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Proposal at VPPR
James F. has started a discussion at WP:VPPR about offering VisualEditor to inexperienced editors. New accounts will all have access to both VisualEditor and the wikitext editor now, and this proposal would (for example) retroactively opt-in editors who were missed during the last couple of months (e.g., 75% of the editors who created an account during the week of the gradual deployment process when only 25% of new accounts were being opted in, etc.) and dead accounts (accounts that haven't edited ever, or for a long time). If you have opinions on the best way to handle these accounts, then please join the conversation. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:24, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
The visual editor’s preference will be moving tabs
Hey all,
This is just a quick note to highlight that the location for the visual editor’s preference is about to move – from the "Beta" tab to the "Editing" section of your preferences (as is currently the case on almost all the other WMF wikis; it doesn’t mean the visual editor is complete, or that it is no longer “in beta” though).
This action will not change anything else for editors: it still honours editors’ previous choices about having it on or off; logged-out users will continue to only have access to wikitext; the “Edit” tab will still be after the “Edit source” one.
We don’t expect this to cause any glitches, but in case there are, please let us know at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback as usual! This should be done in the next few days, and I’ll post a follow-up message then. Best, Elitre (WMF) (talk) 21:36, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
The visual editor’s preference has moved
Hi all. TL;DR: the visual editor's preference has moved. Previously, it was a Beta Feature; now, it is in the "Editing" section of your preferences. It still controls whether or not editors see the visual editor as an option when you edit, and it doesn’t affect the choice editors have made to have it enabled or not. It is still not available for logged-out users. It is only available if you’ve opted-in, or if you start editing today with your account. It is still the second tab, not the first if you have it enabled. It is still offered as its own tab, rather than integrated with both editors available through one tab.
As discussed a while ago, this change is necessary for consistency and performance reasons: When the community agreed to offer the visual editor to all new accounts by default, the preference was increasingly poorly labelled. The point of the Beta Features system is to offer novel, temporary new changes which people can try out and give feedback before a decision is made to offer it to everyone. Now that that's done, it didn't make sense for the option to still be shown in this way, so it was moved.
The second reason is performance for editors. The option was on track to have more than a million accounts opted in by the end of the year, and tracking accounts in normal preferences is less of a server load than tracking them in Beta Features. There is a lot of “junk” already in the preferences table which slows down the site for logged-in users on every page load, and adds more pressure to the costly servers running the site. It is important to improve the speed for everyone!
If you have any issues, I’d be glad to hear about them! Just post on Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback.
Thank you for your understanding, Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:07, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
Verifiable reference for VE's return to opt-out
VE returned to being active by default for new users since 7 October 2015 on English Wikipedia, but I cannot find a verifiable reference to cite when stating this on the VisualEditor encyclopaedia article. All I have is the newsletter update on my userpage! Any advice? T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 10:17, 4 December 2015 (UTC)