I'd like to say thanks to the folks who have been working on VisualEditor,
Citoid, and Parsoid in the past few years.
When I first started to work in 2015 on what I eventually called the LearnWiki
project
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Motivational_and_educational_video_to_introduce_Wikimedia>,
I was a bit hesitant to recommend VisualEditor due to it having some rough
spots in performance and reliability, but I knew that VE was probably the
way of the future for new Wikipedia contributors. As I've been writing
scripts recently for a 2019 small pilot project that will teach users how
to create citations with VE
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Rapid/Pine/Continuation_of_educational_video_and_website_series>,
I've been impressed by how much has improved. The VE's performance seems to
be faster, the automatic citation tool can be easy and enjoyable to use,
and the system (VE + Parsoid + Citoid) seems to be generally stable on ENWP.
I think that you made the desktop user experience significantly better for
new contributors on ENWP who use VE.
While I'm writing, I'll ask a couple of related questions. If someone knows
of recent research that analyzes the productivity and longevity of new
users who try the VE and/or New Wikitext Editor ("NEWT") interfaces, I
would be appreciative if that information could be added to this project
talk page
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:Project/Rapid/Pine/Continuation_of_educational_video_and_website_series>
so that I can take a look. Especially interesting would be research that
shows points in workflows on English Wikipedia where new editors who use VE
seem to become stuck. (The sticking points may have more to do with
policies than with interfaces.) Also, Guy Macon has asked some questions here
(a secton of the same talk page)
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:Project/Rapid/Pine/Continuation_of_educational_video_and_website_series#Measures_of_success_discussion,_copied_from_this_page_on_English_Wikipedia>
regarding the percentage of editors that use different editing interfaces.
Please participate on the talk page if you have the time and interest.
Thanks again for the good work on VisualEditor and related systems.
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )