?!?!?!

Q: How can you tell when a WMF 'Community Liaison' is lying?

A: They're typing.

[HRIP7]

For some wikis (although perhaps not any of the Wikipedias or Wiktionaries), the need for special characters may be small enough that no selector is needed. The devs are, however, aware of the need for a selector on the Wikipedias. In keeping with their agile programming philosophy, they are requesting feedback as early as possible, not when the product is nearly finished. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:20, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Uh huh. Here we are years later with a badly broken project that nobody uses and you're going to try to point to early customer engagement?!?!?!

Q: How can you tell when a WMF 'Community Liaison' is lying?

A: They're typing.

The attempts to stick to the party line are getting slightly pathetic now. I'm almost beginning to feel sorry for them. Getting a WMF job must have seemed like a good idea at one time, but it can't be much fun right now.

[EricBarbour]

The attempts to stick to the party line are getting slightly pathetic now. I'm almost beginning to feel sorry for them. Getting a WMF job must have seemed like a good idea at one time, but it can't be much fun right now.

Never, ever feel sorry for the insiders. They built this "community". It was not made by some nebulous third party and forced upon them. They wanted to have this semi-feudal system of nongovernance with a massive and incompetent bureaucracy, and now they're trying to "govern" it. They will have no choice but to learn that making a knowledge project, by backstabbing and lying and covering up, simply doesn't work. They have to learn by crashing it into the ground.

[mac]

For some wikis (although perhaps not any of the Wikipedias or Wiktionaries), the need for special characters may be small enough that no selector is needed. The devs are, however, aware of the need for a selector on the Wikipedias. In keeping with their agile programming philosophy, they are requesting feedback as early as possible, not when the product is nearly finished. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:20, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Uh huh. Here we are years later with a badly broken project that nobody uses and you're going to try to point to early customer engagement?!?!?!

Q: How can you tell when a WMF 'Community Liaison' is lying?

A: They're typing.

When is the cutoff for feedback? Also, notice her use of "they" and "their" versus "us" and "our". Some division at the Foundation?

[Cedric]

Never, ever feel sorry for the insiders. They built this "community". It was not made by some nebulous third party and forced upon them. They wanted to have this semi-feudal system of nongovernance with a massive and incompetent bureaucracy, and now they're trying to "govern" it. They will have no choice but to learn that making a knowledge project, by backstabbing and lying and covering up, simply doesn't work. They have to learn by crashing it into the ground.

Well, some of them will learn from that experience. Others will be bitter-enders who will always find a way to blame Wikipedia's demise on someone other than themselves or their closest allies.

[Vigilant]

Ow

In keeping with their agile programming philosophy? They have failed before applying the first principle: Customer satisfaction by rapid delivery of useful software You need to follow all of it, not just delivery of software. Your customers are not satisfied, and the software is not useful (whether "rapid" applies can be debated). Like someone wiser than me said: "Would you like to click on open the [...] character set [...] every time you wanted to add a letter? I wouldn't." Agile programming isn't presenting customers a block of steel and saying "this is your car, how can we improve it?" Fram (talk) 09:56, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Got a point there.

So, @Whatamidoing (WMF):, let's see if I get this straight. You come here to ask for feedback on a tool which is pretty unusable for all practical purposes. You then claimed that you had asked for feedback in the newsletter, but didn't receive any feedback. In reality, you did not ask for any feedback there, you just made an announcement. You also claimed that you did this "along with instrutions on how to change its contents to be more useful to the local project", pointing to the character set on Translatewiki, but it turns out that we can't (not at all for the English one, and not with any result for the other languages). Could you please provide somewhat correct information instead of this? Fram (talk) 09:00, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

So, again; I created MediaWiki:Visualeditor-specialcharinspector-characterlist-insert (which you indicated needed to be used) and MediaWiki:Visualeditor-specialcharinspector-characterlist-insert/en (which I thought might be better) (with a minor difference between the two), but neither of those are visible here anyway apparently. Any indication how soon changes made to these pages should have any result? Oh right, "immediate" was what you said.

You know what, please, pretty pretty please, just shut up for a moment, test the things you are telling us, and come back with diffs of actual results, and instructions that actually work. If not, then just stop after the first ten words of the previous sentence. Fram (talk) 09:20, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Fram, I realise you're pissed off, but please tone it down a bit. No-one's going to answer you talking like that even if you're 100% factually correct - David Gerard (talk) 12:44, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

So what? The WMF people are just talking shit to defend the shit they produce. Their strategy seems to be "let's get rid of all opoosition by exhausting their patience by all means possible, including obfuscation, "misunderstanding", displays of stupidity, frequent memory loss, and worse", so it seems only a friendly gesture to show them that their strategy is actually working. It's bad enough that they produce worthless junk, but the ways in which they are obstructing or ignoring useful and pertinent feedback is staggering. Not just this section, the one above about references makes for enlightening reading as well. Not getting an answer is preferable to the infuriating non-answers the WMF has produced. If people use the money generated by the encyclopedia (ie by us) to develop these things or e.g. to have a job that is described as 'to support these changes by "ensuring that our community is represented in the decision-making process and that our planned software adequately reflects user needs".', then we may expect better service and results. As far as I can judge from the results we get, and from the interactions I have had or seen, none of the WMF people involved in VE (with the possible exception of Elitre) or higher up in the WMF has done their job adequately. Some seem to be incompetent, some seem to have done their best to do the opposite of their job description. MediaWiki doesn't seem to have a complaints department. So they receive the backlash here.
If they give correct, honest information, they get polite replies and questions. If they can't be bothered to check their replies or to think before they post, they don't. It's quite simple. Fram (talk) 13:28, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Can't argue with any of that...except David Gerard, who makes, as usual, a feeble attempt to ass lick the WMF.

[Jim]

You know, it's funny, and sad.

Rule one when it comes to standing in the corner, pursing your lips and saying "you're just mean, we're doing our best", when everyone can see you're doing crap, is "don't do that."

People have seen your best. It isn't good enough.

There's a path of acceptance that lets you get out of that hole - but you first need to accept that's where you are. You then need to eat shit.

Those things aren't going to happen here.

[Kelly Martin]

The Visual Editor project is, of course, doomed to indefinite failure, for two very different reasons.

First is the fact that MediaWiki markup is absolutely horrific. The language is insanely badly specified. There are several constructs that prevent the use of any of the "standard" parser types (LL, LALR, SLR, GLR), which means any parser for MediaWiki has to significantly handcrafted, which means longer development time, especially since the "reference parser" is an abomination cobbled together out of PHP, regular expressions, and XML that cannot be readily ported to any other language or platform. On top of that, the parsing of templates requires a round trip to the database engine. Even identifying a construct as a template requires a round trip to the database. These all represent poor design decisions made over a decade of development by people who didn't know what they were doing, decisions that were known as early as 2005 as being "bad" but which the MediaWiki developers have been steadfastly unwilling to revisit because it would involve moving cheeses. This means that the visual editor, which has to render MediaWiki markup for display and do so exactly the same as MediaWiki's own engine, has to be extremely complicated and maintained in lockstep with MediaWiki's rendering engine. It also means that they could not leverage any of the gazillion preexisting in-browser rich text editors. The obvious solution to this problem is for the MediaWiki engine to rerender an article's MediaWiki markup into an XML (or YAML, whatever) markup that is not insane and let the editor work with that. On save, the MediaWiki engine then renders the XML back into MediaWiki markup for storage. Alternatively, and probably more sensibly, would be to store the XML markup in the database and only use MediaWiki markup when an editor specifically requests that. It's fairly clear from reading the bug reports and complaints that many of the difficulties they're having developing this product stem from the complexity of working with MediaWiki markup. For MediaWiki to still be using MediaWiki markup as the primary internal representation of article content at this point is simply bad software engineering, and much of the failure of the visual editor can be attributed to this mistake.

The second problem, however, deals with the stark incompetence of the development managers at Wikimedia. This can be seen simply by the fact that this product has been in development for eight years without meaningful progress. There have been apps that have legitimately taken ten years to develop, but this is not one of them. Browser-based rich text editors are old hat. I remember using one with a CMS system back in 2002 that was capable of as much complexity as MediaWiki's current visual editor is now, but with fewer bugs. And they called their product a "beta", and they'd only been developing it for about nine months. While the markup issues I addressed above are a serious thorn in the side, this is, nonetheless, a project that should have taken a reasonable team of developers a year to work through. The product after the first year should at least work for 80% of the use cases, and for 96% of the use cases after two years. the fact that the developers have neither found a solution (such as the one I mentioned above, which I came up with in 2006 and which could probably be implemented by a reasonably talented coder in under a month) nor simply burrowed their way through the problem in the eight years they've been working on it tells me that their developers are either incompetent or lazy. And for them to have had so many incompetent or lazy developers for so long tells me that their managers are also incompetent. My guess is that they don't have meaningful use cases or even a meaningful development strategy. Part of the problem is that they're relying on "agile development", which only works when very carefully managed by people who really know what they're doing. But I don't think anybody at Wikimedia knows what they're doing. This is cargo cult software development by people whose talent is schmoozing their way into positions of power. They're simply not willing (or likely even able) to fire a developer who isn't making progress, and so their developers just code around in circles, writing scads of code that passes pointless unit tests (thus "making progress") but makes no progress on use cases.

So fundamentally, the fingers point back at Brion Vibber (and maybe Tim Starling or Magnus Manske) for bad decisions related to MediaWiki markup and MediaWiki architecture in general, and to Erik Moeller, for gross incompetence in managing the development team. But these people are sainted demigods of the Wikimedia universe that no one may criticize from within, and thus nothing will ever change. The visual editor will never happen, unless someone from outside Wikimedia implements it (and even then it will likely not be used because Wikimedia has a serious case of NIH as well).

[TungstenCarbide]

... So fundamentally, the fingers point back at Brion Vibber (and maybe Tim Starling or Magnus Manske) for bad decisions related to MediaWiki markup and MediaWiki architecture in general, and to Erik Moeller, for gross incompetence in managing the development team. But these people are sainted demigods of the Wikimedia universe that no one may criticize from within, and thus nothing will ever change. The visual editor will never happen, unless someone from outside Wikimedia implements it (and even then it will likely not be used because Wikimedia has a serious case of NIH as well).

Wikipedia is huge and rich and gets hundreds of millions of page views per day. It's got an army of programmers. They've got all the money they need to do a professional job. This wasn't true ten years ago. Vibber and Starling started out unpaid, and Starling wasn't even a programmer. It's a little unfair to hold them to today's standards for work they did a decade ago when they were volunteering and running the site on a shoestring.

I've been wondering where Vibber and Starling have been on VE. Not much of a public face on the WMF's most important and potentially fruitful programming project. Who knows, Kelly, they might very well agree with everything you say are hand-tied.

[Kelly Martin]

Wikipedia is huge and rich and gets hundreds of millions of page views per day. It's got an army of programmers. They've got all the money they need to do a professional job. This wasn't true ten years ago. Vibber and Starling started out unpaid, and Starling wasn't even a programmer. It's a little unfair to hold them to today's standards for work they did a decade ago when they were volunteering and running the site on a shoestring.

I've been wondering where Vibber and Starling have been on VE. Not much of a public face on the WMF's most important and potentially fruitful programming project. Who knows, Kelly, they might very well agree with everything you say but have to follow someone else's lead.

To be fair, I don't really blame Brion or Tim for the decisions they made. And in fact Tim is a very talented programmer, and from what I can tell so is Brion. But neither is a great software engineer. The mistake with MediaWiki markup isn't in having done it wrong at first; virtually all programmers "do it wrong" at first (myself included). The mistake there was that when they learned they had done it wrong, they didn't throw out the bad design, but stuck with it and continued to expand on it. Even brilliant programming talent can't completely make up for a flawed design, and fundamentally the problem with MediaWiki is that it has deeply flawed design.

[EricBarbour]

Don't forget, Mr. Vibber is so "beloved", he has his own official Wikimedia holiday.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Brion_Vibber_Day

So too does Tim Starling, Magnus Manske, and (???) Justin Knapp.

[Scott5114]

Out of curiosity, what is so bad about MediaWiki markup? From an editor's standpoint, it does the job well enough. Is it the fact that several of the symbols are overloaded (double brackets being used to create links, insert images, and categorize pages, for instance)?

[dogbiscuit]

Out of curiosity, what is so bad about MediaWiki markup? From an editor's standpoint, it does the job well enough. Is it the fact that several of the symbols are overloaded (double brackets being used to create links, insert images, and categorize pages, for instance)?

From a computing standpoint, the issue is parsing - the ability to decode what is text and what functions are being asked for.

These days, the issue is well understood, based on experience with old computer languages, and the easiest to deal with is something like Pascal which is a one token lookahead language - which means that having come across a token (word or symbol) you only need to look at the next symbol to decode which variant of the grammar you are looking at - and you can then decide whether that symbol is valid or not. For well designed languages, it is relatively trivial to write code to handle it (with a caveat). As you mention, when you start using the same symbol for different uses, you may have to go hunting around to try and match what is with the symbols to work out what to do - often what seems trivial to you, once you've grasped the syntax, can be a complex problem.

The caveat is that with something like MediaWiki, you also want a fail-safe mechanism where if someone makes a mistake in hand-crafting the code, the system still is able to handle the bulk of the content, so it is not like a compiler which can just barf and refuse to continue, the system still needs to store the text, and also allow the malformed text to be presented by the editor so it can be corrected.

So the logical approach to the difficult problem is that you alter the language to be parseable, and you put something in place to allow a conversion.

The obvious solution for VE is for the WMF to unilaterally change the markup design to suit the editor. If done with care and intelligence, then it is no big deal for the people using raw markup, and the alterations knock a few years off the development and maintenance budget.

[TungstenCarbide]

Out of curiosity, what is so bad about MediaWiki markup? ...

Nothing, it does the job and works fine for what it was designed to do. Now, though, more than a decade later, the MediaWiki architecture doesn't lend itself to WYSIWYG browser editing. It's only in hindsight, with changing browsers and technology and expectations that it falls short.

Wikimedia's own developers have been complaining about its architecture as long as I remember - 2003, at least - but periodic overhauls were never an option back then, having been cobbled together by a handful of volunteers and students. It's only the last five years or so that the WMF got rich enough to hire an army of programmers. Major changes to the architecture are complicated by maintaining the legacy article history, which can't even fit on a single HDD.

Be very wary of anyone who, with the benefit of hindsight, faults the early programmers of the site or holds them to wildly inflated standards that didn't exist at the time.

[lilburne]

Hmmm. The app I work on has its antecedents back in the 1980s. At that time it was entirely command driven with a complex language behind it. It also ran on mainframe and mini computers, and there was a time sharing access. Move forward to the mid 1990s and it was running an X GUI and the underlying command language had been rewritten. By the end of the 1990s we had ported to windows.

One suspects that in 2034 the Mediawiki system will be mostly as it is today.

[TungstenCarbide]

Hmmm. The app I work on has its antecedents back in the 1980s. At that time it was entirely command driven with a complex language behind it. It also ran on mainframe and mini computers, and there was a time sharing access. Move forward to the mid 1990s and it was running an X GUI and the underlying command language had been rewritten. By the end of the 1990s we had ported to windows.

One suspects that in 2034 the Mediawiki system will be mostly as it is today.

yup

Any changes to the software must be gradual and reversible. We need to make sure that any changes contribute positively to the community, as ultimately determined by the Wikimedia Foundation, in full consultation with the community consensus.

[Hex]

The obvious solution for VE is for the WMF to unilaterally change the markup design to suit the editor. If done with care and intelligence, then it is no big deal for the people using raw markup, and the alterations knock a few years off the development and maintenance budget.

Back in 2007 I was part of a workshop at that year's WikiSym (T-H-L) where the idea was breached of developing a simplified and predictable standard format for wikitext that would be interoperable across different wiki engines. It ended up producing Creole (markup) (T-H-L). The idea was a good one, but went nowhere, mainly because of the intractability of MediaWiki's developers. A shame.

[Vigilant]

*sigh*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... 2_inserter

I can't be bothered to copy/paste all that.
It's so bad.

[Jim]

*sigh*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... 2_inserter

I can't be bothered to copy/paste all that.
It's so bad.

From that conversation:

VE isn't meant to be a feature-finished product.

uh, ok... that's good cos it's a pile of crap -
however...
I guess one has to ask - why was it, then, made the default editor, Last June-ish, or earlier..., on the "biggest encyclopedia in the world" until the users were forced to fold it till all the corners were sharp and reinsert it back in the part of the WMF where the sun don't shine? Seems a wee bit silly don't you think, Maggie?
Just sayin...

I enjoyed this, though:

If you don't want this to be used to insert galleries, then don't add it to the "insert" menu. Seems rather obvious...

"Obvious"? Now there's a word the VE developers can toy with...
List on a postcard, guys, all the things your crapware should "obviously" do, but doesn't. (big postcards are allowed, and you can use both sides, and multiples)
For shame...

Seems Fram can help them with some answers, though:

And we know the reasoning behind putting useless, flawed, untested or unwanted features in production. We just don't agree with it. Using "brains" and "manual testing" before putting something in production is a basic requirement. It would be nice to see it put into practice for once. Throwing every piece of code you produce to a live environment to see what will stick is not productive, it's destructive. Why is it that you are happy to request feedback on VE, but ignore the most basic pieces of feedback you have got, like "we don't want it", "make it opt-in", "allow wikitext editing", "test things before putting them here", "don't introduce things with even the most basic features missing"?

then:

The insert menu is where it will certainly go.

says Maggie, entirely missing the point that it can't insert anything yet, so putting it there now is beyond confusing.

This thing is "live" guys - you wanted it as default, you were forced at gunpoint to accept it being at best a beta, yet you continually throw in this pre-alpha shit to (fail to) address features which nobody really cares about yet, without addressing any of the things I asked you to write on the postcard list above. You know? The basics. The things it must do to be any use at all, but doesn't... The things you can't move past until they are fixed... Those hard things which your managers should not be allowing you to bypass in order to play with more, less relevant stuff that doesn't work, but which you think would be pretty, or fun, and easier.

And. you. don't see. why. that. is. a. problem.

It's an application on a major website - not a college project to see who can create pretty, non-functional widgets. And you are paid to know the difference. Christ knows why, but you are.

There's a word for that lack of appreciation and vision. Incompetence.

[Vigilant]

I have little to no respect for or trust in @Jdforrester (WMF): left after too many very unpleasant interactions. I don't believe it is possible to talk this out "collegially" with Jdforrester, or with the WMF in general. The discussions with Whatamidoing on this page are also quite representative of the problem (note that she still hasn't answered a very practical and useful question, after providing the wrong answer twice; this isn't the first time such a thing happened). E.g. the endless claims that there is a QA team, despite the fact that new releases fail the most basic QA tests time and again, is one of the things that has convinced me that discussing this with Forrester or believing anything he says about VE is pointless and stupid. Reading the Office hour logs also doesn't give me the impression that I miss anything useful. But feel free to pass along my question to the next office hours. Fram (talk) 15:46, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Hard to disagree with this.

It makes me wonder, "At what point will the VisualEditor be considered such a failure that the WMF will stop funding its development?"

[Vigilant]

Hi, NicoV. I just wanted to let you know that I've spoken about this to Philippe Beaudette (who is the Director of Community Advocacy) and that he's talking to the Product team. I think this needs some prompt attention. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 20:39, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Well, that's huge fucking relief!

[Zoloft]

I've said this before, but someone who knows Fram should invite him to participate here.

[EricBarbour]

I've said this before, but someone who knows Fram should invite him to participate here.

Various people tried to get him to respond, on WR before and on here recently. Hopeless.

[HRIP7]

I've said this before, but someone who knows Fram should invite him to participate here.

Fram's now been threatened with a block by Salix alba (T-C-L).

Fram could probably write a good blog post on all of this ...

[Johnny Au]

I was the first to tell the people at Wikipedia about the inability to view or edit hidden comments using VE.

It is very annoying that VE cannot be viewed or edited. They are extremely important (it often contains editing notes).

[mac]

I was the first to tell the people at Wikipedia about the inability to view or edit hidden comments using VE.

It is very annoying that VE cannot be viewed or edited. They are extremely important (it often contains editing notes).

----

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... IE_Support

According to this page, and also [[Wikipedia:VisualEditor]], IE support (later versions) has been "temporarily" unavailable since July 2013. This is getting to the limit of any reasonable interpretation of the word "temporarily". When I asked about it [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... IE_Support here] in July 2013, I was told that "we're probably talking weeks rather than months". Please can you put '''realistic''' information about timescales on the relevant project pages. It would be better to say "support for IE will not be available in the foreseeable future", if that is the true situation, rather than keep fuelling expectations for something that is never delivered. [[Special:Contributions/86.160.223.11|86.160.223.11]] ([[User talk:86.160.223.11|talk]]) 23:14, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Forrester has already replied to the "gallery inserter", but not to this poor soul. It's hard to not feel sorry for this person.

[Vigilant]

Maggie did, indeed, bring it to my attention, and it occupied the bulk of my attention yesterday.A whole day...wow. I have been in a series of conversations with the Product team, as they try to figure out what to do to resolve the situation. Obviously, things are complicated:Because you guys have no clue what you're doing. changes to live code are delicate, and there's a strong desire to correct it now, rather than taking the easy course of just removing it (that's not to say that removing it won't be the eventual solution: it is one of several being considered, along with some code fixes and some UI elements). I don't mind telling Sounds like a cartoon cowboyyou that my recommendation was to disable the feature until we get some UI changes. I want to impress upon you that when I took it to Product, they took it very seriously.Whoop-dee-fucking-doo! They're obviously distressed that the code isn't working the way that they had hoped, and they didn't intentionally release a feature that wasn't ready into the field. They don't do that sort of thing.They do it all the time, Phillipe, you lying whore. It appears that part of this was caused by something that was already fixed, but not back-ported for some reason.They don't know how to test stuff. It's really simple to figure that part out. They're rectifying that.They're really not.
Unfortunately, some key people are either currently traveling or just returned, so they're still trying to wrap their head around the problem.That can't be easy with that many fatheads in one office. I hope to see some resolution soon, though I hesitate to speculate as to when "soon" is. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 18:16, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Nobody, and I mean nobody, believes a single word you say Phillipe.

You and the WMF dev team are unconvincing in the extreme.
You have lied repeatedly right to the faces of the editors that you claim to be building this "tool" for.

[Vigilant]

This is WMF's idea of a customer facing liaison?!?!

It's true, Fram, that when I am busy elsewhere, I do not post replies here.
I think it's pretty obvious that you are consenting to this: You voluntarily look at the release notes as soon as they're posted. You then voluntarily go to VisualEditor to look at and test anything that is announced as being either new or fixed. You do this despite knowing that the developers are giving people access to very early, very incomplete versions of new tools. You do this despite knowing that they are using agile methods. Nobody's forcing you to do any of this; you do it of his own free will. You therefore consent to being exposed to these very early, very incomplete, frequently buggy features, and you therefore consent to be directly involved in the development of VisualEditor.
As for your support, it should be obvious that VisualEditor is being improved as a result of some of your feedback. This is very direct, very practical support for VisualEditor's development. Opposition is not normally expressed as providing practical assistance. Even angry or rude practical assistance is still practical support.
As for how you could withdraw your support, which David asked above: you could stop reading about VisualEditor every day; you could stop providing any sort of feedback entirely; you could contact the Board to tell them that you believe the developers needed to change their programming philosophy; you could remove VisualEditor from your own prefs and ignore its existence (this last item is not universally effective, but given your contributions patterns, if you didn't voluntarily seek out opportunities to use VisualEditor, its use by other editors would have almost no direct effect on you at all). You do not make any effort to avoid VisualEditor, you do not make any effort to change the system, and you do take many direct and voluntary seek out and support this system. That's consent and support. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:37, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Sherry, if you said this kind of shit to one of my clients, I'd fire your ass so hard that your grandkids would be unemployed.

Completely unprofessional.
Completely unacceptable.
Wholly unsuited to the task.

[lilburne]

I was the first to tell the people at Wikipedia about the inability to view or edit hidden comments using VE.

It is very annoying that VE cannot be viewed or edited. They are extremely important (it often contains editing notes).

Simple Google dumps $100,000 into WP each year so Chrome needs to work. That it is taking so long to get that right has pushed everything back down the tracks. Incompetence in design, and a rush to finish has resulted in months upon months of desperate hacking and special casing around to get this code to work with w3 compliant browsers (we know this because each time they touch one part of the code something seemingly unrelated breaks). The chance of them ever getting a working IE version is now zip, nada, ain't gonna happen. This will be announced in due time, and the excuse will be that IE is somewhat oddball, the fault will be entirely due to M$, and will be presented as a triumph of freetardery.

[lilburne]

Sherry, if you said this kind of shit to one of my clients, I'd fire your ass so hard that your grandkids would be unemployed.

Lets be fair here in most cases one would have a QA department and a comprehensive suite of unit tests. We know that when they embarked on this there were no unit tests in place, and they were dealing with a code base that was organically hacked together. No high level design, no separation of functionality, no firewalls between subsystems. The result is that each code change goes live, because the end users are the first call QA dept, and that regression testing is performed by those invested in having a bit of functionality work.

I think that Sherry has described the situation adequately.

[Zoloft]

... no separation of functionality ...

Why this was not done at the beginning, and each function rolled out as it was developed really puzzles me. You should have one vanilla editor/renderer, and if you want to do anything past that, should have to save and open up another window.

Develop each function/role as independent modules.

Sandbox changes in code.

[Johnny Au]

I use Firefox and yet, when I use VE, I cannot see or edit hidden comments.

[Hex]

As the WMF Release Manager I'm tremendously worried about this. I don't want us to be in a situation where we hit weird bugs in the software and are unable to correct them.

Just kidding! This quote isn't about VE; it was in relation to the WMF possibly using proprietary software (see the MP4 on Commons thread).

What was that thing about people who live in glass houses?

[Hex]

Not being able to create galleries
Already fixed, but mistakenly not rolled-out to Wikipedias yet; I've asked for it to be fixed on Monday afternoon, 16:00 Pacific time (the next deployment slot). You can see it working on MediaWiki.org for example; sorry, NicoV that this slipped into production in this state.

That something can "mistakenly slip into production" speaks volumes about the utter incompetence of your software development team.

[Vigilant]

Sherry, if you said this kind of shit to one of my clients, I'd fire your ass so hard that your grandkids would be unemployed.

Lets be fair here in most cases one would have a QA department and a comprehensive suite of unit tests. We know that when they embarked on this there were no unit tests in place, and they were dealing with a code base that was organically hacked together. No high level design, no separation of functionality, no firewalls between subsystems. The result is that each code change goes live, because the end users are the first call QA dept, and that regression testing is performed by those invested in having a bit of functionality work.

I think that Sherry has described the situation adequately.

I have no view on whether Sherry is correct or not.

The way that the community liaison is talking to a pissed off customer is the firing offense.
Arrogant, offended, and self righteous is not the way to approach aggrieved customers.

In the real world, they'd be looking for a new job on the same day they posted that comment.
In a decent company, they would never have made it past the phone screen interview.

[Bielle]

Sherry, if you said this kind of shit to one of my clients, I'd fire your ass so hard that your grandkids would be unemployed.

Thanks, Vigilant. That's a great line. I am going to pass it along to the people I know who are still working (i.e. not retired).

[Vigilant]

Goodbye, Whatamidoing (WMF). Please come back once you have corrected as many botched VE edits as I have done here. Oh, and please shut down VE and any development on it, and fire everyone involved, starting with you and JDforrester. Clear enough? Got it through your thick head that I'm not "supporting and consenting" but that, as long as the WMF doesn't give us any choice (you didn't even want to make it opt-in until we forced you), we are not "consenting and supporting", we are fighting the system from the inside.
Si tous les dégoutés s'en vont il n'y a que les dégoutants qui restent That's your "consent and support" for you. I don't have anything left to say to you. Fram (talk) 21:38, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

While Fram can be a dick, he's dead on here.

"which would mean that galleries would be un-editable for a few weeks or months whilst that is designed and worked on. It's obviously a subjective judgement whether that would be a good thing or not." You are aware that galleries were un-editable in VE for "weeks or months"? If that is such a bad thing now that this version of the gallery editor had to be rushed out, then why wasn't it a bad thing the previious half year? Doesn't seem very consistent, to not use it as a show-stopper for the release of VE, but to use it as an excuse to roll out this very premature version (with many flaws to boot, where was the QA team?).
And why did you decide to release the special character insertor in a similar unusable fashion? And why is the upcoming image resizer just as badly thought out? Perfection may not be required, but some minimum requirements perhaps? And testing for those before the roll-out? How many times have the same mistakes been made now? Fram (talk) 09:06, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

I'm a pretty good bullshitter, but I don't think Id have an answer to this.

Every time Forrester (Run Forrester, run!) makes an appearance, the WMF looks dumber in total.

So, again, same question: is there no test before rolling out a new feature in production ? Isn't it tested on an internal wiki, then on testwiki before being released in production wikis like enwiki ? Because, if this feature has been tested on testwiki before, how could the fix be "mistakenly not rolled-out to Wikipedia" ? --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 21:05, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

I predict a long and sustained silence.

[Jim]

Every time Forrester (Run Forrester, run!) makes an appearance, the WMF looks dumber in total.

Which, given the baseline, is a hell of an achievement. But you're right. He does that. Every time.

I predict a long and sustained silence.

That would be the clever thing, from this actor. Compulsory would be best.

[Vigilant]

Apparently, Internet Explorer is just too gosh durn hard!

IE Support

According to this page, and also Wikipedia:VisualEditor, IE support (later versions) has been "temporarily" unavailable since July 2013. This is getting to the limit of any reasonable interpretation of the word "temporarily". When I asked about it here in July 2013, I was told that "we're probably talking weeks rather than months". Please can you put realistic information about timescales on the relevant project pages. It would be better to say "support for IE will not be available in the foreseeable future", if that is the true situation, rather than keep fuelling expectations for something that is never delivered. 86.160.223.11 (talk) 23:14, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

86.160.223.11, that seems reasonable. I'll bring this up in my meeting on Monday and see what I can find out. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 03:48, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

The word temporarily does not appear anywhere on the page at Wikipedia:VisualEditor because we removed it a couple of months ago. The statement at the top of this page was presumably overlooked, and I'll fix it n a moment.
The status is that every time they've fixed the known problems with Internet Explorer, they discover a new set of catastrophic problems. The problems that caused it to be disabled in June were indeed fixed in August, but new problems immediately appeared. Last I heard, in the current version of VisualEditor, you can open a page in IE but you cannot save under any circumstances. Since they've been through this cycle of "fixed the known problems, discovered severe new ones" so many times in the last ten or twelve months, they have given up on providing any estimate for completion. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:47, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

While I am hardly an IE fan, I can't imagine that a competent (HA!) engineering team couldn't find a way to make this work. If you do a quick search for "internet explorer WYSIWYG editor" you'll see that many people complain about IE, but that's symptomatic of many people actually building these types of editors. You can also find lots of WYSIWYG editors done for IE.

This problem will sort itself out in about 2-3 years given IE's falling market share...probably about the time the VisualEditor is ready for an actual beta.

[Vigilant]

This is the very definition of untested.

Just to confirm, I followed up with James about this yesterday. Whatamidoing accurately reports the status: the known broken pieces are close to being fixed. But we don't know what we don't know, and we don't know how soon those things will be fixed. But it is being actively worked. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 18:52, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

You don't ever release code to production in this state.

Your development teams are morons.

[Vigilant]

Humble pie, being served today.

Hi Fram,
I know you're frustrated. If I didn't know the history, I'd still know from your note that you're frustrated. And I get it, really I do. None of us are thrilled with how this deployment has gone. No doubt we've done some things wrong, and I'm probably personally to blame for some of the decisions. I didn't set the timetable, but I could have pushed back, and I didn't. I am responsible, though, for the CLs and their engagement here, and they have a tough job. So does Jdforrester. I know that you have your differences with him, but I would hope you can admit that it's not an easy job he's doing. I respect him for taking it on, even when he and I disagree. I say all of that to say this: at the risk of sounding trite, which I don't mean, I feel your pain. There's nobody on the team who will look you in the eye and say "we've done it perfectly". Because none of us can honestly say that, me included.
With all that said, though, I want to also say this: I understand your frustration, I know that we haven't always done a great job of explaining things or presenting features, and I apologize for my part in that. We really are working hard to fix these issues.
You asked "How much more of this nonsense do we have to accept?". I hope the answer is "none, because you won't be presented with nonsense", but I'm not gong to promise that, because I've learned - the hard way - to be certain not to promise something I can't deliver. I can tell you that Jdforrester isn't intentionally presenting you with "nonsense", and neither am I, and neither is my team. We're all just people, doing our very best to build features that will make the editing community happy. Sometimes (like with the reference inserter), we appear to be getting closer than other times (gallery inserter, oof. Glad we got some changes deployed there).
The logical next question then, is "so what are you planning to do to fix things?" Here's what I'm going to do: I had a meeting with product yesterday, and they committed to, whenever possible, getting our CLs access to the product in order to write documentation early, so that we can hopefully release documentation (including both what a feature SHOULD do and what it DOES NOW) at the same time as we release the feature. And I've got a standard set of questions that I'm going to ask them, and I'll share the answers with my team - who will share them with the community. Those questions include "What is the purpose of the feature?, what works?, what doesn't?, and at what stage in the development life cycle is the feature?" I hope that clear messaging will relieve some of the pressure and tension that we're experiencing and give you a better sense of what to expect.
I notice, though that there's something we haven't said to you... thank you. Your bug reports really are helpful. I don't always love the tone in which they're presented, but I do love that you're finding and helping to debug things. I know you're working in good faith, and I hope you know that I am too. So I appreciate the bug reports, and all the time and energy you've put into helping make this product good. I'm sorry that we're disappointing you. I hope that changes. But in the meantime, know that whether you continue to engage with us on this or not, I appreciate the time and work you've put into it so far.
I know that there are those in the community who will dismiss this note as more platitudes, or accuse me of pandering: I don't really care. It's honest, it's sincere, and I hope you can see that.
Best, Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 08:41, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Let's see how long this new attitude lasts.
This is, after all, the man who INSISTED that ARBCOM desysop Kww for daring to defy his WP:ORIFICE authoritah!

[EricBarbour]

(Run Forrester, run!)

[Vigilant]

New bug reported today, nothing special or surprising...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... inks_in_VE

Bug report VisualEditor
Description no red links
Intention: I was editing a large table with multiple red links, which I was attempting to remedy. However, when I used VE, the table rendered with all the links blue, thereby making it difficult to figure out what links were in fact redlinks
Steps to Reproduce: #Go to List of International Court of Justice cases

Click on the Edit-Beta tab for VE
See a table full of blue links

Yes, I've reproduced it.

Just an interface issue. Pretty minor. Should be an easy fix...

Hi there, Erudy. Thanks a lot for your kind words and for the pretty detailed report! I believe the issue you're encountering is related to bug 37901. I suggest you keep another tab open in view mode, in the meantime. Regards, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 21:04, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

Elitre seems like a nice person. I wonder what bug 37901 is...

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37901

Bug 37901 -
Summary: VisualEditor: Links are not shown as redlinks when their target is blank (or ...
Status: ASSIGNED
Product: VisualEditor
Component ContentEditable (Other open bugs)
Version: unspecified
Platform: All All
Importance: High enhancement
Target Milestone: ---
Assigned To: Inez Korczyński
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on: 37902
Blocks: 48984 50497
Show dependency tree / graph



Reported: 2012-06-24 19:22 UTC by James Forrester

:sigh:

[thekohser]

Your tax-exempt dollars, hard at work.

[Vigilant]

Same as it ever was...

Advanced image settings? More VisualEditor rubbish.

@Philippe (WMF), Whatamidoing (WMF), Jdforrester (WMF), Mdennis (WMF):

Let's start with the least important complaints, and end with the major trouble, shall we? It's nice that you can add image size, but the behaviour isn't consistent with what VE does anyway (VE always makes width and height the same, the "advanced settings" lets you change one, the other gets adjusted automatically, but they are not the same except for square images!lol).

Worse is the "Make full size" button. In the earlier version, this was labeled "original size", but after I pointed out that this was incorrect (or at least very confusing), this was changed to "full size". However, this small and easy fix did nothing about the larger problem: why do we have this option?why do we even have that lever?!

What may be needed is "Put back default size", for when you have changed the size of the image and no longer knows what the "original", pre-change size was, or what the size would be if you wuold insert the image anew. Hardly top priority, but useful. What we have now though is scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel-prioritymatches developers, when there are countless other things to do. Define position (left/right/center)? Thumb? Alt text? Change an image without deleting and readding it? All 100 times more importan than what we have gotten now.

And of course, it doesn't seem to work very well. When I (FF26, W7) go to Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, and change the size from either (or both) of the images beneath the infobox to "full size", I can use the "save button". However, "review your changes" then gives "Could not start the review because your revision matches the latest version of this page.". The same applies to the image at the top of History of Christian meditation, Catholic clergy involvement with the Ustaše, File dialog, ...

And this doesn't only apply when I use "full size", but also when I explicitly give a size, the only other thing I can do in the new "advanced settings". This thing does not work. As usual.sigh

So, let me again, for the 100th time, do the job the paid developers, product manager, and QA team should have done;gotta agree test it, point out the problems, and even point out the cause of the problems. These new settings, for what they are worth, only work if the image already has a size indication (200px, 250px*250px, whatever), not when it only has a "thumb" indication. Sadly, the latter is the default and by far most common situation. Fram (talk) 13:44, 12 February 2014‎ (UTC)

At what point will the WMF realize that their software development team for VE is incompetent?
Heat death of the universe?
Replacement of Sue Gardner?

This pattern of working on useless features and then releasing them in a broken state has happened at every single release point in this project. I can't find a single release that isn't this way.

Once? Twice? Sure.
We have a conversation in the status meeting about the importance of proper testing and a statement by management that they insist on this happening prior to customer exposure.

But at the WMF...flurble squirtle snirtle

[Vigilant]

Dear lord, it's so very, very bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =599414119

SJ, your benefit #1 is wrong: Section editing has not affected edit conflicts for years now (since about 2006 or so, from what the devs tell me). I completely agree with your point about focus. However, there are drawbacks to this "fake section editing" idea. The most important one (IMO; perhaps others disagree) is that you wouldn't be able to re-use references. In the wikitext editor, if the ref is defined elsewhere, you just type in the ref name as usual. In VisualEditor, if the ref is defined in a section that isn't processed, then it might as well be defined on another wiki entirely. You won't be able to re-use it, because VisualEditor will not know that it exists (and if you process the whole page so that VisualEditor knows that it exists, then you lose all of the speed benefits you were hoping to get). Would that be a desirable tradeoff? Or do you think this would be an unpleasant surprise to users?

You couldn't speed load the section and then process the rest of the article in the back ground?
You couldn't build a reference list on commit/save that gets loaded with a section edit?
This is not beyond the knowledge of man...you guys are just fucking morons.

WSC, I know that Timo was working on Internet Explorer's problems last week. He reported that he solved one known problem and discovered a new blocker. As this process of fixing and discovering new breakage has happened repeatedly, they've given up estimating even what quarter IE's problems might be resolved in. However, I've never understood why the problems with modern versions of IE (which affect 10% of editors) is supposed to be a good reason for keeping it away from people who are using Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. The logic behind "It works fine on your computer, but you aren't allowed to use this, because it doesn't work on somebody else's computer" has always escaped me. To me, it seems more sensible to say, "If it works for you and your computer, then you make your own individual choice" than to say "The choices made by just 10% of other editors (or, more often, by their school or work IT departments) determine what you personally are permitted to do on your own computer." Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:20, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

Thousands of other companies have made their applications work with IE, as bothersome as that can be, why can't the WMF dev teams?
Because they are fucking morons.

You wikipedians need to come to the realization that the VisualEditor will never, ever, ever be a decent first line editing tool. There are just too few working brain cells behind the effort.

P.S. Your community liaisons are dumber than your developers. Sorry.

[EricBarbour]

[Hex]

A couple of enterprising Israeli editors have coded up a citation widget for VisualEdsel. But all is not well in VE-land:

There might be a slight problem here... I believe the VE team in collaboration with community feedback, has already put a lot of time and effort into an official and cross-wiki-utilizable "Citation feature" for VE. You can see details and discussion about that here: mw:VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog, and see yesterday's Metrics meeting overview of the feature (youtube at exact timestamp), and try it out at beta.wmflabs. Did you talk to the VE team about your work on this? Sorry to be the bearer of bad news –Quiddity (talk) 18:00, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

Now get this: those guys got a grant from the WMF to make it (and other VE widgets).