Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Archive/Enable Visual Editor for all non-talk-namespaces

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Enable Visual Editor for all non-talk-namespaces

NoN Needs further discussion and proposer did not respond

  • Problem: A lot of new editors learn editing only/primarily with the Visual Editor. But when they want to edit something in another namespace – for example there own userpage – they cannot use the Visual Editor and are forced to learn Wikitext.
  • Who would benefit: New Editors and Editors who like the Visual Editor
  • Proposed solution: Enable the Visual Editor not only for the article namespace but also for all other namespaces expect for the talk-namespaces (Visual Editor is not ready for them) and Namespaces containing code (Template and Module)
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: MichaelSchoenitzer (talk) 01:09, 8 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Why not talk? It's a wikipage as every other wikipage, so VE could work there as fine as everywhere else. Grüße vom Sänger ♫(Reden) 21:10, 8 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

For strategic reasons:
  • Visual editor lacks some features needed to be useful on talk pages. Adding these properly would mean quite some extra work.
  • There is an alternative for talk pages: flow – many people dislike it, but it still seems to be WMFs solution for this problem.
Both would make this wish less likely the be full filed by the Community Tech team, because it would then be to big and complex. Therefore let's focus on the first step. Let's make an extra wish to enable VE for talk pages. Next year, or if you like already this year. -- MichaelSchoenitzer (talk) 23:23, 8 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
He has already, and it was archived, as appropriate. --Izno (talk) 23:54, 8 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Hi MichaelSchoenitzer, I have good news and bad news about this proposal. :) The good news is that the Wikimedia Foundation is starting the planning process for a big global Talk pages consultation which will begin in February. The idea is that we need to step back from LiquidThreads and Flow, and start over with a totally public and transparent consultation. We want to bring together as many people as possible, and come to consensus on the problems with talk pages that we want to solve, the good things about talk pages that we want to keep, and the tradeoffs involved in finding a solution that will work for new and experienced editors. You can read a lot more about it on that project page that I linked. The planning has just started, and we're starting to talk about the structure for this consultation and how it's going to work.
The bad news for right now is that we don't want to include proposals about talk pages in the Wishlist Survey voting. I know that your proposal is explicitly asking for non-talk-namespaces, but there are a lot of places where those namespaces are used for conversation too -- for example, all of the noticeboards in the Wikipedia namespace.
No matter what happens in the Wishlist Survey voting, all of the future talk page work will be determined by the Talk pages consultation happening next year. We don't want people to vote for something, and then find out that we still have to have another process before we make any decisions.
I'm sure this will be disappointing right now; I hope it's also heartening to know that this problem will get a lot of attention next year. Let me know what you think. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 02:27, 14 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@DannyH (WMF): I find this totally incomprehensible. My wish was explicitly not about talk pages yet you decline it for some "let's talk about talk-pages"-project. Will there be space to talk about non-talk-namespaces in this process or will the topic there also get declined since that is about talk-pages only? I see this falling in between the edges and never being handled. -- MichaelSchoenitzer (talk) 11:13, 14 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Look at my proposal last year: Community_Wishlist_Survey_2017/Archive/Release_VE_on_Talk_pages. It was declined, because any dealing with VE on any pages as default besides article name space is considered beyond the scope of Community Tech. Yes, this is clearly about some tech component the community has to use, but in some warped sense it's not community tech, but the devs decide about their software without community involvement. Grüße vom Sänger ♫(Reden) 12:44, 14 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
MichaelSchoenitzer: Can we make a list of which namespaces you're talking about? We can't do the "project" namespace (Wikipedia:), because it's used as talk pages. We can't do Special. For File and Template, VE is probably not that helpful. So is your proposal to put VE on User and Category pages? If it is, can you clarify that in the proposal? -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 20:43, 14 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
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