User talk:Inpursuit

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Disabling visual editor
Petitions to disable the visual editor are often refused. However, they are not impossible. In our case, it came about because of extraordinary democratic action. We first tried, for at least a year, to work with the visual editor. Our administrative staff initially resisted calls to get rid of it, instead allowing Wikia a reasonable period to work out the bugs. Although we noted significant progress, the fact that it could randomly — and seemingly without explanation by Wikia — dump raw HTML onto pages, we determined that the grace period was over. The visual editor had come into conflict with a local rule, T:NO HTML, which meant that we had to either rewrite local policy or declare the RTE in violation of local policy.

Our administrative staff chose the latter.

We then chose the most democratic, inclusive way possible to make a community decision. Through the use of a bot, we contacted every editor, registered or otherwise, which existed at the time, and gave them an opportunity to participate in the conversation. We also held the vote around the time of the Christmas episode of Doctor Who — a time where we have a demonstrable spike in editors. We wanted to make sure that we weren't passing the rule "in the dark of night", but rather at a time when a lot of editors tend to be on the wiki.

We then left the conversation open for more than a month, as I recall, and the results were overwhelmingly in favour of disabling.

When we presented the results to Wikia, they granted the request.

Now, I don't know why the request hasn't been granted in your case. Maybe they've stopped allowing RTE opt-outs, full stop. Or maybe they put up more of a barrier to start with. I mean, I could see that if yours was a relatively new wiki that they might not allow an opt-out. I would tend to think that you need to have a relatively large and active user base in order to even convene a reasonable discussion about it.

But I do think that, here, the key was patience. We didn't have a knee-jerk reaction against it. We really tried to work with the RTE, but were able to demonstrate that the RTE was against local will, local maintenance practices, and local policy. We also showed we were interested in giving our users local guidance on how to use what Wikia calls "source mode", as at T:MARK and elsewhere. Another thing in favour of our case may have been that, really, our coding is relatively complex around here. Our most-edited pages generally defaulted to source mode, anyway — because of the presence of SMW and nested templates. None of our thousands of our pages about dates, for instance, would work in the RTE, nor would any of our pages about television stories.

At the end of the day, it was pretty easy to demonstrate that the RTE was a net negative for this community. That may not be the case at your wiki. I would think that you have to be able to prove with specificity that it's a net negative for your community as a whole — not just something that you and a couple of other editors don't like. 14:22: Wed 24 Jul 2013