[":::::No, there's no evidence at [[Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Why]]; all it has is a graph showing that 1-year retention has been declining over time after an initial spike when Wikipedia first appeared (and even then, the graph is from ''2009'', over four years ago -- even if it showed what you claim, which it does not, it would be ridiculous to use it as a justification for anything.)  It links to the A/B test, which shows that the ''visual editor'' has driven people away, but nothing in there concretely connects the problem to wikitext.  Either way, that graph says nothing about ''why'' it was declining back in 2009; I think a very reasonable assumption is that Wikipedia (when it first exploded into the popular consciousness) spread rapidly to everyone who was interested in using an encyclopedia and who was currently using the internet, then increasingly gradually once those people were recruited.  Wikipedia's graph of usage also mirrors the problems with retaining users seen by many other major sites with unrelated purposes, like Amazon and Yahoo; the early internet was a fundamentally different place, and usage trends have changed in a way that makes it harder to recruit people.  All of this is at least partially speculative, of course, but it's no less speculative than the random and arbitrary speculation that Wikipedia's shift in usage was because of wikitext, or the entirely unproven and speculative assertion that a WYSIWYG editor is easier to use.  I don't find your speculation or your anecdotal evidence to be convincing at all -- surely many users are now going to be scared off by the clunky and excessively-complex appearance of the bloated visual editor, while previously, many ''parts'' of Wikipedia had very simple layout and did not require knowledge of wikitext at all.  (And, of course, the most complicated parts of the wiki -- the most intimidating ones -- are ''entirely impossible'' to edit with the visual editor by any means.) --[[User:Aquillion|Aquillion]] ([[User talk:Aquillion|talk]]) 01:20, 4 August 2013 (UTC)\n"]