Contributors/Projects/Editing performance

In order to better understand the performance of the 2017 wikitext editor relative to the 2010 wikitext editor, the Editing team has collected performance metrics for these editing environments. This page describes the metrics and how they were collected, and analyses the data to recommend a course of action.

Definitions
"Time to interactive" is the amount of time it takes for the page to be open and ready for user input. At this point, you could start typing, although the page may not have all features ready for use. (For example, in the visual editor, images and parts of the toolbar might still be loading in the background.) For our purposes, this is defined as the amount of time between the user clicking an "Edit" or "Edit source" button, and the user being able to type.

"Time to fully loaded" is the amount of time it takes for the page to complete the loading process. All images, toolbars, and other assets will be fully loaded, and all functionality will be enabled. The page may be interactive before this happens. For our purposes, this is defined as the amount of time between the user clicking an "Edit" or "Edit source" button, and the page having completed loading.

We have chosen these two metrics because they best represent user-perceived performance. The time to fully loaded metric is useful but, in the modern era where additional features are often loaded by JavaScript, it does not take into account the fact that users are frequently able to begin core actions, such as typing, before the page has fully completed loading.

Methods
To collect the data, we instrumented the 2017 and 2010 wikitext editors to capture data conforming to the above definitions.

Although evaluating the visual editor's performance is outside the scope of this analysis, we also instrumented it in the same manner as the 2017 and 2010 wikitext editors, using the same metrics. This was done for reference purposes, and because the data will be useful in the future.

The data reported here was captured is from all of the live Wikimedia sites, so it represents the real experience that our users are getting, with the mix of page sizes, page complexities, different browsers, computer operating systems, network connections, user scripts, geographical locations, and so on, that current users are experiencing now. The sample size is 6.75% of all edits made using the three editing environments, in all namespaces. The initial data included in this report was collected over several weeks in December 2017 and January 2018, and represents a total of more than one million edits.

Results
The results of this analysis are still being processed, and will be posted soon.