Adventures in Visual Editing

It's a big week for Wikipedia, and maybe a bigger one for its developers. Starting Monday (although I only noticed today, EST) the long-in-the-works Visual Editor rolled out to all registered editors. On the Wikimedia Foundation blog, Philippe Beaudette explains the big deal:

There are various reasons that lead existing and prospective contributors not to edit; among them, the complexity of wiki markup is a major issue. One of VisualEditor’s goals is to empower knowledgeable and good-faith users to edit and become valuable members of the community, even if they’re not wiki markup experts. We also hope that, with time, experienced editors will find VisualEditor useful for some of their editing tasks.

In the past I've been a bit of a Visual Editor skeptic—the Wikimedia Foundation's own research shows that not knowing how to edit is seventh among readers' answers for why they don't edit Wikipedia, cited by only 18% of respondents to the 2011 reader survey. Moreover, one still has to know to click on the "Edit" button to get started. And then there's a question for which we currently have no empirical evidence: does making it theoretically easier to edit invite more productive contributors, or more troublemakers? We may well get an answer—though it will take time and, of course, more study. All that said, I'll be perfectly happy if my misgivings turn out to be misplaced. And today I finally took the thing out for a test drive. The Featured article today is Alec Douglas-Home, the United Kingdom's prime minister for almost exactly one year in the early 1960s. At first I noticed some double-spaces after periods (or, given the subject matter, full stops) and went to change it. As soon as I clicked "Edit" button (and disappeared the notification pop-up seen at the top of this post) I saw this:

Yeah, OK, that's an edit page, all right. Upon first impression, I have to say I was wrong about one thing: I was expecting a WYSIWYG editor that was a half-step up from editing code, but was still confined to an undersized edit box. Nope, this is editing right on the page. (Yes, I could have turned on the Visual Editor for awhile yet, but I've also become the sort of person who still waits for an album release even once it's been leaked.) So I removed the superfluous double-space, and went to hit "Save page". So here's my edit summary:

But hey, I came back awhile later, and noticed some joker had changed Douglas-Home's honorific prefix from "The Right Honourable" to "The Right Bhuval" (?) as pictured here:

So I went to edit again, but this time I got the same old edit window:

What happened? I didn't realize until later that I'd actually hit "Edit source", which brings you to the same code-based editing window that Wikipedians have known for more than a decade—and which will surely be the choice of power editors for a long time to come. Alas, I didn't realize that his first name had also been changed to "Bhuval", but someone else did step in to fix that before long. And... that's my experience with the Visual Editor so far! It's not much to go on. But I still have a few early takeaways:

• I've been editing Wikipedia for the better part of a decade now, and I still had a bit of trouble. Also, pictured at the top of this post is the new pop-up alerting editors that they have entered the visual editor, which didn't include a little x-box to close. I wasn't stymied long, but it's the experience that counts, right?

• The Visual Editor really slows down the loading of the edit page. This isn't any huge surprise, but the length of page loads is a matter of concern, especially considering the Wikimedia Foundation's conscious push to improve participation in the developing world, where Internet speeds may be slower.

• It doesn't seem to work on Talk pages, which is a mixed blessing. As something of a Wikipedia elitist, I think the uninitiated may offer the best help by pointing things out on discussion pages. Then again, Wikipedia discussion pages being "broken" is a whole 'nother topic.

• Here's my optimistic prediction for the Visual Editor: while I don't see it encouraging significant contributions of quality new material from previous non-editors, I do think it can encourage more edits by those who already edit occasionally, but maybe can't be bothered to hunt through markup to move a comma.

If the Visual Editor is not for you, here's what you do: go to "Preferences" in the top right corner, select the "Gadgets" tab, look under the "Editing" header, and check the box which reads: "Remove VisualEditor from the user interface". Then hit "Save", and you're good to go. But I think I'll let it stand. It's not a panacea for Wikipedia's ills, and for complex edits the source code is always only a click away. Besides, I'm always looking for that comma—or superfluous double-space.