🌱This task is still a seedling on the floor of the forest is Phabricator. You can expect more context here once the thinking becomes more stable. In the meantime, thinking is happening in docs like Editing Platform Strategy (Spring 2021) (limited access for now).
This task represents the work involved with defining the impact(s) the Editing System will have and the strategy we will use as our guide for bringing about said impact(s).
Use cases
An emerging-list of use cases/needs
- As a WMF Product Team who is developing an editing experience that depends on VE, I want to know who and how VE is available at each Wikimedia project, so that we can know which of the editors we are building for will be able to access it.
- As a WMF Product Team who is developing an editing experience for newcomers that depends on VE, I want said newcomers to be able to easily and intuitively access VE, so that we can maximize the number of newcomers that can use the experience we are building.
- Example: Growth Team and zh.wiki (T287884#7267549).
- As a WMF Product Team who is seeking to improve a particular part of VE's experience, I would like to know what data is available about how people use VE, so that we can decide what intervention might be most impactful to implement.
- Example: CommTech and thinking about how they might leverage edit notices and the Review your changes view to make volunteers aware when they've done something that may defy the project's policies. In this case, adding wikilinks to disambiguation pages. More in: Warn when linking to disambiguation pages and T285508.
- As a WMF Product Team who is seeking to improve a particular part of VE's experience, I would like to know what events are currently being tracked within the VisualEditor, so that we can decide whether new instrumentation is needed to measure a particular part of the experience.
- As a WMF Product Team who is adding new instrumentation to VE, I would like to know what is required to do so, so that we can ensure the changes we are making align with best practices.
- As a volunteer developer who maintains a gadget that introduces new functionality to wikitext talk pages, I want to be able to leverage DiscussionTools capabilities to improve the experience for people who depend on the gadget I maintain.
- Example: T284836#7306168 [via @Jack_who_built_the_house]
- As a WMDE Product Team who is making changes to an existing workflow(s) within the VisualEditor, I want to know when and how to update VisualEditor's technical documentation, so that people needing to use these new workflows can independently learn how to do so.
- Example: WMDE seeking guidance on when and how to update VisualEditor's technical documentation to reflect the changes they are introducing through the work they are doing on templates: WMDE/Technical Wishes/Templates. [via @Lena_WMDE]
- As a WMF Product Team who is wanting to evaluate the impact of a change they are making to the visual editor, I want to know how to go about designing, implementing, running, and reporting on an A/B or multivariate test, so that we, and others, can depend on this information to make decisions.
- As a volunteer developer who is interested in contributed to VE, I want to know what tasks the Editing Team does and does not plan to work on, so that I can focus my attention on tasks that others are not likely to.
- Examples:
- @VPuffetMichel raised this during the Editing Team's Triage meeting
- @Enterprisey inquiring about introducing functionality within VE to make volunteers aware, in real-time, when they are about to make a change/edit they should consider more closely. See T265163.
- Examples:
- As a WMF Product Team who is interested in exposing affordance(s) that enable people to enter into full-page editing mode in a new way, I want to know what design patterns/requirements said new affordance(s) ought to follow/fulfill, so that I can ensure volunteers, across experience levels, can continue intuitively knowing what to do (read: click/tap) to make the change(s) they have in mind.
- Example: T289723.
- As the developers of the Content Translation Tool, we want to be able to customize/extend VE's template editing experience, so that we can offer people using Section Translation the ability to translate the contents of templates from a "source" language into a "target" language. See: T275374.
- Doing the above would require it being possible for the Language Team to create an experience in which: i) volunteers could view a "source" template and "target" template simultaneously and ii) volunteers could accept/apply machine translation suggestions to specific parameters within the "target" template
- As a WMF Product Team who is working to make it easier for people to translate content into/between languages, I need to know how to make VisualEditor compatible with the Translate extension, so that we can support visual editing on translatable pages.
- Example: T261181
- As a WMF Product Team who is working to make it possible for people who are new to contributing to Wikipedia to start and/or comment in a discussion on a talk page, I want be able to easily create a rich text editing experience, so that these newcomers do not need to know about and/or learn to use wikitext in order to contribute to our projects.
- As an engineer who is wanting to add VE support to a MediaWiki extension, I need a set of instructions for how to go about integrating an extension into VE so that both the extension I'm working on and VE continue to work in ways people expect it to.
- @MusikAnimal raised this need in the context of T317112.
Notes
- Provocation: "What kind of functionality/interfaces/etc. would fare well being packaged into 10 lines of config?"
- Tension: There is a tension between exposing functionality that is too generic such that it becomes too difficult for people to program and make use of and exposing functionality that is too specific that it doesn't do many jobs