Hi Growth Team! I wanted to call your attention to a neglected Phabricator task that I think may fall within your realm, task T288161. In short, syntax highlighting is an extremely useful feature that would make things a lot easier for someone trying out wikitext editing for the first time. The en-WP community found clear consensus to turn it on by default for new editors, but more than two years later, it has still not been implemented. Would you be able to help with that?
Topic on Talk:Growth/2023
Hello, @Sdkb, I'm sorry that this task has been neglected! I can chat with the Growth team about it. It looks like the Community Tech team is the maintainer of CodeMirror: Developers/Maintainers, so I'm not sure if Growth is best suited for that work. But I see what you are saying about it perhaps being helpful for new editors, and therefore could be something the Growth team could help with. I'll look into this further, catch up on the discussion on the associated task, and follow up. Thanks!
Just a quick note to follow up: I've discussed this with several people at WMF, but I haven't made much progress on finding ownership or solid next steps. I'll follow up with more info soon.
In response to your drafted RfC, I'm wondering if we enable Syntax highlighting for existing accounts by default, do you think we should also provide some sort of GuidedTour explaining the feature and how to disable it? Or do you think that experienced editors who dislike syntax highlighting will know how to disable it?
Thanks for the update, @KStoller-WMF! I would absolutely support having a GuidedTour when the switch is first made. The reason is that, although Syntax highlighting is trivial to turn on and off if you know how, many people don't know how. It's pretty common that even moderately experienced editors come across it and go "woah, how did I not know this exists?" The unintuitive icon is a part of that.
Having a GuidedTour would be exactly what we'd want to ensure that anyone who missed the RfC knows what's going on and we don't get a flood of comments about it. Once the transition recedes into the past, though, I don't think the walkthrough should be maintained. Since at that point, for any new editors, it'll be just how the editor works, and with no expectations from prior experience they'll have no reason to be confused. And reason to turn of syntax highlighting is rare enough that it's not one of the things we should be emphasizing as people try to climb wikitext's (steep) learning curve.
Hi! I wanted to inform @Sdkb and others interested that Community Tech is currently working on upgrading CodeMirror to the latest version. This will make it compatible with RTL languages, greatly improve performance, among other exciting features such as multiple cursors (but no new features will be added without consultation / preferences to turn them off, etc.). We hope to finish the upgrade in 1-2 months. I say this in case you'd rather wait to do a global RfC, as by then we will be able to turn it on for everyone across all wikis which we can't do now. If the new version is as performant as promised, I personally see little reason to not turn it on by default for everyone across all wikis.
I don't know that my team will be able to add a guided tour until after the upgrade, but the Growth team or anyone else should feel free to implement that now if you so desire, as well as proceeding with turning CodeMirror on for everyone on English Wikipedia.
Echoing Sdkb, I do think phab:T174145 should ideally get some attention too.
It looks like T174145 has quite a few differing (strong!) opinions, so it might be hard to find consensus. But I'll discuss with our designer next week to get her opinion. I'm not sure how much engineering time we can invest in all of this work as it lies outside of the Growth team's domain and the Growth team annual plan, but I'll see if we can squeeze in the icon update. 🤞
I’ve just had bad experience with CodeMirror earlier this week: after a power outage, the content of the edit window was lost. (Fortunately I could redo the edit in half a minute, because it wasn’t much, but it could have been worse.) Would CodeMirror have been turned off, the form auto-recovery feature of Firefox would have restored the content – but since CodeMirror seems to neither synchronize the content with the plain <textarea> nor do any auto-recovery on its own, it didn’t work. I think this should be addressed before thinking about CodeMirror as a tool for normal, day-to-day edits (vs a tool to understand complicated wikitext).
@Tacsipacsi As it happens, my team is currently working on an edit recovery feature! This will be compatible with CodeMirror. I expect us to wrap that project within a month or so, around the same time we hope to complete the CodeMirror 6 upgrade that I mentioned above.
To follow up, I chatted with the Senior Group Design Manager who works with the Growth team about T174145.
She pointed out that it sounds like the underlying issue sounds more like a discoverability issue rather than a major issue with the icon. If we enable the feature by default (and perhaps add a GuidedTour) then that should address the discoverability issue.
That being said, if you truly think an icon update is needed, the Design Systems Team is likely the team that could make that call as they are maintainers of the visual style guide and icon library.
It sounds like there is a path forward once the CodeMirror update is finished and the edit recovery feature is complete.
The Growth team is now focusing on the Community configuration 2.0 project, which I hope can help in situations like this. Community configuration will provide admins with more control over how features are configured on their wiki and if features are enabled or disabled by default. I recognize that doesn't help with this issue in the short term, but I hope it helps remove some of this type of friction in the future.
Thanks for the follow-up! I've watched phab:T259059 and I'll plan to launch the RfC on Meta once it's been completed. Cheers,
@KStoller-WMF - I was looking back at this, but the phabricator tasks are a little hard to parse. When does the WMF expect CodeMirror 6 to be deployed? It would be great to get some of these changes rolled out, like syntax highlighting by default. Thanks!
@Ganesha811 Good question. I don't actually know much about the CodeMirror timeline. I can see that the epic T259059 has many subtasks, and the subtasks are being worked on by MusikAnimal (WMF) and a few others. A considerable number of subtasks have been resolved, but there are also quite a few tasks that haven't been started.
@MusikAnimal (WMF) - does the CodeMirror 6 work have a timeline or release date, or is this work just happening as we can find time to squeeze it in? Thanks!