Board Thread:Darwin/@comment-5275700-20131014191604/@comment-3441771-20131016055040

FishTank wrote: I posted these comments on the blog entry, before I saw this thread. Now that I've read this entry, I wanted to clarify my feedback with both new editors and experienced ones in mind.
 * This seems very awkward with adding Templates. They're available under Transclusion, which I think most casual editors won't catch. In addition, Visual mode would at least give hints about what the parameters were. There's no such guidance here.
 * I also miss the ability to add wikitext inline. It is so natural to want to add link brackets to an article name that I know, and that operation now takes three extra steps. Even in Visual mode, that roundtrip addition was "fluid" (ironic).

I think the new editor makes a learning curve for new users that WANT to get involved very difficult, because it abstracts the code much more than the current visual editor. Most of the "mistakes" I see on the wiki I edit the most are from span copypasta leftovers. They're not making mistakes that would be rectified or mitigated by this project, as I see it. It's a bit like going from finger paints (the new editor) to acrylics (source editing) as opposed to crayons (the current visual editor); there are some basic skills that would be completely missed in the current implementation.

For slightly more experienced editors, it forces them to either ignore that they know "a little wikitext" or go whole hog into Source mode. There has to be a middle ground solution.

For very experienced editors: if they aren't primarily using Source mode or are using the current Visual mode (occasionally or regularly), this new tool will be torture.

'''If one of the purposes of quality control is cleaner source, could that not be accomplished by a Tidy function? Or perhaps a parser at submission that warns "There is an unclosed ]] tag in what you just wrote. The block of problem text has been highlighted.".''' If we experienced editors want to help newer users to make fewer mistakes, more information has to be presented instead of truncating the flexibility that already exists. Maybe "more intuitive" is not the better solution.

I know this tool isn't ready for prime time as is. I know it has a lot to grow on and is made with great hopes. Perhaps my newbie user experience is atypical. Maybe I just don't know what kind of errors others are experiencing that makes this tool necessary. Emboldened point #1: I tend to see too much white-space being added too. This is a consequence of the older visual editor not being a WYSIWYG. There's hope for VisualEditor yet in this department... if Wikia is wise.

Emboldened point #2: (a) Tidy's not a bad idea. Personally, I would build it with a Lightbox (pop up) that makes a list of all the mistakes and shows their fix. Then users would hit "continue". Otherwise even I would not have bothered to learn Wikitext. (b) That's better; let the user makes the changes, because they might think of something else to do. I would actually make the parser live, albeit with a 1000ms delay to avoid pissing people off who haven't closed their brackets. (IOW, just a small cross in the left margin that tooltips.)

Emboldened point #3: I was horrified the first time I saw simple Wikitext&mdash;morbid fascination drove me to keep peeking at what I was *really* doing. So the switch function has to be as fluid as the old visual editor was. (Perhaps quicker... loads, no pun intended, quicker.)