User blog comment:BertH/Wikia's evolution continues with VisualEditor/@comment-3441771-20131015093552

Skip the Rant  I just died, melted into a soggy puddle and turned to dust. Look I get it. Truly, I do. The primary reason why the visual editor and VisualEditor&mdash;you couldn't think up a different name?&mdash;are necessary: money. 100s... 1000s of wikis still work with no RTE, but Wikia is the most ad soaked self-supporting and therefore needs lots of new editors. Editors mean wikis. Wikis mean more editors. More editors mean more edits. More edits mean more pages. More pages mean more places to stick ads. Make that task so simple a 2 y.o. can achieve at least some mark on the page, then the coffers are filled. Any real regard for the information being added? No.

Sure I'm just another user banging on about ads. But not the way you think: I wouldn't care if there were even more ads. I wouldn't care if they permanently replaced the background with ads. So long as it doesn't affect the information.

OK. Say I'm wrong about the ads (I'm not), so the RTE's job is to make editing Wikitext easier? This is fixing an already solved problem! (Wikitext was created to avoid users editing HTML as much as possible.) The VisualEditor's job is to make the visual editing experience easier. That's fixing an already solved problem that has been "solved" before! &ldquo;As most of us know, learning the ins and outs of wikitext can take a little while.&rdquo; &mdash; BertH RTEs are like bicycle training wheels. They do squat for the learning process. I mean, babies would not learn to walk if they were given a frame to begin with. From experience, to learn Wikitext you disable the RTE. You don't create a whole new suite that has even more support. IOW, don't pull that one; we all know this is for those who will not learn Wikitext. &ldquo;Wikitext editing won't be going away[...]&rdquo; &mdash; BertH That's good to hear. I'll keep you to that when I'm in the <1% still using it. &ldquo;We're opening the doors for a new generation of fans and contributors[...]&rdquo; &mdash; BertH Yeah, the iPad generation. The people that visit websites for 3 seconds. How long are they going to continue editing I wonder?  VisualEditor is 1000 times better than the old visual editor. It loads really quickly. This has true support for most things in Wikitext, whereas the previous version made no attempt.

However, it has created a fatal flaw: it doesn't support Wikitext thrown into the edit field. It turns it to s. Why not create an editor that is either an RTE or a source mode editor? Like both in one? If it was really good... I still wouldn't use it though. ;)

Another issue is a lack of a preview function. I assume this is just missing on the beta release because you went to all that trouble on the fluid previewer.

I have noticed some users complaining about how the carriage return works... remove that double line rubbish. We want users contributing with their own mind in their own way, not how you perceive people should use the new line character. This was always an issue with the visual editor, and one of the many reasons why I didn't call that editor a WYSIWYG. Will I endow VisualEditor with that term? Let's wait and see...

Major question: Will my disabling of the visual editor mean I'll be able to edit VisualEditor free? Or are you forcing me to click the down-arrow? (Which would be totalitarian.)

I haven't had a proper bash of it play with it yet, so I won't comment any further... for now. A note on calling this series "Darwin": Is this an attempt to say that all who oppose, or even disagree slightly over, these gimmicks updates are anti-Darwinists? I didn't think so. Don't keep starting your blogs with, "We have to evolve..." it's really trying.