[':::[citation needed].  There\'s no evidence that wikitext specifically is a significant barrier to entry or that it has anything to do with the wiki\'s editor retention stats, nor that a visual editor will provide even the slightest help with that; without that evidence, all of this development time and serious disruption to the wiki is being made over what amounts to a glorified hunch.  (While it is too early to tell, of course, how things will be when all the bugs are worked out, what evidence we do have suggests that the visual editor has, so far, been actively harmful.)  The visual editor itself is going to require time to learn and use, and there\'s no reason to think that the time required to learn how to do "simple" edits via the editor is any less than with wikitext; there\'s also plenty of reasons to suspect that wikitext makes it much easier for new users to pick up day-to-day \'mid-level\' skills for whatever area they want to focus on (since they can see how something was done by viewing the text, whereas a visual editor doesn\'t tell you what of its numerous confusing buttons to push to replicate something you saw elsewhere.) Additionally, while it\'s certainly true that the purpose of Wikipedia is not to learn wikitext, it is unfortunately inescapable that the wiki is constructed entirely out of it; no editor is ever going to be able to provide full control over wikitext without becoming hopelessly complex in the process.  That means that creating an alternative "learning path" where people spend their time learning how to use a complicated visual editor is only setting them up for eventual frustration when they learn that the complicated visual editor they\'ve been wasting their time learning is still useless for many tasks -- even learning every single one of its dozens of unintuitive buttons still doesn\'t let you do everything you will need, and actively replaces the learning that would have helped them contribute more broadly. --[[User:Aquillion|Aquillion]] ([[User talk:Aquillion|talk]]) 22:30, 2 August 2013 (UTC)\n']