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Investigate the true use share of visual editor
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Description

If you divide the number of visual editor edits by the number of non-bot edits, you get a figure around 10%.

However, based on a number of conversations, I've started to suspect that this may not accurately represent the use of visual editor because many of those non-bot edits may be made using custom tools like Huggle, AutoWikiBrowser, and one-off scripts. Visual editor isn't an alternative to any of those tools; instead, it's an alternative to either of the wikitext editors. So the most accurate comparison would to wikitext editor edits.

This isn't directly possible since T188433 is not done, but proxies are possible. In the past, @Tbayer analyzed the webrequest tables and found that the 2010 wikitext editor accounted for 25% of all edits (including bot edits).

We can improve on this by looking at the ratio between the interfaces found among save events in the Edit event log.

Here, I'll

Event Timeline

Restricted Application changed the subtype of this task from "Deadline" to "Task". · View Herald TranscriptAug 21 2018, 1:43 AM

There's also rollbacks, which are definitely not "wikitext edits". And undos, which are... arguably wikitext edits since it does show you a text box with wikitext in, but it's debatable to what extent the visual editor is an "alternative" to this. I definitely wouldn't count rollbacks as wikitext edits, but I probably would count undos since the visual editor could theoretically be used there.

And you can't even totally exclude API edits that are non-VE and non-2017WTE either, since the mobile apps do all of their edits through the API. The apps case is easy to include since they are tagged and have a strict user agent format, but it does leave a huge grey area in the middle...

In the end, whichever heuristic is chosen to determine whether an edit is a "wikitext edit" or not is going to have limitations and caveats, which is fine provided we document that and make sure to present the caveats any time the metric is presented.

Oh, and as a further complication, the apps don't implement Schema:Edit, instead implementing Schema:MobileWikiAppEdit...