Hello VE Team,
Here's some general feedback for you based on having attended a bunch of editathons and editing events.
From my perspective at editathons, VE would be ready to go as the new editor default if we just had the citation thing figured out enough to use the ISBN autofill.
The big block to getting new people to become a productive editor capable of creating content is adding the citations.
I've been finding that getting new editors to put in a full reference to a reliable source can be a really tough sell when working with people who aren't grad students / journalists (or the equivalent).
You can get newbies to add a fact with no problem. Sometimes you can get newbies to add a web link in the inline text at the end of their fact in parentheses, but they can also resist this because they don't like the way the bare link looks. The new editors who aren't very computer literate sometimes choke up a bit when it's time to fill in the citation form with the existing VE or from the source code editing box.
One thing to experiment with for low edit-count (maybe first 10-20 edits) editors could be a pop-up screen with checkboxes after completing their edit: "This information is based on existing sources already cited in the article" / "This information comes from new sources which do not appear in the article yet". If it's a new reference, you then offer them the options of adding a web link, an ISBN, or typing name of the source.
Alternatively, the pop-up screen could be used to direct them to the citation tool.
People at editathons will type data into infoboxes in wikicode just fine. But for whatever reason-- perhaps because the whole idea of citing reliable sources doesn't make much sense to them-- citations really slow a lot of new editors down.
Despite availability of VE, one of my primary activities at editathons turns out to be coding in lists of citations of source material for other editors, using Zotero with the ISBN autofill. The quick ISBN feature is really key (though I find I need to tweak a bit to add co-authors or authorlinks).
Conclusion:
In short, add in the ISBN autofill for citations and I'd say VE is ready to go for new editors. A popup window for the first few edits reminding about the importance of sources would help.
Add the NYT and Google citation generators to VE, and content creation might really improve!
You might also experiment calling the two tabs for VE and wikicode something like "Edit this article" and "Editing - Advanced."
Best regards,
Kristin