Inkipedia:Proposals/Passed/Remove VisualEditor

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It contains older discussions that are no longer ongoing. If you wish to discuss one of the topics here, please bring it up on the current discussion page.

VisualEditor is an extension that offers a "what you see is what you get" editing experience. However, relatively recently, the source editor received a live preview button, as well as syntax highlighting, making it very easy to use. Inkipedia's help pages are written for the source editor. Inkipedia's most experienced editors are generally unable to help with VisualEditor issues, and VisualEditor has plenty of issues.

VisualEditor is used significantly less often compared to the source editor on Inkipedia.

In consideration of those facts, I am proposing that the VisualEditor extension be removed from Inkipedia. If this proposal passes, the removal will be carried out by staff.

Heddy (talk) 01:09, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

Start date: 3 September 2024

End date: 24 September 2024

Support

1. I feel like VisualEditor creates more issues than not.
   1) It can't be used properly combined with more advanced formatting, nor it can be used on the large pages at all.
   2) It oftenly results in a messy source code that requires a cleanup for a further adequate editing (which I encountered during editing the Splatfest dialogues which, after someone created them via VisualEditor, resulted in a big messy pile of unsorted code that, while worked just fine, wasn't organized and was difficult to navigate in).
   3) From my own experience, it's not that difficult to learn the basics of Inkipedia source coding. I personally achieved that by simply copying and learning what other existing pages did.
   I think that removing VisualEditor will spare the editors from sorting the mess, as well as encourage the new editors to learn the sourse code, which I don't see as a bad thing. Milchik (talk) 01:21, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
2. I have had a strong dislike of VisualEditor ever since it was released, and I am very pleased that this proposal is possible and is being voted upon. Source editor is just better in general for wiki editing and not very hard to learn how to use either, especially for minor text edits that most new editors will be doing. EmiTalk 02:29, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
3. I definitely support this. I think visual editor isn't useful. YOLO2020 02:35, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
4.  GX_64 (talk)  02:52, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
5. I support this too. The visual editor makes up a small portion of Inkipedia editing. I would recommend it's just disabled instead of completely removed. ssdrive (Talk・Contributions) 05:50, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
6. I've got no huge dislike of VE, but I definitely agree that with the recent big UX improvements to source editor, it's become more or less obsolete, for this wiki at least. Maybe, as listed below, an opt-in option in Preferences could be doable, but it definitely seems to generally cause more problems than it solves. GloverMist (talk) 06:10, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
7. I agree with what was said. When I was new here, I used the VisualEditor, which was messy and hard to use. It was even harder to use than the Source editor. I found it useless. From my own experience, I can say that source coding is easy to learn, so I'm sure that new users can learn it easily. Squidtent ~ (Talk) 08:52, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
8. yes please <333 (in addition to all the great points made above, that I pretty much all agree with: if that's what it's intended to be, i'm not even sure if VE is effective as training wheels at all — since all it does is obscure the source code so you can keep ignoring its existence)
    ♥ #6-Frisk   ‍  08:56, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
9. VE has been basically useless, even for new users. I'd be happy to see it go. Gallium![Talk] 11:53, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
10. Though I use Visual Editor pretty often, I don't oppose it being removed. OrderSquid38 [Talk] 12:48, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
11. I support this proposal and strongly agree with all the points everyone else has made. VE may be easy for some new editors to learn, but it does not prepare them for the source editor. FancyRat 13:34, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
12. Ever since I learned how templates work, I have not used visual editor a single time. Learning source editing was fast and easy, and I think that all users should take the time to learn it. XarrotD (talk) 14:09, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
13. I've always hated Visual Editor. While the concept of making editing easier is a nice thought, that is scarcely the actual outcome. It ultimately causes more issues than it solves, whether thats tables, stray formatting like gallery tags, templates, showing preview, use of pages with slashes, and more. Source editing is ultimately simple to learn and there are newer, better tools available to simplify it even further. If that's not enough and users are still uncertain, I will gladly go out of my way and hold a lecture/informational video session about how to make source edits myself. Trig - 00:44, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
14. This just makes sense with all the problems it has & Trig's recent efforts to modernize the wiki's HTML tags (while the visual editor still uses the old ones). At first I worried this change would plunge new editors into the deep end and put some people off editing, but live preview and syntax highlighting make understanding source editing much easier. I think this actually makes things simpler for newer editors, since they won't be presented with two editing options ('edit' and 'edit source'), where the worse one is treated as the default. Cackle (talk) 01:05, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
15. If VE didn't have such glaring bugs I'd be more inclined to keep it around for beginner editors' convenience, but as-is their convenience very frequently comes at the cost of edits made in VE needing cleanup. Wikicode is extremely user-friendly, made even easier with the recent software updates we've had enhancing the editor interface. Our wiki community is fortunate enough to have both help pages and a decent-sized cast of regular editors eager to help newcomers learn the wiki process. Yoshifan52 (talk) 18:19, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
16. I agree with all the support above. WaferCaken (talk) 18:22, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
17. StarAdamStar (talk) 06:36, 8 September 2024 (UTC)
18. Anemoia [Talk!] 22:57, 8 September 2024 (UTC)
19. I also agree, although visual editor is a very useful tool for beginners, which is what I used when I started, I found my self almost incapable of editing pages using source editor after trying to use it for the first time. TheYoshiGang (talk) 13:51, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
20. - espresso ( √ darpa ) [talk] 06:47, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

1. I like to have both VE and code editor and to be able to switch between them when editing even if I don't use VE as much as code editor by far It's moon [Talk!] 00:27, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

Discussion

• Technical note: I said "remove" above, but in reality we may end up keeping VE installed but as disabled as possible (possibly opt-in), simply because it's a dependency for discussiontools (the Reply buttons and associated features on talk pages). Heddy (talk) 02:46, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

• Personally wouldn't mind it that much if we lost DiscussionTools, it's neat but I'm used to going without; checking my preferences, turns out I actually have nearly all its features disabled already lol, no wonder. Though if it's useful to other people, I'm not gonna go campaign against it or anything, of course!
   ♥ #6-Frisk   ‍  09:08, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
• DiscussionTools are also a sort of WYSIWYG kind-of thing (please correct me if I'm wrong). If we want to push source editing, we'd probably also disable DiscussionTools.
  ssdrive (Talk・Contributions) 11:20, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
• I personally have never used the discussion tools and would not mind if they were removed. In my opinion, using the source editor for talk page edits is perfectly reasonable even for newer editors. EmiTalk
• I personally appreciate VE for talk pages only (and for a few veeery specific sandbox tests that I touch up in source afterwards), but if removing it improves the average edit quality then so be it. Would this distinction be considered to be part of the vote, or will keeping discussion tools/removing discussion tools be an admin-only decision? Anemoia [Talk!] 12:55, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

• I created a separate vote for removing DiscussionTools: Inkipedia:Proposals/Failed/Remove DiscussionTools Heddy (talk) 14:24, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

This proposal has passed! However, Inkipedians voted to keep DiscussionTools, which means VisualEditor cannot be completely removed. So, as I said above, we will most likely change VisualEditor to be an opt-in user preference, essentially removing it from the default editing experience. We will work to have this change implemented soon. Heddy (talk) 15:24, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

Update: The job is done. We found that it was possible to disable VE more thoroughly than previously stated, while still keeping DiscussionTools fully functional. So instead of making VE opt-in, we disabled VE for all users, and we removed the VE option from Preferences. Heddy (talk) 23:48, 28 September 2024 (UTC)