Author: gnu

Description:
The unusually buggy deployment of the VisualEditor has caused large numbers of English Wikipedia editors to have bugs to report. But the process of reporting bugs is a cumbersome many-step process -- starting with a requirement to "log in" using a credential that most editors do not have.

The rest of the Wikipedia universe uses a universal login system in which you log in with the same username and password to everything, and it all works together. Somehow Bugzilla didn't get integrated with that.

So instead anyone with a bug report for Visual Editor -- assuming they can even find Bugzilla, perhaps from a comment in an RFC about disabling the Visual Editor, as I found it -- then has to get through the "New User" process, which includes providing an email address, checking mail at that address, and accessing a URL which then demands that a new password be created and remembered.
This step should be avoided for logged-in Wikipedia users.

I'm sure that many, many Visual Editor bugs are noticed by editors, but are never reported due to the pain of the reporting process. This shortage of bug reports may serve the political purposes of the WMF in attempting to ram the new editor down the throats of the community, but it is not a good management practice, nor will it result in eliminating the bugs that make the Visual Editor too troublesome for naive use at this point.

(The remaining process of bug reporting is also cumbersome and complex -- but
in this bug report I have no suggestions on how to fix that.)

Version: wmf-deployment
Severity: normal