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In the media

VisualEditor will "change world history"

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By Go Phightins!, Andreas Kolbe

VisualEditor will "change world history"

In an article published by the Huffington Post's United Kingdom edition, writer Thomas Church asserts that the new VisualEditor will change history, literally. It says that Wikipedia's mark-up language has been to its advantage, as most people didn't bother trying to learn it:


When VisualEditor is released, however, anyone will be able to edit, without having to climb over the barrier that is wikimarkup. Church argues that Wikipedians will be swamped, and false information will last longer in Wikipedia. Mirroring concerns ("Citogenesis") made by cartoonist Randall Munroe in November 2011, he outlines a four-step process that he believes those with ulterior motives will employ, though it goes against Wikipedia policy:

  1. Write a "fact" in Wikipedia.
  2. Write the same fact in an article citing Wikipedia as the source.
  3. Go back to Wikipedia and cite the article as the source.
  4. The fact now has a citation and becomes true for all eternity.

Though Wikipedia will undoubtedly attract more editors, the web can be a double-edged sword. If Church's nightmare scenario comes about, and "marketers" are successful in enforcing some of their views and ideas into Wikipedia articles, he believes that the marketers will only hasten their own demise, because people in general are aware of their tactics and will simply "trust them less."

As for when this might occur, Tech2.in.com, citing a Wikimedia Foundation blog post, is reporting that the VisualEditor will be rolled out soon to randomly selected new accounts, tracking new information and additional bugs, as a beta test (a wider rollout is planned for the first week of July). The alpha test, which lacks some core functionality, has been available to registered users for some time and has garnered mixed reviews.

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Visual editor

There are varying intentions of people with technical expertise to handle markup, as there are for those who don't have the skills/patience to overcome the syntax barrier. Wikipedia seems to work better with more eyes and involvment upon it, so I am optimistic that it will be a great step forward. Lee∴V 10:14, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Church's op-ed is just the general argument against wikis. How does he think this thing works now? - David Gerard (talk) 12:06, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that the visual editor will attract so many editors. It only helps to do lists and add italic and bold text. That doesn't change much. Tables and templates are the real deal, and the visual editor doesn't tackle that issue. --NaBUru38 (talk) 14:25, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The alpha doesn't address tables and templates. The beta (and the final version in July) are to address those, plus categories and citations.
As for whether VE will attract editors, I think it's more that potential new editors, upon starting to edit an article, often see a bewildering mass of text (particularly for articles with infoboxes), and decide not to even try to change an article. With VE, that particular intimidation factor should disappear. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:05, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • There will be more serious editors and more vandalism, both. Real contributions will be easier to make, as will vandalistic edits. Hopefully and presumably, this ratio will remain unchanged, with new people better able to create "clean" pieces from the get-go. If additional measures become necessary to slow down the flood of vandalism, there's plenty of room to work (prohibiting IP editing, establishing some sort of more serious registration protocol, etc.). But that's well down the road... Carrite (talk) 19:37, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • I fear that the VisualEditor (VE) is going to be something of a disaster for Wikipedia. For starters, it's nowhere near where it needs to be in terms of features and usability. (I've been trying to use it recently and I find it hopeless for all but the most trivial of edits.) Given the WMF's history of rushing out software, I suspect/know it's going to go live half-baked. Worse, I just think the editor is hard and confusing to use, even more so than editing plain text! It contradicts its own design goal of making editing simpler. Second, assuming that the VisualEditor will "turn readers into editors" as is hoped (an idea that I think is overly optimistic and naive), I think the average quality of edits will plummet. The "learning-barrier" works to Wikipedia's advantage as it weeds out the lowest common denominator: the barely literate, woefully under-educated segment of society that does not have the ability to contribute meaningfully to a high-quality encyclopedia. Yes, there are a few very highly-qualified people who are just technologically inept (inexcusable today if you ask me) that may benefit from the VE, but the benefit these new editors is greatly offset by the hordes of negative-quality edits that will flood our watchlists. This deployment is going to be a disaster and will be rescinded a few weeks after for "further development". Similar to the Article Feedback Tool (AFT), this push/pull cycle will continue for a year until it's made final by the WMF against the general sentiment of the community. After a year of more trouble, the VE will be made opt-in instead of opt-out. Basically, I'm expecting a repeat of the AFT fiasco. Jason Quinn (talk) 19:56, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Yes, yes, new editors are a problem. Sorry we can't help you with that - David Gerard (talk) 22:29, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • Your sarcasm is terribly misplaced. My comment cannot be distilled into a dismissive sarcastic "new editors are a problem" eyeroll. It requires thinking about the distribution of new users and the modifications to this distribution that big changes like the VE can cause and how this affects the encyclopedia quality. You seem to be implying that "new editors are always good" and if that's your intention, it's a shallow one-dimensional take on the topic that doesn't consider the interplay between new editors and their affect on quality. I dismiss it outright as too unsophisticated. Jason Quinn (talk) 23:47, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think I agree completely with you, Jason. I'd also like to add a few things. First, the visual editor, at least from my experience, is horrible at editing templates, tables, pictures, and a whole lot more. Not to mention that it's incredibly buggy. Also, like you said, it is going to attract a lot of, uh, unwanted editors. I don't think that vandalism will be any easier to do. However, if Wikia is any indication, the overall quality of edits is going straight down. I personally think that this is one of the many stages of Wikiafication, which is definitely not something I'm a big fan of. However, I guess this has it's ups and downs.
  • You might attract new editors with sufficient competence and skill to successfully become Wikipedians.
  • You might attract new editors with sufficient competence, but not quite enough skill with editing markup. Those people could be trained to become productive editors, I suppose. This is a slight bonus for the visual editor as many of those people are discouraged with the current markup.
  • You might attract new editors with not quite enough competence, even though they are in good faith. Those people probably would either have to get mentorship or be shown the door. I'd expect quite a few of these.
  • You might attract people with not nearly enough competence to edit Wikipedia, even if they want to help. Unfortunately, it sounds like that will be the majority of new editors drawn in with the visual editor, but I'm not sure.
  • You might attract a few vandals who realize that Wikipedia is easier to edit, and therefore vandalize, than they previously thought.
I also agree with Jason's statement that a lot of features the WMF has implemented aren't fully baked up and don't really help. As he pointed out, the Article Feedback Tool doesn't really get anything done. Out of the many comments that are given via that tool, only a few have any changes that are implemented. Before you start yelling at users for not patrolling the feedback logs, a lot of the feedback is crap, a few ones are specific and good, a lot of them are possibly useful but not much at all, and a lot of the feedback is in good faith but not implementable and kind of stupid. So if the visual editor is anything like this in overall effect, with bad edits instead of bad feedback, I think we have a problem. There are going to be more unhelpful edits than good ones. Then again, I might not be completely correct. Thekillerpenguin (talk) 06:23, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • You are complaining that a piece of software labeled as alpha is buggy and feature incomplete? That is the definition of alpha software. I don't expect any piece of version 1.0 software to be feature complete forever. Atleast anybody can test this out before it goes as the default editor, which hasn't always been the case with WMF software roll outs. I do worry they are doing releases based on the calendar and not when it is ready. "VisualEditor is coming! It will be available to all logged-in users from early July." It should read "...it will be available when it is feature complete based upon version 1.0 goals."
Please don't compare AFT with Visual Editor. Personally, AFT looks great on paper, not great in real-life. WMF has done some good projects and some, well, not so good ones. Special:NewPagesFeed is an example of a good project. Notifications, in the end, is a good project, but had a horrible roll out.
I had to laugh a Jason Quinn's remarks of "I just think the editor is hard and confusing to use, even more so than editing plain text!" It reminded me when Microsoft Word first came out and everybody was using WordPerfect... Word's GUI vs WordPerfect's faster/easier (non-newbie wise) to use text version. Alot of the same arguments for and against Word have been thrown at Visual Editor. Word way was easier for newbies to learn and was WYSIWYG (won't mention Microsoft's shenanigans). I think being easier for newbies is a good thing. The ramifications are a different story and we will have to wait and see how that turns out. Bgwhite (talk) 08:58, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Unfortunately VE isn't yet enabled in Wikipedia talk: namespace so you will just need to look at my user page to see my point. I'm a bot operator, and someone just called me a template guru on my talk page, but I still find Microsoft Word and the like somewhat difficult to use, as I don't spend all day using it (actually I only compose word-style documents on rare occasions). I grew up in an ASCII world, so am quite comfortable with plain-text markup editing, and find most toolbars to be tedious. But something relatively simple like a smarter template namespace edit window that paired up beginning and ending braces in preview mode would be much appreciated. Wbm1058 (talk) 12:23, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
@Bgwhite The VE is "beta" now, not "alpha", is it not? Regardless this is a software scheduled to go live in a couple weeks! Jason Quinn (talk) 13:53, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Jason Quinn Per Tech news: 2013-24, an alpha version went live to all Wikipedias on June 6. Going "live" to logged in users may not be a bad thing, as this will mean more people testing it or more people frustrated. There is a chicken or egg scenario here. But I do share your concerns as it does sound like they are up against a date deadline and not a quality deadline. Bgwhite (talk) 21:39, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Creating "facts" via Wikipedia

I find the argument by Thomas Church to be unpersuasive. First, it's not all that easy for someone to publish something that is a reliable source. Second, and more importantly, it's easy to see when a "fact" was added to Wikipedia, and that such a "fact" didn't exist in a reliable source until after the Wikipedia article occurred. There have been a number of cases (sorry, can't cite one at the moment) where such "all-sources-appear-after--Wikipedia" have been dealt with by deleting the Wikipedia information. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:05, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

See WP:CIRCULAR.—Wavelength (talk) 16:44, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
both Philip Roth and Timothy Messer-Kruse tried this and were rebuffed. the problem is not that the vandals will take over, but that the gatekeepers can't tell error correction from vandalism. this is a people problem not a software problem. 98.169.241.140 (talk) 23:58, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah. People with ulterior motives still have motives, so they are going to learn how to cheat the system anyway (and, eventually, that they can't). The new editing system just makes honest editors:
  1. Remove the problem faster, and
  2. Simply edit better.
The point in not putting it in doesn't hold water. I don't see his side. XndrK (talk · contribs · count) 22:12, 18 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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