VisualEditor/Survey 2015/en

The Editing team is asking for your help in improving VisualEditor. The team has a list of top-priority problems, but they also want to hear about small problems. These problems may make editing less fun, take too much of your time, or be as annoying as a paper cut. Small problems might not seem important enough to file a bug about, but the Editing team wants to hear about and try to fix these things, too.

They are contacting several different types of users and asking you to share your thoughts by clicking this link.

The quick, simple, anonymous survey is being conducted via Qualtrics. You may respond in your own language. If you take the survey, then you agree your responses may be used in accordance with these terms. This survey is powered by Qualtrics and their use of your information is governed by their privacy policy. If you have questions, or prefer to respond on-wiki, then please leave a message on the talk page. The entire survey is posted below.

The information you share will be used to improve VisualEditor's function and design. A link to the final results will be posted on this page.

Introduction
This survey is being conducted by the Wikimedia Foundation to learn more about community members' experience with VisualEditor on Wikipedia and related projects. VisualEditor is a rich-text editor that makes it possible to edit Wikipedia and other projects without first learning wikitext markup.



These screenshots were taken from the English Wikipedia article, "Galaxy". The first screenshot (on the left) shows the article open for editing in VisualEditor. The second screenshot (on the right) shows the same article open for editing in the wikitext editor.

''You agree your responses may be used in accordance with these terms. This survey is powered by Qualtrics and their use of your information is governed by their privacy policy. For licensing and attribution of the screenshots, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy.''

Questions

 * 1) First, to which project do you contribute most often?
 * 2) * Wikipedia
 * 3) * Commons
 * 4) * MediaWiki
 * 5) * Wikibooks
 * 6) * Wikidata
 * 7) * Wikinews
 * 8) * Wikiquote
 * 9) * Wikiversity
 * 10) * Wikivoyage
 * 11) * Another project sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation
 * 12) * I do not normally contribute to any Wikimedia Foundation projects.
 * 13) How frequently do you use VisualEditor when you are editing articles? (on a scale of 0% to 100%)
 * 14) * Never (0%)
 * 15) * (10% to 90%)
 * 16) * Always (100%)
 * 17) How likely are you to recommend VisualEditor to a new editor? (on a scale of 0 to 10)
 * 18) * I would recommend the wikitext editor always. (0)
 * 19) * (1 to 9)
 * 20) * I would recommend VisualEditor always. (10)
 * 21) Choose all that apply:
 * 22) * In the past, I used VisualEditor regularly, but now I mostly use the wikitext editor.
 * 23) * I have tried to use VisualEditor, but I often left the page without trying to save my changes.
 * 24) * I sometimes start editing in VisualEditor, but then switch to the wikitext editor.
 * 25) * I have provided feedback about VisualEditor on wiki at pages like VisualEditor/Feedback.
 * 26) * I have reported bugs or subscribed to bugs in Bugzilla or Phabricator.
 * 27) * None of the above
 * 28) In VisualEditor, the area that needs the most improvement is...
 * 29) * Adding or editing citations or references
 * 30) * Images and other media
 * 31) * General editing
 * 32) * Support for languages other than English
 * 33) * Adding or editing templates
 * 34) * Performance and speed
 * 35) * Making or editing links to other pages and other websites
 * 36) * Copying and pasting
 * 37) * Having discussions with other editors
 * 38) * Switching back and forth between VisualEditor and wikitext editor
 * 39) * Setting and changing categories
 * 40) * Having two edit buttons rather than the software remembering which I like to use
 * 41) * Handling edit conflicts without showing me wikitext
 * 42) * Showing me diffs and the history of articles visually
 * 43) * Formulæ, imagemaps, timelines or other special content types
 * 44) * Stability and reliability
 * 45) * Other
 * 46) I would like to see improvements to this area (the one selected in the previous question).  If I could make one change to this area, I would change...
 * 47) How did you hear about this survey?
 * 48) * A message on my user talk page
 * 49) * A message on someone else's talk page
 * 50) * From another page on wiki
 * 51) * Email
 * 52) * Other
 * 53) Optional:  In case we have questions about your comments or suggestions, you may type your username here, so we can contact you.  If you want, you may add the best wiki to reach you.  (Example:  User:WhatamIdoing at en.wikipedia.org)

Results
1,639 invitations were sent, including some duplicates due to contacting a few dozen people via e-mail (from Bugzilla accounts, which are not associated with wiki accounts). As of 17 April 2015, 508 surveys had been completed in Qualtrics and two on wiki.

First, to which project do you contribute most often?
There were 501 responses to this question.

How frequently do you use VisualEditor when you are editing articles?
There were 452 responses to this question. The mean was using VisualEditor for 40% of article editing, and the standard deviation was 30%. The answers were mostly evenly distributed, with clusters among people who almost never used VisualEditor and also editors who almost always used it.

How likely are you to recommend VisualEditor to a new editor? (on a scale of 0 to 10)
There were 449 responses to this question. The mean was 60% with a standard deviation of 30%.

This answer correlated very strongly (p=<0.0001) with whether the respondent uses VisualEditor frequently.

Choose all that apply:
There were 453 responses to this question.

In VisualEditor, the area that needs the most improvement is...
There were 433 responses to this question.

The order of the items (except "Other") were randomized, so that different people saw different items at the top of the list. The most popular choice was "Adding and editing templates", followed by "Switching back and forth between VisualEditor and wikitext editor", "Adding or editing citations or references", and "Performance and speed". Responses were correlated with how much the participant uses VisualEditor. People who use VisualEditor for most of their editing were most interested in improved support for citations, such as the automatic reference filler Citoid, rich copying and pasting, and special content types, such as mathematical formulae. People who never or rarely use VisualEditor were more interested in performance and reliability as well as general or non-software issues; they were comparatively uninterested in template or citation support within VisualEditor.

If I could make one change to this area, I would change...
There were 300 responses to this question.

How did you hear about this survey?
423 people answered this question. 82% said that they received an invitation on their own talk pages. 9% received an invitation through e-mail. 6% found the link to the survey on someone else's talk page. 2% chose "Other", and about half of them said that they received the message either on wiki or in e-mail, e.g., e-mail messages to the translator's mailing list. One person found the link on another wiki page.

Languages
Almost all invitations were delivered in English. Almost 40% of the survey respondents took the survey in a language other than English. People who took the survey in English, French, or German were more likely to have used VisualEditor reqularly in the past, but not currently. People who took the survey in English or German were more likely to have exited without saving or to switch to the wikitext editor during an edit. Participants taking the survey in English were much more likely to have provided feedback or reported bugs.

Newly tracked bugs

 * T97323: Improve tabbing in template dialog