On 16 June 2015 at 10:53, Derk-Jan Hartman <[email protected]> wrote:

> https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-December/063225.html
> I just found back this post by David Gerard from 2010 and was struck by how
> dead-on the discussion and analysis was and how far we have actually come
> with VE 5 years later, even though we still did not pass the finish line
> just yet.


:-D

Erik had been thinking along similar lines, and this is about when the
VE project started in earnest.

See also Magnus' early attempt: WYSIFTW, which had a similar "full
page" editor interface to VE. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WYSIFTW
(A page I just edited very quickly and efficiently in VE.)


> I think VE is really close now to being usable in production, but I think
> that we are FAR from done on this front. Like was stated, templates are a
> real problem. A UI problem, and one that VE doesn't really solve. Citoid
> sort of does, but just for one small subset of templates.


I think VE right now is good enough to put live for newbies, but
getting there was always going to take a couple of years.

(The en:wp advanced user community is *still* upset at how VE was
launched, so will take a bit of convincing to let VE go default or
even be presented as a default. I suspect a lot of them haven't used
it recently and should give it another round of testing and
bug-reporting.)

There's a recent Eric S. Raymond post on the sort of problem VE is: he
calls it a "Zeno tarpit". http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6772

(How did we get here? Because MediaWiki started off parsing wikitext
using a chain of regular expressions rather than a proper parser.
Because we had no idea all this would end up this big. From small
acorns of decision come huge oaks of technical debt ...)


- d.

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