I switched the beast on- i tried to make a quick edit to add a citation- and I have disabled it again. If it comes on the subhead instead of VE, I can continue to test it- but if it replaces edit source it has to go.
Where are the citation templates? Unusable with out them. It may be an improvement on ve but I need the real editor there at all times as fall back. The citation issue is important- for grown up articles one cites with templates then later goes back and converts them manually to sfn and efn.
The templates are not perfect- we lack one for cite sign (useful in a museum) and cite in compliation- where the paper is contained in a volume published under another authors name,and again the facility to set up sfn/efn automatically would be useful.
When training academics to use WP one needs one simple foolproof method that is close to what they have used in academic papers- often for example they will have chosen a BLP that they want to add and will be clutching a pile of tomes from a specialist library which will support notablity and the mental outline for the task. The best approach I have seen is where the trainer says: there are two editor, VE is good but until you have learnt to edit it is too complicated- so today we are going to stick to Wikitext and you can experiment later.
Icons are impossible in a training situation- we need to be able to say- ǵo to the button labelled "Cite", or "Advanced" rather than describe squiggles, and use words in out training booklets (until we ave a special font including them all) Enough. I have switched it off.