It's not as colorful as the ipê-amarelo flower. It doesn't taste like Ginjinha. Then, why do Portuguese-speaking editors like the visual editor so much?
Its uptake at pt.wiki doesn't seem to have evident reasons, and it's so different from the average value that deserves a little investigation as to why it's so successful there. We may be particularly interested in why IPs prefer it to wikitext editing, but let's not forget that earlier this year we also found out that 27 registered editors there were among the top 500 VE users at the time.
Here are a few facts/data points/remarks.
- VE has the same config there as on most other big wikis (primary tab, opt-out);
- There are not so many templates with TemplateData (around 130, although this includes common Cite templates, Infobox person);
- Citoid is enabled, and only provides basic info with pt news sites;
- There is no local documentation about the product (only a redirect to mediawiki.org's one);
- The guides on mw.org are not entirely translated (currently, the user manual basically is - although it's at 76% for pt-br; when you look at all the VE-related documentation, pt is at 58% and pt-br at 75%);
- The interface itself is translated almost entirely;
- VE is not mentioned or promoted in local help pages (except for a few tutorial pages with less than a dozen views in 90 days each);
- VE is not mentioned or promoted in interface messages (i.e., after looking for an article which doesn't exist);
- the local feedback page isn't very active and never really hosted conversations around the product (although, let's thank again @He7d3r for all his efforts there);
- CLs haven't engaged in a particular way with this community and haven't held specific initiatives;
- A couple of instructors involved in Education programs at pt.wp seem to be using it (cc @FloorKoudijs: maybe they're recommending it in class?). Details on these initiatives (and others which may be initiated by community/chapters/user groups etc. like edit-a-thons) are much welcome;
- Finally, VE is also much used at pt.books, where it's in opt-out mode (95 out of 500 edits made with it to mainspace pages as of a random check minutes ago);
- pt.wiki is "mostly edited from Global South, in contrast to earlier concerns the VE would be only usable for GN people with state of the art computers".
If we could use T89970 or T104439, we could survey editors directly in a quick and easy way...