The Visual Editor is a huge failure

[Vigilant]

The funny thing is that Fram, who was so annoyed at being used as a guinea pig, seems to spend most of his wiki-time these days being a guinea pig. Perhaps this was Moeller's plan all along.

It's actually kinda refreshing seeing him lock onto the "professionals" as a target for his one-man QA department rather than hapless bot-writing clods like Rich Farmbrough or Kumioko. The guy is thorough, you've got to give him that. If I ever needed a QA guy, I'd hire him.

Hmm... maybe he's trying to get the WMF to hire him as a QA engineer? Won't work, though; they've made it clear they have no use for people who tell them uncomfortable truths.

I get the feeling that Fram is twisting the knife.

He's been finding what should have been obvious problems for a good long while now.
This is stuff that anyone with a decent QA background would have nailed months and months ago.

I think he got miffed with the WMF and is enjoying watching the dev team twist in the wind.
All of the bug reports I've seen have been carefully documented and are scrupulously repeatable.

Fram makes that team look worse than anything I could write.

[Hex]

I get the feeling that Fram is twisting the knife.

He's been finding what should have been obvious problems for a good long while now.
This is stuff that anyone with a decent QA background would have nailed months and months ago.

I think he got miffed with the WMF and is enjoying watching the dev team twist in the wind.
All of the bug reports I've seen have been carefully documented and are scrupulously repeatable.

Fram makes that team look worse than anything I could write.

I agree on all points. He's doing great work.

[SB_Johnny]

I get the feeling that Fram is twisting the knife.

He's been finding what should have been obvious problems for a good long while now.
This is stuff that anyone with a decent QA background would have nailed months and months ago.

I think he got miffed with the WMF and is enjoying watching the dev team twist in the wind.
All of the bug reports I've seen have been carefully documented and are scrupulously repeatable.

Fram makes that team look worse than anything I could write.

I agree on all points. He's doing great work.

I agree too, but I also enjoy the irony of his becoming the very thing he objected to them forcing him to become. And here, I'll actually use this emoticon in perhaps the first documented proper use on this most esteemed forum.

You boys need to read more Russian literature, or at least stop watching "Glee".

[Vigilant]

Oh boy, this is worse than bad.

Please delay 2013-12-05 (MW 1.23wmf6)

Update 2013-12-05 (MW 1.23wmf6) (planned for implementation at enwiki and most other wikis), described at mw:VisualEditor/status#2013-12-05 (MW 1.23wmf6), should not be implemented here. Deployed at MediaWiki, I found two serious errors affecting many (all?) users. Furthermore, the most important new feature of it only works so-so as well. I have noted these things at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/status, but replies there tend to be erratic and unwelcoming. Fram (talk) 14:32, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

VE scrolls down to bottom of the page (confirmed for FF by other editor). This is the one that really confirms my fears about the crap that the WMF (or its VE Product Manager at least) hsa been trying to sell us for months now. The problem: if you open a page in VE, the cursos is nicely at the top, but the image, the thing you see, is the bottom of the page... Totally useless, and totally obvious for every human tester worth his salt. Please remind me, how many times has it been said that yes, everything gets tested by humans, but yes, we will do even better in the future? Bullshit. @Jdforrester (WMF):, are you trying to defend your team and testers out of some misplaced sense of loyalty, or are you simply incompetent, or worse? How many such failures will you need before you see the light? "Switching to Wikitext, oh, that doesn't work in Firefox" or "Who would have thought that other language wikis would use diacritics and accents?" are just a few weeks old, and now this. The updates can't be trusted, the status reports on them can't be trusted, and the WMF excuses can't be trusted. Do you really believe that this is the way to get enwiki (and nl-wiki and dewiki) to reembrace VE anytime soon? Never mind that, do you really believe that that is the way "agile programming" works and software should be deployed? I have to go and test at MediaWiki (where some WMF people made it very clear that I'm ot really to be trusted or welcome) to prevent these "improvements" to be deployed here. I don't think anyone else is doing this, perhaps because they still believe that the WMF handles this, or (more probably) because they can't be bothered with VE anymore at all. Congratulations! Fram (talk) 14:32, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

This may well be related to 58089 above (let's hope so). When you are editing the text, and you add a reference or a template, the cursor is not placed at (or better yet behind) the ref or template you inserted, but at the top of the article. The page hasn't scrolled up though, so this isn't really obvious. If you start typing after adding a ref or template, you are editing the start of the article, not the place where you were. How this hasn't been noticed isn't clear, but one rant per post is enough. Fram (talk) 14:32, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

The new update introduces a long awaited improvement: "You can now paste rich content copied from external sources (not just as plain text), including other VisualEditor surfaces". And indeed, you can, but you shouldn't expect it to work very well... I've done two tests, described at MediaWiki, one from another MediaWiki page, and one from an enwiki page, and both contained immediately obvious errors. My third, more ambitious attempt (still one section only) can be seen at [3]. I think there is still some work to be done before this feature can really be considered to be ready for implementation.

As a final test of this bug, I thought, let's play fair, let's just copy the announcement of this change from the status page to my mediawiki sandbox. Nothng fancy, no cross-wiki copy, just the most basic thing this faeture is supposed to do. [4] is the result. I wonder what kind of "rich content" we are supposed to copy-paste with this, I haven't seen much beyond plain text that works. This was important enough to be put first in the status report, and bolded, and even this sucks big time. Fram (talk) 14:32, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Conclusion

The major new feature doesn't work as it should do, and at least two major new bugs are introduced: please, please do the sensible thing for once, and do not implement this update anywhere. Fram (talk) 14:32, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

I think this might just be the camel back breaking straw.

I cannot wait to see what the WMF does.
A dollar says they try to ignore it.

[Alison]

Now being foisted upon the Irish language Wikipedia without as much as a by-your-leave, which really does piss me off.

[The Joy]

Now being foisted upon the Irish language Wikipedia without as much as a by-your-leave, which really does piss me off.

Is é an EagarthóirAmhairc ualach bollocks.

(Irish is one of the most epic languages. Just giving someone directions sounds like you are challenging the Gods themselves! )

[EricBarbour]

Now being foisted upon the Irish language Wikipedia without as much as a by-your-leave, which really does piss me off.

If only the others on that wiki were a little more protective. I see that the "halla baile" or Town Hall is full of pronouncements from random WMF people and others, and always in English. And usually "delivered automatically". It seems to me that German and French WP people would tend not to tolerate this, although I might be wrong. It looks as if they are "lecturing" people.

[Alison]

Is é an Eagarthóir Visual ualach bollocks.

(Irish is one of the most epic languages. Just giving someone directions sounds like you are challenging the Gods themselves! )

Is lód magairle an Eagarthóir Amhairc

Irish is one of the more ... earthy ... languages, if only they'd actually teach the words in school that people really use. Don't get me started

I see that the "halla baile" or Town Hall is full of pronouncements from random WMF people and others, and always in English. And usually "delivered automatically".

That's because the WMF expect volunteers to localize their pronouncements. Normally, I'd pause to think about doing that if I thought it was useful to some folks but in this instance, I really couldn't be arsed, y'know?

[The Joy]

Google Translate actually did a fair job with PEarley (WMF) (T-C-L)'s translation in an English-to-Irish and Irish-to-English test. A simple copy-and-paste from that is all you need to get a rough message across. Why he or some underpaid, overworked WMF intern couldn't be asal'ed about it, I have no idea.

I do feel bad about this since I suggested they try it out VE on the smaller wikis before going on with the bigger "more important" wikis. I would have thought they would have still asked the communities for permission before jamming down their throats.

[Poetlister]

Irish is one of the most epic languages. Just giving someone directions sounds like you are challenging the Gods themselves!

In my experience, if you ask an Irishman for directions he'll say "If you want to get there I wouldn't start from here."

[Randy from Boise]

Irish is one of the most epic languages. Just giving someone directions sounds like you are challenging the Gods themselves!

In my experience, if you ask an Irishman for directions he'll say "If you want to get there I wouldn't start from here."

So you're English, are you?

RfB

[The Joy]

Irish is one of the most epic languages. Just giving someone directions sounds like you are challenging the Gods themselves!

In my experience, if you ask an Irishman for directions he'll say "If you want to get there I wouldn't start from here."

So you're English, are you?

RfB

All his sock IPs go to England, so I imagine so.

[Randy from Boise]

Irish is one of the most epic languages. Just giving someone directions sounds like you are challenging the Gods themselves!

In my experience, if you ask an Irishman for directions he'll say "If you want to get there I wouldn't start from here."

So you're English, are you?

RfB

All his sock IPs go to England, so I imagine so.

It reminds me of a story I heard during my one big year of grad school... One of the profs in the department, then a PhD candidate, was traveling through Czechoslovakia in the early 1980s. He was a specialist in Slovak history and knew Slovak very well; Czech, not so much. People in the Czech western part of the country were complete assholes to him when he asked for help or information or tried to buy something making use of Slovak. Rude and surly and just mean...

He also knew a tiny bit of really bad German. On a hunch, he switched to bumbling along in German rather than making use of his excellent Slovak.

No more problems! Everyone was polite and nice...

So, of course a Pom asking directions to the local boathouse from an Irishman is going to be given instructions that will lead him to drive off the end of the pier...

RfB

[Vigilant]

Looks like people are coming around to the way the WMF devs work.

Why bother with testing or Bugzilla? Your complaints will be dealt with by incapable hands anyway

Why bother? Testing isn't done by the WMF devs, reports of failures and errors get no, evasive, or wrong answers, bugzilla reports get closed prematurely and incorrectly all the time. Do the people at WMF really want help? They really need help, that has been shown over and over again, but the only ones that don't seem to have gotten the message seem to be working at (or at least being payed by) WMF.

I have described at length what I tested and encountered wrt the supposedly fixed bug 41193, the major aspect of the upcoming untested VE release, in Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback#Rich content?. Replies?

"[...] It does not apply to anything copied from an internal source, i.e., any page produced by Mediawiki. Whatamidoing (WMF)" Completely wrong
"If, however, you open the source page in VisualEditor [...] then you will see that rich copying and pasting works. Whatamidoing (WMF)" Again wrong!
"Just a thought, copying between en.wp and mediawiki.org is probably not the most reliable testcase, since they use different versions of VE. That might be influencing your results. TheDJ" Wrong, but written to be helpful, not as an "I know better", so no problem there.

Bugzilla:

Closed by JDForrester (WMF) 2013-11-26 as Resolved-Fixed
Reopened by me, with reference to my tests here, 2013-12-09 08:20:51 UTC
Closed again by Jdforrester (WMF) 2013-12-10 17:06:29 UTC as Resolved-Fixed without any comment there or anywhere
Reopened by me 2013-12-11 08:16:38 UTC
Closed again by Andre Klapper 2013-12-11 12:39:57 UTC , this time with an unsatosfactory comment, basically stating that the WMF doesn't care if a fix has many known bugs, and that apparently bugs are not a problem preventing deployment as long as the literal, technical minimal requirements are met. Furthermore, Bugzilla is too lazy too follow a link to enwiki discussions and expects that the discussion gets repeated there, in new bugs I have to submit.

With my apologies to the few WMF people involved in this who try their hardest to be user friendly (Elitre comes to mind), but in general, you are not worth the money the WMF (i.e. the Wikipedia readers) spends on you, nor the time lost on you. That the initial release of VE was a catastrophe was bad; but that the repeated fiasco's since then have not learned you anything, and that all your promises to the contrary have been shown to be pure bluster, is much worse. Fram (talk) 13:06, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

I think that as the fundamental architecture of the product is wrong they have no option but to bluster. Eric Corbett 13:59, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

The saga continues:

TheDJ (volunteer) opened a new ticket, 58318, confirming one of my testcases, but this time in Safari (so it fails in Safari and in Firefox at least). He indicated that this ticket blocked ticket 41193 (" Derk-Jan Hartman 2013-12-11 13:19:08 UTC Depends on: 58318")
But who cares about this? Not the WMF devs in the form of User:AKlapper (WMF), who again closed the ticket, without adressing theDJs issue. ( Andre Klapper 2013-12-11 13:49:39 UTC )

I supppose that, since the deployment is dependent on this bug being fixed (it was the first and most important of the bugs listed in the status report), it has to be closed at all costs. Deadlines being more important than getting it right, not for the first time. Fram (talk) 14:51, 11 December 2013 (UTC)
Chess pawns after references

Serendipitously, the very next granule of feedback is for a bug that has been reported, repeatedly, to have been fixed...

Sometimes, if I add a space after a reference, a chess pawn will show up. It usually happens if there is a line of text after a reference that I am working with.--¿3family6 contribs 16:08, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Time to halt this zombie of a project, do a post-mortem and rethink what needs to be done here.

P.S. Fire everyone remotely associated with this debacle. Start at the top.

[TungstenCarbide]

In the technical world of design, be it mechanical or programming or any large complicated project, you need a certain amount of mental horsepower to make it go forward, otherwise the project stalls.

[Vigilant]

This (and the related reverse typing bug) should be solved after the next update of VE here (planned for tomorrow, despite the other problems this update creates or contains). I haven't checked thoroughly whether it will really be solved or not though, I have noticed that the new version inserts clouds and snowflakes sometimes, so at least we won't have a shortage of funny unwanted characters yet. Fram (talk) 19:39, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Why do I get the feeling that the dev team just changed the "special character" that VE was emitting to get rid of "chess pawns"?

[Mason]

This (and the related reverse typing bug) should be solved after the next update of VE here (planned for tomorrow, despite the other problems this update creates or contains). I haven't checked thoroughly whether it will really be solved or not though, I have noticed that the new version inserts clouds and snowflakes sometimes, so at least we won't have a shortage of funny unwanted characters yet. Fram (talk) 19:39, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Why do I get the feeling that the dev team just changed the "special character" that VE was emitting to get rid of "chess pawns"?

That's how they version things. You know, like Apple does Panther/Snow Leopard/Lion. This is the Snowflake release of VE.

(We should be grateful the damn thing doesn't randomly emit swastikas.)

[Vigilant]

This (and the related reverse typing bug) should be solved after the next update of VE here (planned for tomorrow, despite the other problems this update creates or contains). I haven't checked thoroughly whether it will really be solved or not though, I have noticed that the new version inserts clouds and snowflakes sometimes, so at least we won't have a shortage of funny unwanted characters yet. Fram (talk) 19:39, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Why do I get the feeling that the dev team just changed the "special character" that VE was emitting to get rid of "chess pawns"?

That's how they version things. You know, like Apple does Panther/Snow Leopard/Lion. This is the Snowflake release of VE.

(We should be grateful the damn thing doesn't randomly emit swastikas.)

Give it a couple of releases...

I'm loving the "speshul snoflake" release. Must have been named after the devs.

[Mason]

Mr. Forrester feels attacked.

[DanMurphy]

Mr. Forrester feels attacked.

That's quite a good one. For posterity this was the bit of feedback that Forrester hid from view, alleging it violated Wikipedia's policy against so-called "personal attacks."

@Jdforrester (WMF):. Why did you reclose bug 41193? Without any comment, changes, replies, anything? You have been shown time and time again that you are wrong, that testing is insufficient (or simply non-existant), that bugs which are closed are not fixed, that bugs which you consider duplicates are not duplicates at all (e.g. bug 57209 discussed below), and so on. Perhaps you had a good reason to close the bug as "resolved fixed", but we can't read your mind. If you close a bug as resolved-fixed, and people report serious problems with it and reopen it, then the least you should do is explain your swift reclosing.

Your job description is "My job is to help make sure the VisualEditor team understands what the community wants and needs, is focussed on the things that matter, and is engaging with and understood by the community." Please start doing your job. Fram (talk) 08:27, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

[Mason]

Fram Undid revision 585645740 by Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) Resolved in your mind only

[Vigilant]

Mr. Forrester feels attacked.

That's quite a good one. For posterity this was the bit of feedback that Forrester hid from view, alleging it violated Wikipedia's policy against so-called "personal attacks."

@Jdforrester (WMF):. Why did you reclose bug 41193? Without any comment, changes, replies, anything? You have been shown time and time again that you are wrong, that testing is insufficient (or simply non-existant), that bugs which are closed are not fixed, that bugs which you consider duplicates are not duplicates at all (e.g. bug 57209 discussed below), and so on. Perhaps you had a good reason to close the bug as "resolved fixed", but we can't read your mind. If you close a bug as resolved-fixed, and people report serious problems with it and reopen it, then the least you should do is explain your swift reclosing.

Your job description is "My job is to help make sure the VisualEditor team understands what the community wants and needs, is focussed on the things that matter, and is engaging with and understood by the community." Please start doing your job. Fram (talk) 08:27, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Alleging Personal Attacks without evidence is sanctionable behavior.

WMF devs, stop protecting your jobs, your deadlines, your colleagues, your pride, your ass, and admit that this thing sucks extremely big time, and that none of you have done any decent testing on this. Again. As always. Stop this deployment, reopen the bug, and fix the bloody thing until at least most of this works. Just do the job you are being payed for, but don't bother us with your stupid toys until they actually work sporadically. Fram (talk) 21:28, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

That's gonna leave a mark.

From bugzillla

(In reply to comment #13)
> Fram,
>
> I closed this without comment because we'd already discussed this, and it
> didn't seem like a worthwhile expenditure of my time or yours to re-hash the
> issue when we already agreed about things. I'm sad that you think I did it
> out
> of malice. AGF clearly doesn't apply to your attitude. :-( Please be less
> aggressive in future.

No, I'll only get more aggressive, just read my last post at enwiki or my next
post here, which will be a link to enwiki.

"We'd already discussed this"? You mean your replies at
[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:VisualEditor/status]? No, I don't see
where we actually agreed upon things. You were pinged about the enwiki
discussion as well, which contained further examples.

But I don't said you did it out of malice, there are a number of other possible
reasons, including (but probably not limited to) laziness, incompetence,
stupidity, or a hopefully well-founded fear of losing your job after the
umpteenth VE fiasco.

SPANK!

[Hex]

...that Forrester hid from view...

He likes doing that.

[Vigilant]

Morons are everywhere over there...

I agree completely, but I have to say that Fram's tone is sometimes overly aggressive. He seems to be frustrated that there are limits to what is delivered when and at what quality and the rate at which those improve. We should not forget that the foundation in terms of software development is only some 4 years old. Before that time (and also largely overlapping) it were just a few folks doing some volunteer style work, but doing it fulltime so they were hired, because someone NOT doing it was worse). This is not going to change in a few months. The quality levels in terms of development that some people are expecting are at least some 3 years out. Quality processes grow organically, you cannot just 'put them in place'. Well you can, but then they'd never get anything done, the foundation would bleed money or the teams would self collapse. In the mean time, there is this gigantic site and community that needs to be kept going. Complain, complain often, just don't let it get too emotional, because that is just counter productive. If you take a 2 year overview, progress has been enormous. And if you start stamping on folks toes, don't be surprised that the other person won't extend you a hand. Goes for both parties.... —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:28, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Because silicon valley startups know NOTHING about QA best practices... There are FUCKING LIBRARIES OF BOOKS that deal with this topic. There are people who DO NOTHING ELSE BUT THIS STUFF. Any startup that wasn't a group of room temperate cronies would have figured this out a long, long time ago or their funding would have been pulled.

TheDJ, and the WMF, obviously have no working background in engineering.

Do you suppose that ASIC development gets by on spin and pray?

The dumb, it burns us, my precious.

[Hex]

The rancid stink of desperation.

And I now have been blocked from Bugzilla by one of the involved devs on that thread, for "Warned in a private email to stop being aggressive". Funnily enough, another, more friendly editor there posted me a link to the Bugzilla etiquette, which contains things like "Do things in public. Unless you were asked to email somebody with specific information, place all information relating to bugs in the bug report itself. Avoid sending private email; no-one else can read your mail if you do that." Which is what I did, but what the blocking Bugzilla admin didn't (and which I only saw after the block was made, I don't constantly check my wikimails). Oh well, it will at least stop the requests to put these things in Bugzilla :-) The email was rather short, but contained a link to the WMF code of conduct policy, which starts "All Wikimedia staff and members of the Board of Trustees are required to abide by this Code of Conduct. It is also intended to provide guidance for volunteers.". As far as I know, I'm not Wikimedia staff not a member of the Board of Trustees... Desperate times and people require desperate measures I suppose?

[Vigilant]

The problem is not me reopening the bug, the problem is shortsighted devs closing it again, despite the terrible state this is in. If they hadn't closed it again and again, you wouldn't have received all these mails either... It is ridiculous to state that something works if this is only technically true, but not in any practical sense of the word. This is a typical tech-oriented vision, where the actual need that the bug is supposed to fix is totally forgotten, and the obvious negtaive consequences totally ignored. "An enhancement report is normally closed whenever anything at all works for it." is a terrible thing to say. Fram (talk) 05:49, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

It may be a terrible thing to say, but it allows them to report that they have successfully achieved their bug fix/feature deployment milestone.
I have never, in over 30 years of engineering work, ever released a "fix" like this into a live production environment.

I truly think I would die of shame if I was responsible for this.

[Randy from Boise]

Fram Undid revision 585645740 by Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) Resolved in your mind only

I mentioned before that even the much-hated physical defensemen like Fram, Orange Mike, Andy the Grump, Sandstein, etc. had a valuable place on Wikipedia's hockey team. See what I mean?

RfB

[Vigilant]

I hadn't seen this page before.
http://terrychay.com/article/response-t ... itor.shtml

It's a long read, full of (unintentional) humor and insight (lies).
My favorite quote is here:

One small thing to note. This project has concentrated most of our best front-end engineering talent at the Foundation, as well as two of the top engineers at Wikia

I'm sorry for you guys.
Perhaps you should look into finding someone who is better at hiring engineers and building engineering organizations.

I would suggest someone with a proven track record in this regard.
Just so we're not confused here, someone who has actually delivered software to a large, diverse customer base.
And the customer base liked it.
And they did not demand that the software be immediately uninstalled.
And there weren't near riots trying to remove the software ... oh god, it burns, it burns!!!...get it off!!!... someone help us!!!! ... NooooOOooOOOooo make it stop!!!!

Anyway, I hope you WMF guys get the idea.

Hmmm...
It's where the customers are glad that you did this work.
Where they look forward to your next piece of software without trying to figure out if they're going to get lubelessly cornholed, yet again.

Anyway, carry on, "best front-end engineering talent at the Foundation"



I try to imagine how you guys wrote your first "Hello World" programs.
I wonder if those programs inadvertently formatted your parents' PCs.
Maybe if you guys fell back to VisualBasic, things might not be as bad...
Perhaps if you downloaded and ran on a guest VM of WindowsMe?

[Mason]

I try to imagine how you guys wrote your first "Hello World" programs.

Code: Select all

10 IF RND(1) > .2 PRINT "HELLO ";
20 FOR I = 1 TO 17
30 IF RND(1) > .85 PRINT "♙";
40 GOTO 70
50 IF RND(1) > .3 PRINT "WORLD "
60 GOTO 90
70 NEXT I
80 GOTO 50
90 POKE RND(1) * 65535, 7
100 PRINT "PLEASE DONATE"
110 PRINT I / J
120 END

[DanMurphy]

Apropos of not much Mason: Is your avatar Ignatius Reilly? (I don't think there's ever been a movie, but it popped into my head).

[Mason]

Apropos of not much Mason: Is your avatar Ignatius Reilly? (I don't think there's ever been a movie, but it popped into my head).

Indeed it is! I doubt a movie could ever do the book justice, but I'd probably line up to see it anyway.

[tarantino]

Apropos of not much Mason: Is your avatar Ignatius Reilly? (I don't think there's ever been a movie, but it popped into my head).

Indeed it is! I doubt a movie could ever do the book justice, but I'd probably line up to see it anyway.

Here's a list of 10 actors considered for the movie role of Ignatius. I'd go with John Goodman.

[Mason]

Apropos of not much Mason: Is your avatar Ignatius Reilly? (I don't think there's ever been a movie, but it popped into my head).

Indeed it is! I doubt a movie could ever do the book justice, but I'd probably line up to see it anyway.

Here's a list of 10 actors considered for the movie role of Ignatius. I'd go with John Goodman.

I love John Goodman, but I think it would be tough to beat Belushi in that role. He had the wild-eyed ranting thing down better than anyone.

[The Joy]

I'm looking at E.M. Forster (T-H-L) and I notice that "Novels" in the "Notable Works by Forster" section isn't bold. I've tried to correct it with the VisualEditor, but it makes a four-directional arrow instead and I can move the section around like a picture or a singular object. It won't let me edit the stupid text within the section! I don't get it. And why does it have a puzzle picture appear and want me to translude the darn thing? Why would I want to? Most people don't even know what "translude" means.

I've right-clicked on the section and Firefox says it is an image. It is not an image! It's just a text section! Why does it treat it as an image?

[Randy from Boise]

I'm looking at E.M. Forster (T-H-L) and I notice that "Novels" in the "Notable Works by Forster" section isn't bold. I've tried to correct it with the VisualEditor, but it makes a four-directional arrow instead and I can move the section around like a picture or a singular object. It won't let me edit the stupid text within the section! I don't get it. And why does it have a puzzle picture appear and want me to translude the darn thing? Why would I want to? Most people don't even know what "translude" means.

I've right-clicked on the section and Firefox says it is an image. It is not an image! It's just a text section! Why does it treat it as an image?

This begs the real question.... Why are you wasting your time trying to use Visual Editor? It's the proverbial fur-lined pickle jar of Econ101 — sure they might make it, but nobody's gonna buy it.

RfB

[The Joy]

I'm looking at E.M. Forster (T-H-L) and I notice that "Novels" in the "Notable Works by Forster" section isn't bold. I've tried to correct it with the VisualEditor, but it makes a four-directional arrow instead and I can move the section around like a picture or a singular object. It won't let me edit the stupid text within the section! I don't get it. And why does it have a puzzle picture appear and want me to translude the darn thing? Why would I want to? Most people don't even know what "translude" means.

I've right-clicked on the section and Firefox says it is an image. It is not an image! It's just a text section! Why does it treat it as an image?

This begs the real question.... Why are you wasting your time trying to use Visual Editor? It's the proverbial fur-lined pickle jar of Econ101 — sure they might make it, but nobody's gonna buy it.

RfB

This is the first time I used it. I thought removing two or three characters would be fine, but VE doesn't even let me do that! It also gave me some perspective on why it is a huge failure. I'm going back to the old way.

[Vigilant]

This is some interesting lying on the 2013-2014 WMF master plan
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/f ... lished.pdf

Visual Editor
2012-13
Goals
:
Launch a new default environment for Wikipedia projects that does not require markup.
Limited English Wikipedia release for real-world editing in December 2012. Deployed to majority of
Wikimedia wikis and ready for default usage by July 2013.
Results
:
•
December 2012 release:
Done.
Visual Editor was released in December 2012 as an alpha-release in
production on the English Wikipedia (supporting basic content editing but not yet templates and
citations) as an opt-in user preference and has since been made available in 14 additional Wikipedia
languages.
•
July 2013 release:
On track.
We are still planning to change the default for editing to Visual Editor
by July, while retaining the old editor as a prominent “edit source” tab in the interface. Work has
progressed to procure required hardware, resolve bugs, and add missing core editing functionality,
especially for templates and citations

Lets just see what the VE feedback page has on it...
Full bug listings are too sad for the lulz. I'm just doing section titles. And only from January 2014...
Keep in mind, gentle reader, the WMF says this was ready to go about 8 months ago...

Adding pictures

multiple ☃ characters

Links in subpages

Inserting http links in wikilinks randomly

Explanation on hover

Leave the "toolbar" at the top of the screen always

bent arrow

Cannot add special characters to existing wikilinks

Yet another spellcheck bug

Missing highlight when selecting list bullets

Too funny. Too sad. $15MUSD/year and this is what they can produce...

[Hex]

Nonsense, comrade! 2014 has always been the year of VisualEditor!

[Scott5114]

I'm looking at E.M. Forster (T-H-L) and I notice that "Novels" in the "Notable Works by Forster" section isn't bold. I've tried to correct it with the VisualEditor, but it makes a four-directional arrow instead and I can move the section around like a picture or a singular object. It won't let me edit the stupid text within the section! I don't get it. And why does it have a puzzle picture appear and want me to translude the darn thing? Why would I want to? Most people don't even know what "translude" means.

I've right-clicked on the section and Firefox says it is an image. It is not an image! It's just a text section! Why does it treat it as an image?

This begs the real question.... Why are you wasting your time trying to use Visual Editor? It's the proverbial fur-lined pickle jar of Econ101 — sure they might make it, but nobody's gonna buy it.

RfB

This is the first time I used it. I thought removing two or three characters would be fine, but VE doesn't even let me do that! It also gave me some perspective on why it is a huge failure. I'm going back to the old way.

In case you haven't figured it out, it's because the bit of text you wanted to edit was in that two-column section, which was created by some manner of template circus. Editing tables and templates with VE isn't supported. Presumably Erik figured nobody actually has a need to do that badly enough for his software to support that in this version.

[dogbiscuit]

In case you haven't figured it out, it's because the bit of text you wanted to edit was in that two-column section, which was created by some manner of template circus. Editing tables and templates with VE isn't supported. Presumably Erik figured nobody actually has a need to do that badly enough for his software to support that in this version.

I know you are just explaining, but that is exactly why the VE is a huge failure, that a casual editor, the ones that VE is targeted at actually have to have some significant understanding of how articles are put together. It is that difference between recognising that applying templates is "advanced user" and that is not something that they are interested in and realising that these things permeate the content so the editor is going to be exposed to them whether they want to support them or not.

If I was starting off, I'd be looking at articles like the top 20 edited articles (let's guess that includes Michael Jackson* and Obama) that casual editors are likely to want and seeing how they were structured. If VE can't edit them in their entirety, then VE is a failure.

I did a lot of evaluation of 4GL code production tools (an 80s fashion in data processing shops) and the demos always did straight forward tasks, but as soon as you wanted to introduce a special case, they fell apart. Typically the answer was "Why would you want to do the report like that?" to which the response was "We don't want to spend 6 months in union negotiations to recalculate the bonus structure." "Oh..."


[Edit]To answer my own challenge, go to Michael Jackson (T-H-L). There is a spelling mistake in the Info Box ("philantropist"). Fix that with VE. (If someone has already fixed it without VE, try editing the error back in and out again). I just tried it and all I could see was that there was text in a box that was mis-spelled. I try and click on the text and nothing happens. Tried double clicking, nothing happens. No obvious hints on the tool bar. I assume that the article had loaded as I could edit other text on the page.

[Scott5114]

The least the devs could do would be to gray out templates and tables that you can't edit, to at least give some indication that you can't edit that with VE.

[Zoloft]

I have been editing with VE, minor changes only, and it has progressed from incredibly awful to barely usable. It does still introduce odd stuff into seemingly casual edits. I recently had to remove a lot of " " (HTML entity for a single space) that were randomly inserted into sentences here and there, like nerdy little raisins.

[The Joy]

The least the devs could do would be to gray out templates and tables that you can't edit, to at least give some indication that you can't edit that with VE.

I would have thought the Beta version of VE would let people edit templates at least. Templates are a major part of Wikipedia.

People should start using VE on the Erik Möller (T-H-L) article and publicly complain about the errors. Maybe that will improve it!

[Vigilant]

http://thewikipedian.net/2014/01/02/the ... 13-part-2/

Number one problem for wikipedia is ... :drum roll:

1. The Visual Editor debacle is also a potent metaphor for Wikipedia’s chief organizational dilemma

To conclude the thought above: the Wikipedia community does not always agree with the Wikimedia Foundation. Some Foundation initiatives have been met with a indifference at best (see last year’s #9, which is arguably the real predecessor entry to this one). Others have been rejected like antibodies to a transplanted organ.

Into this latter category falls the Visual Editor, a long-in-development software initiative which was rolled out this summer to mixed reviews (hey, I thought it was fun) followed by a backlash that grew and grew until a volunteer editor’s uncontested edit of the source code summarily immobilized the whole expensive project.

Maybe I’m overdoing it to place this at number one. Maybe the underlying issue is less than the existential struggle between those two classes of community members than I think; perhaps the issue was simply one of a botched deployment and avoidable toe-stepping that only temporarily poisoned the well.

But I believe no single event in the past year encapsulated the biggest challenge facing Wikipedia today: it seems no better able to organize itself now than when it was a freewheeling experiment stumbling into greater and greater success in its first seven years of its life. Seven years further on, Wikipedia is a different kind of community, one struggling to cope with its fantastic success, but which hasn’t yet learned to adapt.

Whether the Visual Editor itself ever finds its way into everyday usage—and I think it will, after a long “eventually”—it spotlights Wikipedia’s most critical challenges more than any other story, and that’s why it’s the most important Wikipedia story of 2013.

Who called it? Come on, say the V word...

[EricBarbour]

Who called it? Come on, say the V word...

You da man.

Meanwhile.......Fram keeps complaining, and Sherry Snyder keeps denying the "problems".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... e_of_image

[Zoloft]

Who called it? Come on, say the V word...

You da man.

Meanwhile.......Fram keeps complaining, and Sherry Snyder keeps denying the "problems".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... e_of_image

Fram needs a base. Come over, Red Rover, come over...

We have the light on for you.

[Vigilant]

<span about="g0.674951691491155" data-ve-ignore="true"></span>

In this edit, VE added <span about="g0.674951691491155" data-ve-ignore="true"></span> after one of the {{convert}} templates I added. I do not know what is different about this section. (Monobook, Firefox 26, Windows 7):Jay8g [V•T•E] 01:54, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

I wonder if it is the same VE bug that caused something like this, where you get a very ugly effect and a very, very long ref with things you normally can't change in VE at all (font of refs? Ugh...) Perhaps in this case it is a copy-paste in VE gone wrong (some redundancy in that sentence can't be avoided ;-) ), perhaps it is simply VE going wrong for no good reason... Fram (talk) 13:03, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

And this one? Fram (talk) 13:08, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

And this one... Fram (talk) 13:09, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

Tweaking the king's nose.

[Jim]

<span about="g0.674951691491155" data-ve-ignore="true"></span>

In this edit, VE added <span about="g0.674951691491155" data-ve-ignore="true"></span> after one of the {{convert}} templates I added. I do not know what is different about this section. (Monobook, Firefox 26, Windows 7):Jay8g [V•T•E] 01:54, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

I wonder if it is the same VE bug that caused something like this, where you get a very ugly effect and a very, very long ref with things you normally can't change in VE at all (font of refs? Ugh...) Perhaps in this case it is a copy-paste in VE gone wrong (some redundancy in that sentence can't be avoided ;-) ), perhaps it is simply VE going wrong for no good reason... Fram (talk) 13:03, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

And this one? Fram (talk) 13:08, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

And this one... Fram (talk) 13:09, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

Tweaking the king's nose.

I know...

But how long can you keep doing that?

Oh. OCD. sorry.

[Vigilant]

Another world beater from the WMF engineering team.
Why don't these feeble people ever learn?!

Feedback request: VisualEditor special character inserter

The developers are working towards offering mw:VisualEditor to all users at about 50 Wikipedias that have complex language requirements. Many editors at these Wikipedias depend on being able to insert special characters to be able to write articles.

A special character inserter tool is available in VisualEditor now. They would like to know what you think about this tool, especially if you speak languages other than English. To try the Special character tool, please:

If you haven't already opted-in, then opt-in to VisualEditor by going to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures and choosing "VisualEditor". Save your preferences.
Edit any article or your user page in VisualEditor. See the mw:Help:VisualEditor/User guide for information on how to use VisualEditor.

Screenshot of TranslateWiki interface
The “insert” pulldown on the task bar of VisualEditor will lead you to the ‘Special character’ tool.

Screenshot of Special Characters tool
This is the Special character inserter. Your feedback on this tool is particularly important.

Comments (positive, negative, or neutral) may be left here. It is really important that the developers hear from as many editors as possible. Thank you, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:18, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

special character insert tool feedback

this tool seems to be less than half-baked - maybe do some developer testing until you are happy, and then ask for feedback again.

issues:

limited # of character sets, with no way to select other sets: this is an important part of special char tool - how do you switch from farsi to greek to hiragana? sure, we can test it with less-than-full set, but surely, the finished product needs some charset-selection widget, no? should it even be demonstrated without such a widget?
editing Cham Choghal-e Sofla:
open the tool after pressing "edit", without actually clicking inside the article (i.e., there is no visible "caret" in the article that marks the insertion position)
press some a special characters, one after the other (the tool stays open, no visible change to the article)
*do* place the caret somewhere by clicking between two characters in the article
click a special character
result: it spits all the previously clicked characters at the very beginning of the article.
use it again, and it spits part of the original article - all hell breaks loose.
the !@#$%^&* thing self-destructs as soon as i enter a single character (except the case described in #2 above), so if i want to add 5 special characters one after the other, i need to open it every time. the least i expect is some checkbox or button for "multiple character insertion"
there is no obvious way to close it if you decide not to insert a special character (say, you opened it by mistake). it seems to close if you click on the page outside the tool, but i think it should have a "close" widget also,

peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 21:50, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

Re the menu seen in File:VisualEditor - Toolbar - SpecialCharacters.png: The mathematics special characters are very limited. At the least I'd think they should include subset/superset/union/intersection. The accents character set looks useless to me (with a Mac keyboard), because they're all easily obtained with option-key combinations; I'd rather see the characters that are hard to type with this keyboard. Also, having the order in the "symbols" menu as degrees-seconds-minutes makes no sense; it should be degrees-minutes-seconds. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:36, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

One minor detail is I'd prefer the dialog be placed near the menu, not underneath the cursor. This is because if the cursor is near the bottom of the screen, I have to scroll down to use select a character. -- Ypnypn (talk) 01:03, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

At some point, even the morons at the top of the WMF must surely see that they have ZERO capability to build anything.

STAHP WMF. YOU ARE PISSING THE MONEY AWAY. STAHP.

[EricBarbour]

At some point, even the morons at the top of the WMF must surely see that they have ZERO capability to build anything.

STAHP WMF. YOU ARE PISSING THE MONEY AWAY. STAHP.

For what little it's worth, I've seen major corporations piss away far more money, more quickly, and for far less reason.....
besides, the WMF bullshitted that money fair and square, and they want the divine right to piss it away. Woo hoo.