User talk:Jdforrester (WMF)/Archive 2

Office hours
I have to say, I'm glad that I didn't join the office hours, reading the logs seems to indicate that they were a total waste of time. Nice to see that Spanish editors have the same problems and get brushed off just as easily though.

You claimed in the office huors log that "But in 3/6/12 months it will not be true, and it will confuse people. VisualEditor is already proving to be a success for new users, despite the issues." What do you consider "proving to be a success for new users", apart from anecdotical evidence? WMF figures indicated that (before the opt-in was enabled) newly registered editors used VE for 20% of the edits, and Wikitext for 80%. No significant change could be detected in these figures over the months, there was no increase in VE use. I have anecdotical evidence (no means to collect this more thoroughly) indicating that people tried to use VE, failed, and then simply stopped editing. Are such things monitored and taken into account when you claim that is "proving to be a success"?

Just like with the edit summary issue above, please provide some good evidence for your claims or don't make them please.

In the same log, you claim "Also, the numbers of accidental mis-formats (having to fix your syntax after saving) is zero with VisualEditor, obviously." Um, what? What do you mean when you make such an outlandish claim? Even today, basic edits by people who regularly use VE for simple things create malformed pages, like here (mentioned on WP:VEF). If this is not what you mean, then please give examples of what you mean with "fix your syntax". Removing empty section headers? Needs to be done in VE. Saving internal links as external links and vice versa? Gets done with VE all the time. Anything else? Fram (talk) 13:28, 9 October 2013 (UTC)


 * I believe that "accidental mis-formats" refers to things like [unpaired brackets]] in a failed effort to make a link. BracketBot sends out a couple hundred messages every day about that one problem (a number of messages, BTW, that exceeds the number of nowiki tags produced by VisualEditor each day before it was changed to opt-out).  The classic wikitext editor is essentially "designed to fail" whenever the user makes a typo with brackets, or forgets the slash in the second ref tag (thus putting all the text between that typo and the next ref tag [or the entire rest of the page, if it's the last one] into a footnote), or otherwise doesn't get every single character of formatting typed correctly.
 * It's also worth remembering that different wikis have different responses. I checked every diff made in VisualEditor at ja.wp for weeks during the summer, and I never once saw the nowiki problem:  Japanese editors just didn't type brackets inside VisualEditor.  At the Spanish Wikipedia, VisualEditor is currently (last ten days or so) being used by slightly less than half of the new users (accounts registered since their rollout date on July 25th).  When you keep in mind that about a quarter of users can't even see VisualEditor (because they're running IE or have Javascript disabled), I think it is not unreasonable to interpret this as a clear majority use of those editors who are actually able to make a choice for that project.  What happens at the English Wikipedia, with the oldest editor base and by far the most technically complicated pages, is not what happens everywhere.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:58, 9 October 2013 (UTC)


 * [ec] User:Whatamidoing (WMF) is indeed correct - what I had written:
 * Sorry for my inclarity. It is fundamentally impossible in VisualEditor to make the very common wikitext mistakes like unbalanced bold/italics (e.g., ), broken template calls (e.g.,  ), broken references (e.g.,  ), broken image invocations (e.g.,  ) broken categories (e.g.,  ), mis-matched reference names (e.g.,  ), mis-typed template parameter invocations (e.g.,  ) and dozens of other hugely common mistakes that catch out new and experienced editors alike, and which again and again and again have been demonstrated to drive new contributors away. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:06, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
 * But on the other hand, it is much more common now to see half-linked words, empty section headers, text converted into a section header, and so on. Wrong edits like this one are easier to make in VE than in Wikitext. Having prevented a number of errors doesn't mean that "the numbers of accidental mis-formats (having to fix your syntax after saving) is zero with VisualEditor, obviously.", and such claims can only backfire. Whatamidoing, note that the problems / backlash isn't only here, but also on the German and Dutch wikis. It seems as if it not some purely local problem. I have heard that both the Spanish and Danish wikis also were discussing changing to opt-in, but I have no idea what the current status on this is. Are any figures available on the percentage of users that opens a page in edit mode (VE or wikitext), but don't save their edit? Is this higher or lower in VE? Do you have a number of users that made an edit in VE, and then made a consecutive edit on the same page in the Wikitext editor (indicating that they probably couldn't do whatever they wanted in VE)? Fram (talk) 08:25, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
 * They ran those numbers at the start of July, and discovered that the system had some problems (like more people saved an edit in VisualEditor than opened it, or something similarly implausible). I don't know what happened since then.  I do know that they ought to exclude me from any such report, because I open VisualEditor to verify bug reports multiple times a day, and I save very few of those edits.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:06, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks. While I would obviously prefer to have such figures, I appreciate a honest answer that an attempt to get them failed, and so you don't have them. Can't be helped :-( Fram (talk) 20:06, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Note that I have no objections against implementing the few improvements VE made into the wikitext editor. E.g. the template editor, with Template Data, could be a good improvement for Wikitext editing (making the current citation drop down menu more general in fact). On the other hand, the file treatment, which may have eliminated some errors but at the same time eliminated nearly all functionality, is not an improvement. I see no reason though why you couldn't have a dropdown "files and templates", where the options for a file are treated like the parameters for a template, and you can indicate "thumb", "left" or "right" and so on. Fram (talk) 08:58, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

I can't comment on the Japanese wikipedia, but looking at the Spanish, where the "nowiki" tag doesn't seem to be activated, the most recent VE edit is this, adding incorrect nowikis. No idea why this doesn't happen in Japan, but it clearly isn't an enwiki-only problem. (also e.g. here. And this may not be a syntax error, but it's hardly good code either (and rather rare in Wikitext editing). I also note a very high vandalism / vandalism reversion rate in these edits, but I haven't compared this to wikitext editing so I can't claim that this is VE related. Fram (talk) 09:37, 10 October 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm immensely puzzled by this - VisualEditor has not remotely "eliminated nearly all functionality" from media files. We have repeatedly and clearly said over the last nine months that the rest of the functionality (all of it) is coming, but is less of a priority. If you're going to mis-represent that, how can we have a proper conversation about the matter on which we should focus and when? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:13, 11 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Pot, kettle, black. In my opinion, yes, it has "eliminated nearly all functionality". What can I do? I can add a file, I can resize it, and I can give it a caption. I can not chose the position, I can not edit any of the parameters directly (alt text? Size? see Extended image syntax), I can not change the file (replace file 1 with file 2)... And I have absolutely no idea how I am supposed to add or modify a gallery in VE (which is "also" file functionality!). And the new fucntionality (resizing, moving) works so poorly that it is hardly worth it. The only improvement I see so far is the file choice display when you add a new file. Please, next time, try to remember that a difference of opinion is something completely different than misrepresenting things. For me, nearly all functionality wrt files is missing. For you, it isn't. Fine. If you can't live with someone having a different and less favourable opinion, then yes, it will be hard to have a proper conversation, and it will be hard for you to do your WMF job properly. But don't blame me for your problems. I'm one of the few editors on enwiki still testing VE and commenting on it. Perhaps try to encourage others to join, instead of alienating the few that are left? Fram (talk) 07:22, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
 * "Eliminated all functionality" makes it sound like VisualEditor previously supported all these things but is now actively removing these elements (e.g., automatically deleting the  position setting or the alt text on an image), not merely that the current version doesn't happen to let you edit that part of the page.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:39, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, I thought it wsa obvious that I meant "eliminated" compared to what we had (i.e. wikitext editing), not that VE used to be better somehow. But if this was the cause of the confusion and rather vehement reply, then thanks for clearing this up. Fram (talk) 09:37, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

An example of things that are "fundamentally impossible in VE" and happen zero times: this edit empties a named ref, causing the "Cite error: The named reference prisa was invoked but never defined" error. No idea how the editor did it, I haven't tried to reproduce it, but it shows that VE also enables (and sometimes produces) such edits. Making categorical claims is rarely a good idea. Fram (talk) 08:19, 21 October 2013 (UTC)
 * It appears that you can reproduce this if you select the ref, open the ref dialog, blank the contents, and apply your changes. This can be reproduced both when the named ref is reused and when it's not, as well as when the ref is added in VisualEditor and blanked during the same editing session (not saved, so no diff for you, but it looks identical).
 * I'm not sure what the expected behavior should be: to have the whole ref removed, even though the user didn't delete the whole thing?  to do what the user actually did, which is blank the contents?  to produce some sort of warning?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:58, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Another example of one of these impossible things: this edit introduced a Cite error: A (see the help page). big red tag. So your claim that "It is fundamentally impossible in VisualEditor to make the very common wikitext mistakes like [...] broken references (e.g., ) [...] Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:06, 9 October 2013 (UTC)" is again, cmlearly not correct. It may be impossible if you use VE "correctly", but then again, that applie to wikitext editing as well... Fram (talk) 10:14, 6 November 2013 (UTC)


 * The ref tags are properly paired in that diff (which is produced by typing the full wikicode of the ref, including ref tags, into VisualEditor's reference dialog):


 * I don't know why that produces the unpaired ref warning (presumably something about the nowiki tag), but the problem isn't VisualEditor. You get the same thing if you paste that code straight into the old wikitext editor.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:46, 7 November 2013 (UTC)
 * "You get the same thing if you paste that code straight into the old wikitext editor." Yeah, obviously, but it is using VE that this was generated, so VE is quite capable of producing these, even though the opposite was claimed. Many errors created by VE will produce the same result if you copy the created wikitext into, well, wikitext, that's not really a valid argument. The end result is that VE produces ref tag errors due to its "nowiki" problems, even though this was claimed to be impossible. Fram (talk) 07:50, 8 November 2013 (UTC)
 * It's still not valid wikicode even if the nowiki's aren't present. This:


 * displays as  inline, with nothing in the reflist.  Wikicode does not support nested ref tags.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 14:27, 8 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Of course it is not valid wikicode, we would hardly get an error message otherwise. I thought VE couldn't insert invalid wikicode though, that that was exactly what was being claimed and what I tried to show is false? It looks to me as if you agree with my point, but you probably intend something different, so I'm obviously not understanding you correctly.Fram (talk) 14:50, 8 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Meanwhile, while trying to reproduce this, I have frozen my sandbox without using navboxes or the like, just by playing with refs, grouped refs, moving refs, using ref syntax in VE, ...; the save button is again no longer usable now, even though VE knows that there are changes (I have the undo and redo button, and "save" is not greyed out). Similarly, the toolabr drops down, but none of the options then work (media, categories, ...). Fram (talk) 14:53, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Pure VE, no tricks or wikisource copypaste or whatever. First, add an empty ref. Oops... It doesn't help if I use a group name either. So perhaps it is possible to have incorrect wikisyntax by only using VE (and not doing anything extremely complicated, simply use "insert ref" without providing any text to it). You can, by the way, reuse these malformed refs, but that doesn't really help... So, I'm a new user, I have made this error, I'll now try to correct it by adding text to the ref? Nope, you get a "no entry" sign with the popup text: "This reference is defined in a template or other generated block, and for now can only be edited in source mode"... (Despite that message and sign, I can edit the reference in VE anyway :-D ) Fram (talk) 15:09, 8 November 2013 (UTC)
 * That looks like two bugs to me. Have you posted them at Bugzilla yet?
 * (I agree that adding an empty ref is something that new users might do.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:04, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
 * No, not at Bugzilla yet (not by me at least, they may exist there already otherwise) Fram (talk) 13:31, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

es:VE poll
Hi. es:poll about VE has finish. I told Jan and Raystorm. As a result several recommendation were made at poll and a report (still in development) to improve Encyclopedia. Cheers. --Ganímedes (talk) 10:35, 13 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks! Look forward to the report. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 00:38, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Referencing
Sorry to do this on your talk page but the discussion on the VE feedback page was archived before I could ask this question and I don't know if it's important enough to reopen the discussion on the feedback page. I was very confused by your statement (on bug 60361) that VE was trying avoid usage of the reflist parameter. The reason for my confusion is that, when I add references via the transclusion button and the page does not already have a reflist parameter, wiki encourages me, in bright red letters, to add one in. I'm not sure how that fits into discouraging use of reflist. Red Fiona (talk) 20:39, 11 March 2014 (UTC)


 * No problem. The local community on the English Wikipedia have customised that message – it originally asks you to add  rather than   or anything similar that is specific to just this wiki. If we fix up the built-in tool so that the templates are no longer needed, I imagine the message will be changed back to normal. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:44, 11 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the information. I've switched to using /references.  Red Fiona (talk) 22:12, 12 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Please don't encourage references over reflist, it offers no advantages I know of (a very, very minimal increase in speed perhaps) and lacks some of the advantages reflist has. Reflist is de facto the standard at enwiki ("This template is used on 2,600,000+ pages."), and this isn't just reflected in one message, but also throughout pages like Help:Footnotes, with sentences like "When editing,, but I don't think that is supported by VE...


 * While it may be correct that the changed message is enwiki specific (I haven't checked), it should also be said that "reflist", i.e. a wiki-local improved reference template that has replaced "references/" as the default, is not enwiki specific but also happened at e.g. frwiki (, 390,000 pages) or nlwiki ( "We geven er de voorkeur aan om dit sjabloon te gebruiken boven "). Dewiki doesn't use this, and consequently don't have ref lists in columns or the other extra options. Anyway, bug 51260 has been open for 8 months now. Changing VE so that every wiki can decide their own "default" reflist syntax to be added through VE would be a much simpler solution probably. Fram (talk) 08:10, 13 March 2014 (UTC)
 * If you aren't actually using any of the "advanced features" in the template, then why would it be desirable to use the option that is slightly slower, that increases your risk of reaching the transclusion limit, and that is unfamiliar to people who use MediaWiki but are new to the English Wikipedia (e.g., most of our non-English editors and almost everyone who learned to use it at work)? It seems to me that when there is no advantage to using the template, that there's no disadvantage to using the simpler alternative.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:22, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
 * If you (WMF) are automatically using the option-free version, then people using VE will have a hard time knowing that a better (more flexible) alternative exists. And the non-English editors and people using Mediawiki before editing here are a clear minority (and even among the non-English editors, many use some version of reflist as the default, as I showed above). Of course, the cases are rare where you reach the transclusion limit but do not use any of the features of reflist (like multiple columns). Proposing references as a valid alternative is no problem, but actively discouraging people from using Reflist, like Jdforrester and the WMF do, is a bad idea. Of course, we have had the same discussion in VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive 2014 1, where your arguments were even less convincing (e.g. your conversation with Eric Corbett there). Fram (talk) 07:46, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

Pertaining to my Wikidata citation proposal
Hello again. I don't know if you've had a chance to check back on my proposal at the village pump yet, but it has been suggested that the conversation should be moved to Wikidata or Meta rather than be limited to only Wikipedia English. In principle, I'm not opposed to this. My proposal could be implemented at any or all the Wikipedias (not just en:WP). The problem is what I am proposing (as it currently stands) would be implemented as a template (something each Wikipedia language edition would need to implement separately) and I have very little experience operating outside of Wikipedia so I don't know where such a discussion would go. I'm hoping someone with the WMF might be able to offer some guidance.

Meta makes more sense than Wikidata since this is about how to do things in Wikipedia articles, but is there any forum provided by Meta suitable for discussions that pertain almost entirely to Wikipedia? What about it being very Wikipedia edition dependent? While editors from other Wikipedias should have a say in something relevant to them, this is something that would or wouldn't be implemented within their own template spaces. Does that make the suggestion to move my proposal wrong? On the other hand, if supported, my proposal would prompt people to fix/complete the half-implemented Wikidata feature it depends on. ...help. — Sowlos  14:44, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Not happy
I am not happy with the tone of this comment, "You seem to be confused".
 * Firstly, are you seriously saying that as "Product Manager, VisualEditor team" you are completely unable to give a useful answer to a question about what the plans for mathematics rendering are or what progress has been made against those plans? Does mathematics rendering really have nothing whatsoever to do with Visual Editor?  Or is there some other reason why you prefer not to answer the question?
 * Secondly, if you wanted to be helpful, instead of airily alluding to "the volunteers who maintain that extension" you might have said who they are. Who are the people to whom, in your opinion, I should address that question, please?
 * Thirdly, if you really wanted to be helpful, and I am finding it hard to avoid the conclusion that you do not, you might even have volunteered to pass the question on to the approriate people rather than batting it back so unhelpfully.

Once again, if you engage constructively with the volunteer mathematics editor community, it is likely to prove of benefit to the project. So far I'm seeing less of a serious attempt to engage and too much petty point-scoring. Deltahedron (talk) 10:03, 3 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Firstly, are you seriously saying that as "Product Manager, VisualEditor team" you are completely unable to give a useful answer to a question about what the plans for mathematics rendering are or what progress has been made against those plans?
 * Yes. I don't work on the mathematics rendering system, and I don't tell volunteer developers what to do. Do you think that would be appropriate? I fear that our volunteer developers would disagree.
 * Does mathematics rendering really have nothing whatsoever to do with Visual Editor?
 * Yes. What the community of developers creating, augmenting and improving the mathematics editing and rendering systems thinks are important are presumably what they will choose to work on. I can recommend changes to their existing VisualEditor plugin, and we can dive in and fix bugs caused by VisualEditor itself, but I think that you as an actual user of their tools will have a much closer and more credible relationship with them on suggesting priorities.
 * Or is there some other reason why you prefer not to answer the question?
 * No.
 * ''Secondly, if you wanted to be helpful, instead of airily alluding to "the volunteers who maintain that extension" you might have said who they are. Who are the people to whom, in your opinion, I should address that question, please?
 * I don't know. Physikerwelt is the main (sadly, almost only) volunteer developer on the mathematics side, but he's not been involved much in the VisualEditor plugin, which was developed by a GSoC student.
 * Thirdly, if you really wanted to be helpful, and I am finding it hard to avoid the conclusion that you do not, you might even have volunteered to pass the question on to the approriate people rather than batting it back so unhelpfully.
 * You replied to my post; personally I would consider it rude to have ignored your question entirely when I was responding to others in the thread. I'm sorry that you think that it is more polite to merely ignore someone rather than to try to help them. Also, you should feel free to re-read the terms of "AGF" when you make speculative statements implying that I know more about fellow volunteers than you do.
 * I regret that you are taking your apparent lack of knowledge on the intricacies of who is developing mathematical tools for the Wikimedia community (which is entirely understandable) and turning it into my problem because it happens not to be me.
 * Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 05:08, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 05:08, 4 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Thank you for the promptness of your reply. I could unpick it point by point but I'm not going to bother.  You inserted yourself into a discussion on a topic (MathJax rendering) on which you now profess complete ignorance, but it is your underlying position that the resulting confusion is in no way your fault.  I disagree but there seems little point in continuing here.  You have wasted a lot of my time and I do not propose to waste any more.
 * However, I do acknowledge your admission that it is indeed correct that WMF has zero plans for mathematics. While I find that position lamentable in itself, it is helpful to know that it is the case.  Deltahedron (talk) 06:21, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

Citation formatting tools
Since it seems you are the person to pester with this: Is there planned work to make citation formatting less tedious in Wikipedia? User:Citation bot is currently broken for DOIs, even though the DOI formatter service works fine via its Google Chrome extension (which produces citations in 1001 formats, but not in Wikipedia's citation templates). WP:REFLINK is a private, non-WMF enterprise now. http://reftag.appspot.com/ never was supported by the WMF. All of these are very useful in cutting down the chore of ref formatting an producing easily verifiable content in practically every area of Wikipedia. But none of these tools are supported by the WMF? Why? Don't tell me that the Visual Editor has some limited support for some of this stuff, because I don't want to be hamstrung to use VE in order to automate citation formatting. JMP EAX (talk) 18:46, 20 August 2014 (UTC)


 * mw:citoid is the current focus. It is initially being developed for VisualEditor, but it is being created as a standalone service that could be used with the wikitext editor as well.  It will likely be some months before it's ready for production.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:24, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

Personal attacks
Your comments at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics, such as "misleading, to put it mildly", "you try to twist my words", "Your continued grossly bad faith responses" constitute personal attacks. Please post here, or email me, the name of your supervisor at WMF. Deltahedron (talk) 20:36, 19 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Here's the link again, from the last time you demanded this in the midst of making personal attacks: . Hope this helps you find solace. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 21:20, 19 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Thank you for that link, although this is in fact the first time I have seen it. Deltahedron (talk) 21:25, 19 August 2014 (UTC)


 * My apologies; I thought I'd given that to you before (or that I'd seen you get it from another collegue). It's linked (indirectly via 1 click) from the bottom of every page on Wikipedia, FWIW ("A Wikimedia project" > "Staff and contractors"). Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 21:30, 19 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Having slept on it, I have come to the conclusion that I don't really care. I have to admit that I was briefly sufficiently annoyed that I had been seriously considering making a case to your employer that might have involved some kind of real-life consequences.  But now I see just what a waste of time that would be.  Have fun.  Deltahedron (talk) 06:05, 20 August 2014 (UTC)


 * If I saw any future for mathmatics editing at Wikipedia, I might feel inclined to think you sufficiently important in the scheme of things to exert the effort required to bring about the real-life consequences that follow from calling me a liar and making statements which are ridiculously easy to contradict with evidence. But you are not: I'll confine myself to refuting your more lucicrous assertions.   Deltahedron (talk) 18:39, 21 August 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm sad that you don't think mathematics editing has a future at Wikimedia. Maybe we should talk about how you're going to help fix that, rather than continuing to threaten to spend your time trying to get me sacked? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:51, 21 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Since I have never said that I want to get you sacked, and have just said, twice, explicitly, that I have no intention of doing anything of the kind, your final phrase is at best irrelevant, but since you are so concerned about the issue, for the third time: I am not going to do anything to try to get you sacked -- OK now?
 * Now for the substantiative question. You may notice that I have been trying to contribute to improving mathematics editing by such efforts as: writing 60 articles in the area and making thousands of edits to articles in mathematics.  You will also recall that I did my best to contribute to discussions about how mathematics would fit into planning for VY and Flow.  The response from WMF staff was uniformly discouraging: yours in particular varied from a reluctance to supply useful information; sulking and refusing to answer questions because I was resctful enough to you; and a series of personal attacks culminating in accusing me of lying on the basis of statements of your own which are demonstrably false.  As the request of Jimmy Wales I worked with other mathematics editors to put forward a set of proposals ranging from the strategic to the specific: unfortunately they have been rejected; mathematics is not on the roadmap; you have no resources to devote to it; any progress will have to come from volunteers; you do not want to broker interaction between volunteers; WMF is imposing software on users irrespective of whether it's fit for our purpose -- no, I'm not going to try to fix all that.  Deltahedron (talk) 19:16, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

"I'm sad that you don't think mathematics editing has a future at Wikimedia. Maybe we should talk about how you're going to help fix that, rather than continuing to threaten to spend your time trying to get me sacked?" is a nice example of a false dilemma, of course, as it may well be that achieving the latter would indirectly help the former. But in general, I have the feeling that Deltahedron, and the larger community of mathematics editors here, wants a positive answer from you on how the WMF is going to help them, not the WMF asking dedicated but frustrated mathematics editors on how they are going to solve their own frustration at something they have no influence on. Your replies are unhelpful in the extreme. I hoped against all evidence that the WMF would slowly learn to communicate with the editing community in a positive and helpful manner, but time and again this turns out to be wrong, as things only seem to get worse (with the whole Eloquence fiasco here and at dewiki as the most painful recent example of course). Just tell the math editors that no, the WMF will do nothing to help them, they are not on the list for the next few years, and it's up to them to live with their problems or stop editing. They won't like it, but they will know what they can expect in clear language. Fram (talk) 20:24, 21 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Sure, except that we did tell Deltahedron and others that we indeed don't currently have any plans for staff-led engineering work on mathematics, and that the existing volunteer developer resources should not be over-ridden by WMF. What do you think we should have done? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:40, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
 * "that the existing volunteer developer resources should not be over-ridden by WMF"? Sounds like a meningless cop-out. The WMF has never cared about overriding volunteer developer resources when they have decided that X or Y needs to be done, whether the community wants it or not. As or what you (WMF) should have done, was clearly indicate where such decisions (on what to spend staff on) were made, where the community could actually join these discussions and influence the outcome, and first and foremost make it clear that the decisions on what to allocate staff to are made with the encyclopedia and the community behind it as the goal, and that previous decisions can be reversed when it turns out that they don't give the hoped for results. Basically, the exact opposite of what the WMF is doing now, which is to continue pouring money in pet projects which don't work or don't give the expected results, which are clearly unwanted by the vast majority of the editing community, but which continue to get priority from the WMF, even when it alienates some of the largest user bases you have and creates even deeper rifts between the WMF and the editors (I thought the low end was reached a year ago, but clearly not).
 * TLDR? Show that you have learned something from all the failures of the last few years, months and weeks, instead of alienating even more editors. Fram (talk) 06:43, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm here just to post a note of support for Jdforrester, against what I consider to be harassment by some Wikipedia editors. Mgnbar (talk) 11:28, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Help with a GLAM-related template
Hi James, it's unlikely you remember me but we met once in London at an OKFN thing in King's Cross. I probably rambled about archaeology! Anyway, I'm now coordinating a GLAMwiki project in Yorkshire and trying to pilot a GLAM Directory - a proposal that got great support at Wikimania. However, I'm having trouble with the template needed to start things out and wondered whether you could cast your eye over things or recommend a Wikipedian to help? The idea is to have a directory of uniform template-based pages for each GLAM we work with so that there is a more standardised documentation than the current forest of project pages. I've done some mock ups in the Prezi I gave at Wikimania and played around in my sandbox with the code for the 'user info' template. I've made a formal request but it's already been archived! (at the bottom). What do you think? Maybe there's a better way to go about this? Cheers anyway, hope you're well! PatHadley (talk) 12:17, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor
FYI, the Visual Editor post at the Village pump (proposal) has a Auto-filled citation generator "View as animated GIF" link which returns a 404 error.--Wolbo (talk) 21:51, 28 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Sorry about that; now fixed. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 21:56, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor default bug
Hey, Jdforrester, after thinking/discussing it, I'd like to try to shear off the hyperbole and restart the discussion a little bit. So, one of my main concerns with this whole VE thing is the inconsistency in editing experiences between IP editors and newly-registered editors. Obviously, given that enwiki is a VE-second site, IP editors use the source editor, and this bug creates an inconsistency between an IP editor's experience and that of a newly-registered user. I feel that consistency of editing experience is an important thing to have (at least as a baseline), and the IP-to-new-account barrier is likely to be a particularly important one.

Is this a thing that we can agree needs fixing? I think it's important, though I guess without being able to run an A/B test I can't really say for sure. And granted, the WMF might have better things to do. But from my perspective, the only thing it costs me is time (which I don't mind giving, since I like fiddling with scripts). In that respect, I've created a Javascript snippet that should pretty much fix the bug from our end, without needing any code changes or anything on your part. The source is here; I've also posted it to the VPT thread. What are your thoughts? Writ Keeper &#9863;&#9812; 21:54, 11 May 2016 (UTC)


 * Hey.
 * Right now there are three circumstances for new account editors:
 * They edited as an IP, starting automatically in the wikitext editor but switching to use the visual editor. When they create an account, on their first edit MediaWiki will remember that they used the visual editor, and load that, offering the chance in the "Welcome!" dialog to switch back to wikitext anyway.
 * They edited as an IP, using the wikitext editor. When they create an account, on their first edit MediaWiki will remember that they used the wikitext editor, and load that. It won't even give them the option to switch to the visual editor, except by pressing the " " icon (and with no pointers to it suggesting that they should).
 * They didn't edit as an IP. When they create an account, on their first edit MediaWiki will see that they've not edited before, load the visual editor (unless their machine can't), and offer the chance in the "Welcome!" dialog to switch to wikitext.
 * To undo the second part of the change, as requested in that thread, would only change the last of these three situations, and would instead give them the wikitext editor without the option to choose. As of next week that will be slightly better, when the software to add the "Welcome!" dialog to the wikitext editor too rolls out.
 * I do not at all agree that this configuration is a "bug". This is the configuration several other wikis have, and though it is accidental (on my part) that the wiki got to this state in one bound, this was the next step and it is intentional (on my part) that it stay here for now, on the way to the next step (default for IP users, which we'd only do following another enwiki community RfC like the one done last September).
 * Also, the impact of the script you wrote is non-trivial (amongst other things like altering users' preferences without going through security review, it would remove the "Welcome!" dialog from all new users, for whom it has be especially designed and carefully tweaked following several rounds of expensive expert testing). I would very strongly urge you to rethink your approach to this as a technical 'problem' that you can 'fix', and think of it as a partnership where we can discuss and agree a way forward.
 * Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 22:20, 11 May 2016 (UTC)


 * Well, your second scenario is well-taken, but it's a little more nuanced than that, isn't it? I assume MW remembers through use of cookies? If so, your second case (IP editing with wikitext) is only valid if they register their account within the same browser session as an edit (depending on the user's browser settings). So that's definitely good, but not foolproof. I'm not really sure what you mean by security review; the preferences are changed, to be sure, but it's done through the standard Mediawiki API, and there are no variable inputs that that might need to be sanitized, so I don't know how that's a risk--it also doesn't change any settings that are visible to the user, so it's not like it'll remove something a user has set themself.
 * If we were rolling this out to IP and new users alike, that'd be one thing, but I don't think that leaving in this half-state is a good idea. I'm certainly open to discussing it, and I'm totally willing to reach a middle ground; as I said at VPT, I'm not planning on taking any unilateral steps on my side. For example, I would be more than happy to figure out a way to get the betawelcome message with the option to switch to VE back in--given that it would work in the other direction, with the source editor as the default. I'd also think it should mention that VE is still in beta, but that's whatever, I guess.
 * Finally, let me just throw this out there: if you wouldn't release this to all IP users without a consensus from a community RfC, why are you doing it to registered users? I get that it's a smaller impact, since it'd affect each user only once, instead of each time an IP tries to edit, but I still think it's a valid point. I mean, even if it wasn't the intent, you can see how it at least looks like a fait accompli maneuver? Writ Keeper &#9863;&#9812; 22:52, 11 May 2016 (UTC)


 * I'm not going to discuss the script / security / Terms of Use / CFAA issues, because (a) I don't work on that stuff, and I'm definitely not an expert, and (b) I think it's a distraction from the substance of this discussion. :-)
 * Yes, the editor software uses cookies which last 30 days since the last edit. For all but an incredibly small number of our users that means it's not just "within the same browser session", but reasonably long-term.
 * Rolling the change out to IP users has indeed been planned for a long while (as discussed in the RfC last year). As we said then, that will only happen once we've tested it and agreed (through a new RfC) the change. However, we will still need to roll out this change (for users) before the A/B test on IP users (because otherwise the users in the test group would get VE as an IP, but when they registered when they'd get WT again), so we're still in that Catch-22. Doing another RfC to re-set this with no new data (rather than doing an RfC after the A/B test with actual data to discuss) won't be ideal.
 * However, there's way too much shouting right now, and no proper discussion, so I'm going to bring forward the fix from next week to improve the flow, and undo the change. No point getting into a war, I'm here to work as a partner.
 * Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:20, 12 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Yeah, there's definitely a lot of heat going around, and I'm probably as much to blame as anyone (my M. Hypothesis joke--and it was a joke--was a poor choice in retrospect). So I'm sorry about that; I should've thought better of it.
 * I see your point; you're right in general about the cookies relieving most of the inconsistency, but I still feel like, given that we've been told that enwiki is a WT-first site, just the possibility is unnecessary. (I habitually set my browser to clear cookies when I close the window, so I may not have a representative view of cookie persistence.) But at this point that's little more than my opinion, so I won't keep trying to beat you over the head with it.
 * I also see your point about the A/B test, but is there not a way to take the user's cookies into account? Like, if a newly-registered user has a WT or VE cookie, whitelist them into the appropriate treatment, otherwise, allocate them randomly like normal? I guess that could skew the distribution of the registered-user sample, though. Anyway, I can respect the need for new data to support a new RfC, but it would just seem from my reading of the RfC in September of last year that we weren't going to do something like this until another new RfC. It is a bit of a Catch-22, I'll admit, but I don't know.
 * It's just the way this change was framed was weird, y'know? If it was framed as, "we need to get data to support a wider rollout, and this will get us the data", I could've gotten behind it more; the graphs that MusikAnimal linked to in the VPT thread are actually a little compelling at least for new users. But "well, this was an accident, but we're going to keep it anyway" doesn't sit so well. I mean, believe me, I know that accidents happen, and I've been lucky enough to know that not all accidents are *bad*. It's just a little uncomfortable to see a thing that had the potential to be so vocally opposed be thrown in by accident. But again, I'm not trying to bludgeon you with that, so I'll leave it be now. Writ Keeper &#9863;&#9812; 18:44, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

Care in inserting TemplateData "format" parameter
Hi, following up on this tweak I made to this edit that you made to Template:Distinguish/doc. A quick glance at the documentation shows that this template prefers inline formatting, but you marked it for block formatting. Please be more careful with this; explicitly setting the wrong value risks having VisualEditor misformat templates and in turn cause editors using the wikitext editor to complain—which is obviously bad for promoting VE adoption. {&#123; Nihiltres &#8202;&#124;talk&#8202;&#124;edits}&#125; 21:22, 31 May 2016 (UTC)


 * Hi there. I can't remember exactly which user requested the change, but it was intentional. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:02, 3 June 2016 (UTC)