VisualEditor on mobile/VE mobile default

This page talks about the Editing Team's work experimenting with VisualEditor being the default mobile editor on a select number of wikis.

This initiative is a part of our team's larger effort to simplify contributing on mobile, described in the Foundation's 2018-2019 annual plan. And more specifically, to increase the likelihood contributors will have success making quick edits on-the-go, by presenting them, by default, with a simpler and more visual editing interface.

Watching this page is a good way to be involved with and stay up-to-date about:


 * Which wikis we collaborate with
 * How we plan to measure the impact of this change
 * When this change will go into effect

Background
We are striving to make editing on mobile web simpler. Research [https://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usability_and_Experience_Study#Where_do_I_edit? leads us] to think contributors will have more success editing on mobile using the VisualEditor given it presents a more structured, visual and easily understood interface than wikitext does, the editor that is currently presented to contributors by default on mobile. Qualities the Design Research team has found to be especially important on mobile, where screen space and potentially time, are more limited than on desktop.

Despite what we have come to think are VisualEditor's advantages, few contributors are discovering and using it. In May 2018 for example, just 1% of mobile web edit sessions (or ~20,000 of the ~2 million total sessions recorded) happened in VE.

Defaults clearly impact how contributors experience editing Wikipedia. Defaults also express unspoken assumptions. Assumptions in this context, about which editing experience will help the most number of contributors be successful editing using a mobile device. This project is about investigating this assumption. Our goal is to learn whether setting VisualEditor as the default mobile editing interface provides the majority of contributors a "better", as measured by overall completion rate, mobile editing experience than wikitext.

What is changing?
Currently, both editing interfaces, – VE and wikitext – are available on mobile for contributors to use. Although, the mobile wikitext editor is shown by default to new contributors, while the VisualEditor is accessible via a dropdown menu in the editing toolbar.

As part of this project, we will be working with a select number of wikis (yet to be announced) to switch which editing interface is shown to new contributors, on mobile, by default. Meaning, on the subset of wikis we work with, the mobile VisualEditor will be shown to new contributors editing on when they tap "edit" and wikitext will be available via a dropdown menu in the editing toolbar.

Glossary

 * Mobile VE.jpgVE: abbreviation for VisualEditor, MediaWiki's rich-text editing interface.
 * Mobile VE: MediaWiki's rich-text editing interface, implemented for mobile devices.
 * Mobile: the mobile site, regardless of what device you use to reach it. For example, this page on the mobile site compared to this page on the desktop site.Switching between wikitext and VE on mobile.jpg