Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive 2013 10

Image link

Image link is not working when adding files from wikimedia commons SariSabban (talk) 08:27, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

@SariSabban: to get this clear, you are trying to create a LINK to an imagepage on Commons, not to "include" an image from Commons ? That indeed isn't possible right now (just as including a link to the Polish Wikipedia isn't possible). This might be slightly confusing I guess because the Commons pages are 'first class' citizens when including them as images. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:54, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Problems with the logo

I've noticed a few problems with the logo. The line spacing seems to be messed up, it looks its been set to "1ex", 3ex is a more typical value. However the insertion cursor is looking like its been give an 220% fontsize. There is also a bug with the insertion cursor partially obscuring the character under it and shifts the character under it leftwards. (The line spacing might be baseline:subscript, but that can't be as VE does not support subscripts.)

I've tried to reproduce the bug using CSS: visua|editor

Should I file a bug report? We would not want the logo to give a negative impression of the project. --Salix (talk): 14:11, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Where is this a problem? — Edokter (talk) — 15:13, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

I may not like change...

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...but I like the original source editor much better, even for small changes. This new editor doesn't really make an edit faster for me and it cannot do all the same edits the sourcel editor could do. NortyNort (Holla) 14:51, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

You're hardly alone on this, but VE will get better. In the meantime, just in case you're not aware of this, you can opt out, and not see VE at all. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:12, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Closing div tags removed

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This edit removed the closing </divs> in 6 places. I'm not sure if it's a known bug?

Also, it's not standard article formatting - so, although I've fixed/replaced the old code - updates to the page beyond that would also be welcome. –Quiddity (talk) 16:56, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure if it's known. Opening the article with VE makes it abundantly clear that VE cannot properly parse the article, so editing it with VE is unsafe. I've disabled VE editing for the article until there's a fix.—Kww(talk) 17:07, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

The page had invalid div tags which I fixed and removed the VE-disabling from that article since that is no longer necessary. Ssastry (talk) 18:26, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

No problem. Let me know when you do that so that I can remove the edit notice warning people that the Visual Editor has been disabled.—Kww(talk) 18:40, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

The page loads and edits fine in VE once I fixed all the invalid div tags as above. So, the edit notice can be removed. Ssastry (talk) 18:53, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Enable VE for editing one section or subsection at a time.

I find Visual Editor useless for long articles, because even when I use the Edit tab on one subsection, the system insists on loading the whole #$%?&* article and scrolls at the speed of molasses. Yesterday I wanted to make a very simple edit - to change "is" to "are". Unfortunately the article was 73K long and VE loaded it all, then it took 5 minutes to scroll and find the sentence which needed changing as Ctrl-F worked VERY slowly, and I finally changed "is" to "are". Then I tried to look at my edit before saving - possible but took another 5 minutes! Then I saved at looked at the revision history, and was horrified to see that my revision was marked not (+1) for adding one (net) character, but (+4,036)! The system had duplicated a whole table from one point in the article to another, and a quote box as well, and the article was now not 73K but 77K. Possibly I clicked somewhere I shouldn't while waiting for the interminable load or the interminable scroll. Fortunately I was able to undo the damage much more quickly with Edit Source; I reverted my own edit and then edited the one subsection and changed "is" to "are" again all in 1-2 minutes.

This was all very frustrating and I will not be using VE again except for the shortest articles, at least until it is possible to load and scroll a single (sub)section and edit it alone in isolation as is possible with Edit Source. Dirac66 (talk) 20:07, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for reporting. I went and looked at your recent edits and found that you had edited Chemical element. I investigated the problem with the table duplication and as it turns out the problem was with Template:Periodic_table_(nutritional_elements) which had an unclosed table which I fixed. While this wont solve the slowness issue you experienced, this should at least fix the problem with duplicating a table. Ssastry (talk) 21:17, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for finding the error - now I know it wasn't something I did 8-)) This means though that Visual Editor is susceptible to some embedded errors with Templates. When I redid the edit 3 minutes later with Edit Source no such problem occurred. Dirac66 (talk) 21:47, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

how to remove paragraph?

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-- 85.246.205.104 (talk) 20:53, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

This section, above, may help: #Deleting a section heading only deletes the heading, but the section remains. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 02:46, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Autofill references from PMID and DOI are very important

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to me. Looks neat. Great work to whoever did this, but I'm going to be editing the source until this particular feature gets ported. mcs (talk) 19:58, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Definitely a nice thing to have, but it might be beyond the scope of the VE team. Templates are locally defined on this wiki so VE will not know how to fill them in automatically. It will probably require a local gadget to be able to do this.--Salix (talk): 05:42, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Actually we're looking to modify TemplateData so parameters can be defined as "should be auto-included". Auto-filled is a problem, though :(. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:37, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Cannot add a lineup of refs in one go

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54228

Mid-save suggests all is go - actual save results in this

In this [1] edit, and the preceding edit which created the article, I had attempted to add a lineup of refs and in both edits. I had expected to have a total of 7 refs like this [2], however, in both edits, managed to add one ref only. Rest of the refs disappeared magically. This seems to be some kind of bug.OrangesRyellow (talk) 04:08, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not disputing that there is a bug, but you might want to read WP:OVERCITE before continuing this approach to adding citations. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 04:31, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

I accept WP:OVERCITE is relevant there. I had added that many refs because I had just created the article and did not want it to get deleted due to notability concerns. The refs will be more spread out as I develop the the article and use those refs to get in more content. So, the OVERCITE problem will disappear as we go along. Thanks for the pointer though.OrangesRyellow (talk) 06:16, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

@OrangesRyellow: Notability concerns are absolutely a priority when creating an article. An alternative, I think, would be to put online sources into the "External links" section and non-online sources into a "Further reading" section, just above the EL section. My (limited, admittedly) experience with deletion discussions is that editors don't look at where sources appear in the article, but rather just at the quality of those sources and their relevance to the topic.

And, to return to the main topic at hand, it would be good if someone else were to test whether adding (say) seven footnotes in a row results in anything unusual happening with VE. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:07, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

@ John Broughton. Yes. Putting excess links in FR/EL sections looks like a good idea. In my experience, even trying to add two refs in a row (in one edit) results in one of them disappearing.OrangesRyellow (talk) 06:01, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

In my first test, VE seemed okay with 6 refs in a row. On my 7th, using Chrome, the editor seemed to get really upset with me. It wouldn't allow me to exit the reference tool, and it would not save the reference or the changes I had already made. I'm going to test that again. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 16:06, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Okay, I replicated the bug at 6 refs. See screencap. Seeing how many it will permit. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 16:52, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Seems like it will permit one. At least using bare urls, it would not even save two for me on Chrome, using Windows 7. This is a problem. Filing. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 16:55, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Citation needed substituted?

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54242

Check this edit, line 701. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:01, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

How strange :/. Now reported; thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:45, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Simple request

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As far as I can see, there is no way to mark an edit as a minor edit in the VisualEditor. It's not a major thing, but it would be great if this feature was included. 99.141.248.145 (talk) 18:27, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

"Minor edit" is a checkbox in the "Save Page" confirmation window, after you pressed "Save Page" for the first time in the editor toolbar. Note to developers: the toolbar button still needs a more meaningful and less confusing label (or the confirmation button). GermanJoe (talk) 18:34, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Agreed; this is being worked on :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:50, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

A proposal to make the "Reference" panel awesome

First of all, the panel is currently almost totally unlabeled, which is very confusing. Anyway...

It seems to me that almost all citations are (and should be) created via templates, but this interface encourages manual formatting, which seems like a Bad Idea. Sure, you can include a template with the dauntingly-named "Transclusion" button, but then you are staring at another bafflingly labeled panel with a text field. This doesn't really make finding the template you need easier.

So here's what I propose: Templates work with Wikipedia categories. So why not set up a category namespace just for citation templates, with a nice taxonomical structure. Then you have a UI in the reference panel for drilling down through that structure. So if I wanted to cite a podcast, I might click "Multimedia", then "Audio", then "Podcast". Or if I wanted to cite a journal article, I could navigate through "Print -> Academic -> Journal". Then I'd be taken to a form to fill out the fields for that template. This could be a walk through sort of "wizard" or just a tree-view like any old file browser. Doesn't really matter. Note that a template could still be in more than one category if it made sense, e.g. "Map" could be filed under both "Multimedia -> Visual" and "Print -> Reference".

There are several really nice features of this proposal. First, it would be totally backward compatible with how things already work; it just needs UI on top of it and volunteers categorize the templates. Second, it finally fixes a major pain point in adding actual substance to articles, since searching for citation templates has always been laborious for occasional contributors (I have at least once given up on an edit because I lost patience). Finally, it would make the organization of the citation UI totally user driven - was the template for "DVD notes" not where I expected it? I can fix it myself! mistercow (talk) 00:47, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

@Mistercow: There are only fifteen specific citation templates, plus an overall {{Citation}} template, per Wikipedia:Citation templates . You're not really proposing a separate namespace with a total of sixteen pages, are you? Similarly, given the relatively few citation templates, why is searching for citation templates "laborious"?

There has been some discussion of just putting citation templates on a menu, within the References dialog box. They you'd only need a single click to select the citation template you want. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:59, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

@John Broughton: Wikipedia:Citation templates does not list all of the templates there are. There are 28 templates under Category:Citation Style 1 templates alone. I understand how it seems aesthetically awkward to create a namespace for a relatively few pages (though far more than 16). But the purpose of using a namespace for this is to use an existing technical feature to mark those categories as meaningful to the reference editor. The main purpose of namespaces in programming is to keep names sanitary. The number of items in a namespace really isn't that important of a consideration.

The same effect could be achieved by using a specific category within the main Category namespace, but that is more likely to lead to accidental contamination by users. A new namespace would make it clear that these particular categories are of special importance to the MediaWiki software. Also keep in mind that MediaWiki is not just used by Wikipedia. Other wikis will have different citation templates. Giving a category special meaning to the software without a new namespace would be an exceptionally bad idea. mistercow (talk) 12:02, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Five templates, {{cite book}}, {{cite web}}, {{cite journal}}, {{cite news}}, and {{citation}} account for about 95% of templated citations. Most of the existing ref tools focus supported between 3 and 8 templates. One can cover most use cases with a relatively small support set. Dragons flight (talk) 16:31, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

That seems a sensible way to improve the VE cul-de-sac. {{sfn}} and {{efn}} with {{convert}} are the two templates I need all the time during page generation. These should be a one touch control key sequence- it is a shame the Ctrl-t is already taken. The notes/footnote/citation blocks are c&p'ed from a similar article and the unused ones deleted at the end, <sarcasm> thank goodness you can safely C&P all these references from a similar article </sarcasm>. The other task is to hunt out {{cn}} templates and convert them into {{sfn}}, {{cite book}}, {{cite web}}, {{cite journal}}, {{cite news}}, and {{citation}}.

Finally, WP code is written for 'users' convenience not that of the 'coders'- so when will this made-up word 'transclusion' be replaced with a term that is Joe Bloggs normal vocabulary. Take a step back- just try googling for it in the non wikiworld. -- Clem Rutter (talk) 18:43, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Phantom link in subpages

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54243

Jeepers! It's a phantom!

Go to any page that is a subpage, such as a user sandbox. Observe the link to the parent page, located just under "From Wikipedia...". Activate VE. Observe that the aforementioned link disappears. Hover over that area. The link, though not visible, is still clickable. This occurs in Firefox v22.0 and Chrome v28.0. This occurs in Vector and Monobook skins. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 05:08, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Followup: The same thing happens when I try to VEdit an old revision of a page. The warning message at the top ("This is an old revision of this page, as edited by...") introduces phantom links. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 00:30, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Great find! Now reported :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:56, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Content transclusion causes WTF mode

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54198

I have stumbled upon a hidden variant of VE that I like to call "WTF mode". While VEditing, click the Transclusion button, then do one of the following actions:

• Click "add content", write anything (or nothing), click "apply changes".
• Click "remove template", click "add content" (order does not matter). In content module, write anything (or nothing), click "apply changes".
• Click "add content", click "add content". Write anything (or nothing), click "apply changes".

The first two actions activate WTF mode. The third action allows you to add markup directly, which may cause other problems if abused. Anywho, symptoms of WTF mode:

• The transclusion button is now non-functional.
• Pressing "enter" at the end of a paragraph will create a copy of the paragraph.
• Images may disappear.
• The text cursor may stick to one location even while typing in another location.

I suspect this is an incomplete list. Possibly the wierdest behavior I have seen in VE thus far. I will explore further when I get the chance.

Using Monobook on Firefox v22.0 on Windows 7

--Cryptic C62 · Talk 06:38, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

"WTF mode" is well named. I can find it with Vector/Win7/FF22.0. I was puzzled at first because after clicking the "Transclusion" icon there is no "Add content" button visible, but I found it lurking behind a + icon in the bottom left corner. Mousing over that produces two icons - a puzzle-piece "Add template" and a [ ] "Add content". (Comment: these are not described in the User Guide).

Steps to demonstrate WTF mode. Starting with this test page in edit mode

• Place the cursor in one of the three paragaphs, and remember which one
• Click the puzzle-piece icon
• Mouse-over the + icon at bottom left, click on [ ] "Add content", type something in the box, and click "Apply changes". Now you are in WTF mode. The symptoms I observe are:

• The text typed in the "add content" box has not gone anywhere
• The "Transclusion" icon has no effect
• In the two paragraphs where the cursor wasn't, you can add and delete text as normal, but
• In the paragraph where the cursor was things are odd, and inconsistent:

a) Sometimes you can add text, but not delete it: the "Backspace" key only moves the cursor left without deleting, and the "delete" key has no effect

b) Sometimes use of the "Backspace" or "Delete" keys makes the whole paragraph vanish.

I don't know what decides whether (a) or (b) happens.

• Sometimes when you click to reposition the cursor it appears in the new place, but when you type the changes appear at the old cursor position.

I haven't observed the paragraph-duplicating effect.

JohnCD (talk) 11:42, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Absolutely correct, this "functionality" is not described in the User guide. When/if it ever becomes stable, and has a clear purpose, I'll be happy to include it there. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:13, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

@JohnCD: Thank you for clarifying. Yes, I was referring to the lurking + icon. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 00:49, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Double content transclusion enabled markup editing

Elaborating on a point I hinted at above: While VEditing, click the puzzle icon to open up the transclusion box. In the bottom left, hover over the + icon, then click [ ] "Add content" twice. Any content added this way will ignore the VE "no markup allowed" rule. This allows the user to add a variety of markup options that are otherwise inaccessible in VE.

For example, at the top of a page, use double content transclusion to add a <s> tag. At the bottom of the page, use the same method to add a </s> tag. Before saving, none of the page's content will be affected, but upon saving, it will all be struck out. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 00:23, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

That's fascinating. It's still challenging to do markup without actually being able to see it (as one can with the wikitext editor), but still, this could be very helpful for something like doing blockquotes, if one wants to stay use VE to do that for some reason. And, yes, it does work - I did strikeout in one edit, and changed some text to a smaller size in another edit, both using VE.

What I can't figure out is why - is this an undocumented but deliberate way to allow wikitext markup, or is this something that no one planned for the VE software to do, and it's really WTF mode? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 04:15, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

WTF mode, unfortunately :/. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:02, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Error loading data from server: Unsuccessful request: Invali

Keep getting this error on edits Error loading data from server: Unsuccessful request: Invalid token. DennisDaniels (talk) 07:23, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Oh dear; that looks like a timing out bug. Does it occur regularly/consistently? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:58, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Gallery layout issues

The gallery at the bottom of GNB2 renders very differently in VE for me in Firefox, with three columns instead of four. The {{Gallery}} invocation for that page is at {{PDB Gallery/2783}}. Has this type of problem been reported? John Vandenberg ^(chat) 11:48, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

This gallery is a 'width' based gallery, and does not have a fixed amount of columns. It seems the width of the cells is slightly different in VE mode. Minor issue. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:46, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Worse is that it has double captions, caused by incorrect interpretation of the inline mode of image transclusion. This is part of the VE that is still heavily in development. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:48, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

@TheDJ:, thanks for figuring it out. Have you seen a bug about this? I couldnt find one in the 'visualeditor caption' quicksearch list. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 14:46, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Bug with image/link codes?

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54107

Just came across this botched-up VE edit by an anon [3]. This edit has copied mangled parts of an image caption including half the code of a wikilink (with its final brackets, but missing the initial ones) and moved it into the text. It appears to me that this couldn't possibly be an error committed by the user (or how could VE possibly allow the user access to just half of a link code and let them insert that without "nowiki"s?), so I assume it's more likely to be a VE bug. Is it a known bug? Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:03, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

That looks like bugzilla:52107. Move the start of the paragraph onto a separate line to fix the problem. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 14:42, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Sorry; I meant the second image should be moved to a separate line; i've done that now. Hopefully that fixes it. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 14:26, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

VE should be disabled for certain pages

The Visual Editor should be disabled for the following types of pages (in main and user space) because it is of absolutely no use there:

• the Main Page - Rarely will one encounter a Main Page with editable content; it is usually just transcluded pages or parameter-less templates.
• user .js and .css pages - a no-brainer; VE is useless for editing code.

— Edokter (talk) — 15:07, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

(Removed unrelated personal opinion.) I would appriciate not hijacking this thread to spew personal opinions. Let's keep on topic. — Edokter (talk) — 15:45, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

The Main Page is editable only by admins, since it's fully protected; I wouldn't expect the VE team to be interested in coding an exception just for admins.

I looked at a user .js page and a user .css page, for me, and I didn't see VE enabled for them. So either the VE team anticipated your proposal, or reacted very quickly to it, or the two of us are seeing different things. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:20, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

It seems they already fixed that one indeed. That leaves the Main Page; VE is pretty useless there, even for admins. Besides, it would save loading stub code for VE that is not used there anyway, which could save quite some bandwidth for the most openend page. — Edokter (talk) — 20:31, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Try copying the mainpage to a user subpage, and editing in VE. It might work fine. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 21:29, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Doesn't work at all; all content is transcluded. — Edokter (talk) — 22:11, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

On the Main Page, your point is well taken - the English version gets 9 million page views per day, on average; that's an opportunity to load VE stub code 9 million fewer times per day,just for the English version of that page. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:31, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Non-admins don't see VE on the main page, and I doubt the VE stub is the biggest performance hit with regards to bandwidth of the main page. ($.ime appears to be one of the biggest problems on a cold cache, as it is not needed to render the main page (but it might be needed for the search box?)) I'm sure the network guys will yell at the devs if they leave too much unneeded JS being sent 9 million times per day ;-) John Vandenberg ^(chat) 03:13, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

With the way the devs are treating us editors with our comments its unlikley they would do anything even if the network guys did complain. Kumioko (talk) 13:30, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Too slow to save

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The VisualEditor is unacceptably slow to save, taking literally minutes to save an article. This is on a Core i5 laptop using Firefox 22 and 8mbit+ broadband, so not exactly a slouch technically. -81.129.124.199 (talk) 23:19, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

The page you were editing is indeed unacceptably slow to edit, although I've not been able to replicate a minute-long save. It takes me 26 seconds to save a change, which is still far too long. I suspect there may be an additional sporadic timeout error you're hitting, based on other reports on this page.--Eloquence* 05:48, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Speed improvements are something that the team is focusing on, from what I hear. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:03, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

A trip to German Wikipedia.

I followed a link to German Wikipedia, so lets give you a few more bugs.

• I have done everything possible to opt out of the the shoddy beta version- to my horror, you have to opt out all over again. Instead of the clean 'bearbeiten' we now have 'bearbeiten/quelltext bearbeiten'.
• Following the ?BETA button on the top bar I get a popup telling me to read the manual.
• I cant cut and paste the text here as C&P is disabled.
• I click on the link Lies das Benutzerhandbuch and I linked to the English Language version which suggests to me that these messages have been hardcoded- rather than filtered through a data-dictionary, so whole of the Visual Editor source code will need to be rewritten when a new language is added!
• The German feedback page is regimented into threads which IMHO makes it deliberately unusable.
• There is no table on this page to links to similar feedback pages.

It was an interesting trip to make. Are we going to be given statistics for VE take up in the other wikipedias? When can we expect global opt-out?-- Clem Rutter (talk) 23:39, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

You'll find dashboards for VE on other Wikipedias at meta:Research:VisualEditor's effect on newly registered editors. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:10, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Just for information, the German Wikipedia created also a poll about VE, overwhelming consensus against the deployment as the default editor de:Wikipedia:Umfragen/VisualEditor_Opt-in. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 04:26, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor has been changed to opt-in at the German Wikipedia, per this statement from the WMF. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:20, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

So what's it going to take to get the same treatment here?—Kww(talk) 16:32, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

A similar poll ? (wishful thinking...) --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 16:37, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Die Verwendung von Wikitext wird selbstverständlich auch nach der

Wiederaktivierung des VisualEditor möglich sein. Der VisualEditor ist und

bleibt optional, und kann während der Beta-Phase auch komplett aus der

Benutzeroberfläche entfernt werden.

-- James Forrester, Produktmanager, VisualEditor-Team

I don't want to spoil good news but why, when you have opted-out of VE in one language do you get thrown back into it when you enter another. und kann während der Beta-Phase auch komplett aus der Benutzeroberfläche entfernt werden seems a little ingenuous, or out of touch. So what was de:wikipedias secret, could they share with us a pointer to the type of pressure they used to rescue their users? -- Clem Rutter (talk) 18:00, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't know if anything could lead to a similar treatment here, but I will highlight what I think dewiki did right. They avoided distractions. Their poll was a simple actionable question. Given the current state of VE, it should A) be deployed by default for anons and everyone else, B) be deployed by default for registered users but not anons, or C) be made opt-in only for all users. (This was slightly undermined by the addition of a confusing fourth choice after polling started.) If you want to give clear guidance about what people think about a software package, it helps to ask clear questions. By comparison, enwiki's discussions have been scattered and the polling we have done on the subject has been confused by too many options or questions that don't easily lead to actionable responses. Dragons flight (talk) 18:35, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree with you, that's why I talked about a similar poll (the one that was held on enwiki was too confused and too far from being neutral). I also think that there's been a beginning of change in WMF position about the same time as Jimmy got back from holidays (first, the option to opt-out, then this decision for dewiki). --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 18:40, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Should we run a new poll here? I mean, WP:VE/FAQ already shows fairly strong support, but I'm not that concerned if it's preferred to restart. We should probably have a sitenotice, though, to get widespread input. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 18:56, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I think a new poll would be a good idea. I wouldn't have thought a community poll would be enough to sway them but now that the precendant has been set we should go forward with the idea as well. I also think it needs to be limited to 2 options. A) Keep the editor enabled by default, as it is now; B) Make the Visual Editor opt in only. We can always reenable it for all users later when the problems have been resolved but I think we nearly all agree that there are just too many problems currently. Kumioko (talk) 19:00, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

The elephant in the room: the German Wikipedia already made one credible threat to fork, over the image filter. It is much easier to give them the off switch than to risk such a movement again - David Gerard (talk) 19:41, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I also think a new poll would be a good idea, with just a choice between "enabled by default" or "opt-in" (and if "opt-in" is decided, it can be changed later). And eventually a site notice or edit notice to have user know about the poll. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 20:24, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

For what it is worth, if we are going to have another poll, I would include all three states that the WMF has been using in their deployment choices, i.e. enable for all, enable for registered users only, opt-in only. Dragons flight (talk) 20:33, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Its all to do with pushback. I had an email exchange with Sue Gardner, basically all the angst about VE was expected. I think they were planning for a lot of "resistance to change" (my words) for the release. People screaming for it to be switched off was expected. People calling it a buggy piece of rubbish was expected. The foundation was actually surprised how little pushback there was before July when you had to opt-in, and pushback now is about what is expected.

So far the pushback from en wikipedia has not be strong enough, de was more organised with a greater number of votes: 480 for opt in our RFC with only 39 for disabling just does not measure up. de has also been better in taking things to bugzilla, which is where the developers listen. Posts on-wiki have little effect where the foundation/developers are concerned. The Dutch wikipedia has done even better you can't even use VE there, but this is mainly due to a bug which badly affected that wiki. We have had some success and have been successful with the disable VE preference, we are likely to see action on the hover effect on edit|edit source T52540.--Salix (talk): 21:18, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, I think they are mistaking "resistance to change" with people being fed up with the deployment of a buggy, unfinished and non fully functional software (which is an objective statement I think, and not just "resistance to change"). The fact that they got less pushback than expected before July is a clear indication that it's not just resistance to change, but really a resistance to buggy software: before July, I think most people here didn't believe that WMF would really proceed with the deployment (as the number of bugs was important and major features were even thought through). So, people just took it quietly, expecting bugs to be fixed and features added before the roll-out.

dewiki and nlwiki handled things a lot better, but they also had a few weeks to prepare themselves, here we were fighting every week to stop the deployment for going an other step further. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 21:43, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

See #RFC over default state below.—Kww(talk) 03:04, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Less imposing

This edit makes me fell like im more likely to make changes as it looks less imposing 142.162.223.104 (talk) 01:36, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Great to hear! Let us know if you see any bugs. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:04, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Breaking of [[x]]y links

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54240

[4] consider another item in this sack full of glitches. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 10:40, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't understand the issue with that edit. :/ Can you explain what that broke? It seems to work. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:04, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

It is injecting poor syntax. this is what it should look like. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 14:10, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Maggie, syntax like [[a|ab]]c is awful: you can use [[a|abc]] or [[a]]bc. I think John suggests that VE could handle this kind of links smartly (like some other tools already does) since in VE the user doesn't see the underlying wikitext. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 15:35, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying; I'll report it. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 19:51, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Proposal: WikiProject VisualEditor

I think we should, if there is sufficient interest, create a WikiProject for VE, at Wikipedia:WikiProject VisualEditor. At Wikipedia talk:VisualEditor#WikiProject VisualEditor, I've listed a number of tasks that such a WikiProject could work on. Please comment on this proposal (including an interest in participating) at that talk page, not here. Thanks. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:16, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Bold italics

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54254

I was looking at the corrupted tables in http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Metallica_%28album%29&oldid=566196578&veaction=edit when I noticed the lead (compare it to the display at Metallica (album)). It's not just bold italic text, because User:Kww/italictest works correctly. I'm suspicious that it has something to do with Metallica having an italic title, but I can't figure out precisely how Metallica gets its italic title, because I don't see a call to {{italic title}}.—Kww(talk) 23:11, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Template:Infobox album contains the call to {{italic title}}. GoingBatty (talk) 23:17, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Certainly does, but that doesn't seem to be the source of the problem, per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kww/italictest2?veaction=edit .—Kww(talk) 23:24, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

T54254—Kww(talk) 00:34, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

RFC over default state

Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Default State RFC has been opened. Be nice. Be respectful. Don't vent.—Kww(talk) 01:30, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Pretty please, countdown to end of VE beta

Pretty please with sugar on top, could we please get a countdown to the end of the VisualEditor beta? For whatever reason, there are a group of people that miss all the messages when there's a change. I fear that when the beta phase of the VisualEditor ends, we will have to go through the whole VE switchover thing all over again. So I think it would be helpful if there was a m:CentralNotice that counted down the last 5 days before the VisualEditor beta period ends and the switch to VE becomes finalized.

There are a lot of good people helping others learn how to use the VisualEditor and answering questions, but they have been through a lot recently and I would hate to see them have to go through that all over again. I think a countdown would help these dedicated folks and their efforts to help others with the VisualEditor. Thanks for considering this suggestion. 64.40.54.39 (talk) 01:31, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, we'll definitely need to do lots of communications around the end of the beta time period. It's almost certain that some users will continue to hide VisualEditor completely via a gadget, as well. Markup editing is not going anywhere -- users will continue to have the choice between the two modes.--Eloquence* 02:58, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks very much, Erik. You've done a great deal of work improving our projects over the years, so it means a lot to me to have your support. I sincerly appreciate your efforts. Kind regards. 64.40.54.39 (talk) 03:42, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

References - still dreadful

I've not followed all the discussions about references, but it's still a nightmare. Click on "Add a reference", and unless you know about "cite web" etc there's no clue what to do except to add a free-formatted reference with no links etc.

Having added a couple of references, I want to re-use one of them. There's a helpful looking button saying "Use an existing reference". It leads me to a box asking "What do you want to reference"? What? I want to re-use my existing Ref 2, at the point where I've got the cursor. What sort of question is that? No clue as to how to do anything. Will have to add that reference out in Edit Source. (Have the existing references got names? If not, will have to add a name, too). Not going well. PamD 11:04, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

It would be good if the most common cases were intuitive. i.e. adding a webpage or journal article can be done without any help pages. We could add an icon after the transclusion icon, which offers : webpage, journal, book, doi, pmid ; clicking on one of them would automatically set up the right transclusion dialog. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 11:41, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

I too think that adding new references is comparatively cumbersome in VE. I find the referencing tool in the old editor very convenient. However, for reusing an existing ref, I think the VE is more convenient. If you look below the box saying "What do you want to reference"?, the existing refs should be listed there. You can click on any one of them and go on to reuse them. Actually, the box containing the message "What do you want to reference"? is a search box. If you type any word in that search box, the list showing existing refs would be whittled down to the refs containing that word. So, finding the desired ref is easy. You can click on the desired ref, and reuse it.OrangesRyellow (talk) 11:56, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, Oranges: my two refs weren't listed as you describe, so I don't know what was going wrong there.

In general terms, when I've clicked on "Add reference", there should be some buttons for "Get help to add a reference to a: book / website / journal article / newspaper item", to lead to the citation templates, rather than expecting the editor to (a) guess to click on the transclusion icon, and then (b) know the name of the template they want. We could bypass those two stages and lead the editor to the appropriate citation template. And within that template, having added one or more parameters, we need "Add another parameter" rather than having to click back on the template name. I don't think an inexperienced user has a cat in hell's chance of adding a reference at present. PamD 12:38, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, reopened it in VE and the "use existing reference" worked like a dream. I wonder why it didn't work first time? PamD 12:46, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Did you save the two refs before trying to reuse them? Reuse function does not work on refs which have not been saved yet. I second your request to bypass the two stages you described. I guess we are requesting a workflow similar to the referencing workflow in the source editor referencing tool. I think improvement in the referencing technique of VE should speed up its usage across Wikipedia. I think the VE has the potential to have a referencing technique superior to the source editor. It just needs some tweaking to the community's tastes.OrangesRyellow (talk) 12:55, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm actually talking to James about this today. I'm going to try and write up what comes out of the conversation. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:18, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Apart from reproducing the old cite toolbar functionality, a nice feature to include would be another button beside "Use existing reference", one that says something like "Modify existing reference and use here". When you click on this it brings you to essentially the same list of existing references, but when you click on one of them in this list, it makes a new reference but copies all the old information from the existing reference that was selected and then places it in this new reference, and then the dialog goes back to the original reference view so that the editor can change the page number, etc. This allows quick referencing, comparable or perhaps even quicker than source-code, of the same work or volume when just a new page or chapter is being cited; since most articles don't use Template:rp.

On top of this another couple of useful features would be (1) some note in the normal reference view when a reference is used more than once, "This reference is used in multiple locations in this article." And (2), when this is the case, a checkbox with a label like "Modify for this location only." Then, if this checkbox is checked, and any changes are made, when the editor presses "Apply changes", a new reference is made with the content as modified and put in that location, but the old reference is left unchanged. This way one can change an incorrect page number without having to create a new reference, nor run any extra risk of accidentally changing a reference for all locations when only one location needed fixing. --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 18:57, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

I think I like this idea. If you've got several similar sources (e.g., side-by-side articles from the same periodical or chapters from a book), you could save some time by copying the one and changing only the titles and authors. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:59, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

@Okeyes. Thanks. IMO, the important things to keep in mind is that, like in the source editor referencing tool(SERT), getting to the common ref templates like cite news, cite web, cite book, cite journal should require as few clicks as possible. Like in the SERT, clicking on those templates should provide a ready-made form with 5-10 commonly used parameters visible all at once, with an option to show some additional less commonly used parameters, so that most users can get done without requiring to add parameters one by one. Having to select and add parameters every time one wants to add a ref is cumbersome. It can be made even better if users had an option to devise and save their own ready-made forms with pre-selected parameters for any ref template, and access these self devised templates from buttons on the VE. Next time they want to use the ref template with the same set of parameters, they just need to click a button and start adding the data. This should be a big advancement on the SERT, and please power users, besides being convenient for eds who use various types of specialized ref templates. I understand adding a functionality like this may not be easy. I am willing to give it some time...OrangesRyellow (talk) 09:18, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

@Okeyes (WMF), PamD, and John Vandenberg: In the meantime, would someone mind submitting a bug report that the search box hint, "What do you want to reference", should say "What existing reference do you want to use?" Because, as Pam pointed out, the existing hint can be read as asking the user "What text do you want this citation to apply to?" Hopefully this is something that is easy to change. Maybe it's something that we here can fix via localization rather than waiting for the VE team to react? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:22, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

The search bar should actually have been removed; are you still getting it? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:00, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

@Okeyes (WMF): The search bar in the References dialog box, visible after one clicks on "Use an existing resource', is very much still there (Chrome, Firefox, Safari). Are you saying that it's going to be removed, or that a different search bar has already been removed? (I ask because I'm trying to keep the User guide current.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:37, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Neither; it should've been removed, and has been for me. How very strange :/. O...kay. I'm going to go down to 3rd and headscratch with the devs about this.

Unrelated; I had the chat about referencing with James F on Thursday. Basically they're looking to make some general improvements to reference editing as it stands, but more importantly integrate (on a per-wiki basis) equivalents to the cite functions that exist in the markup editor. You'll get a set of buttons pointing at commonly used templates, and clicking will open up a template dialog populated with the various parameters. Obviously this can be made more elegant (and the template dialog itself needs to be made more elegant) but they hope to have that in place in August (taking into account Wikimania). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:44, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

@ Okeyes (WMF). Thanks for the update. The plan looks good. The search bar is still there for me. Besides not having to learn and wade through complicated wikicode, the search bar is one of the smartest things about VE. It is very easy to reuse refs through that search bar, particularly when the article contains a large number of refs. (Try reusing a ref in an article with 100-150 refs through source editor and then in VE through search bar, and you will see the argument). So, I would request that the search bar should be kept. I feel most people do not know about the search bar because the present caption "What do you want to reference ?" seems confusing and does not provide a good clue that it is a search box. I think the caption should be changed to something like "Search and reuse existing references". That should immediately convey the meaning and purpose of the search bar. I guess, people will like the VE lot more if they saw this search bar there. Reusing refs in source editor seems comparatively difficult to me and the VE clearly outscores it there. Why delete a smart feature?OrangesRyellow (talk) 07:43, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

I wouldn't treat this as a permanent removal; more a "we know bits don't work very well, so let's strip it down to something more basic and build off that". This isn't to say the search bar won't be returning - I don't know the answer to that question, I'm afraid - but instead that something being removed doesn't mean it's gone forever. The restoration of the old interface serves as a good case in point, I reckon :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:13, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Templates for dealing with problem cases

For problem cases like List of X-Men (TV series) episodes where Visual Editor cannot be safely used, I've developed two little templates: {{disable VE top}} and {{disable VE bottom}}. Any text that lies between those two templates cannot be edited by the Visual Editor. If you place them in an article, please make sure that an edit notice like Template:Editnotices/Page/List of X-Men (TV series) episodes is in place to make editors aware that the inability to edit the section is intentional.—Kww(talk) 05:44, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

If we add a specific class to that template as an option, we can use MediaWiki:Common.css to hide the edit links to the VE on these pages using the same rules as found at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Opt-out#Firefox, leaving only 'edit source' links which go to the SE. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 06:22, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

I've got no objection to that, but I think we'd need a wider consensus than just us. The template as it stands can be used to protect a subsection as well: if there's an individual table that causes trouble, only the table needs to be protected.—Kww(talk) 06:32, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

@Kww: "only the table needs to be protected" - have you tested that? John Vandenberg ^(chat) 14:50, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Not heavily. Certainly wouldn't hurt if you wanted to play with it.—Kww(talk) 15:44, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

The only problem I see: when the dev team releases a significant update, we'll get a better sense of the update's effectiveness if this template isn't used. Many eyes make shallow bugs, right? --Cryptic C62 · Talk 00:54, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

My two cents

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I just wanted to briefly say that I have had generally good experiences with Visual Editor. It obviously has its limitations, which have been mentioned above. However, it does help in doing edits of long articles that need a lot of basic trimming. I think it's OK as long as editors are aware of its shortcomings. Coretheapple (talk) 20:00, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, Coretheapple :). The developers are working on adding new features, and fixing bugs with existing ones. I think another deployment goes out today, actually. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:11, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Ctrl+A throws errors on large pages

Procedure: Go to George W. Bush. Click "edit this page" to activate VE. Press Ctrl+A, the shortcut to highlight all text. I got the following error:

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.

Script: https://bits.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=ext.visualEditor.base%2Cmediawiki%2CviewPageTarget%7Cjquery.visibleText%7Coojs%7Cunicodejs.wordbreak&skin=monobook&version=20130727T023558Z&*:2

Alternatively, if I scroll down a bit before pressing Ctrl+A, my browser scrolls down to the bottom of the page and then freezes for a few seconds.

Using Monobook in Firefox v22.0 on Windows 7

-- Cryptic C62 · Talk 00:47, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Ctrl+A isn't one of the shortcuts listed at mw:VisualEditor/Portal/Keyboard shortcuts. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:15, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Listed or not, it certainly functions as expected, and selects everything on the page.—Kww(talk) 03:22, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I have intentionally avoided looking at any documentation pages, including the keyboard shortcuts page. I'm not interested in seeing how VE reacts to some hypothetical contributor who colors in between the lines. I'm interested in seeing how VE reacts when you actually try to use it. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 12:41, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

This page is certainly a nice performance test case. On my 6-year-old 2Ghz desktop PC, I can't reproduce the aforementioned issue either in Chrome or FF. It definitely takes a while to load the whole thing, and then CPU is usage is pretty high, so with a slower machine it seems likely to be operating near the limit.

Is it just Ctrl+A that triggers the warning, or does it also happen if you interact with the document in other ways?--Eloquence* 06:06, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

@Eloquence: After highlighting the entire article, pressing the bold, italics, or numbered list buttons cause the multi-error behavior that John describes below. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 12:41, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

It takes my Dell Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz (5985 bogomips) computer 2'15" to switch into VE mode on the GW Bush article, with the busy script warning appearing twice. After pressing Ctrl+A, then delete, the warning appeared 10 times, and I gave up and cancelled it after 10 minutes, and I am left with a half deleted article. This computer has no problems performing other tasks for my day job, and Google Docs never causes that warning. Just to compare, I copy the entire G W Bush article into a Google Doc, and it is instantly visible and I can scroll through it - No worries - I dont get a script warning. However to be fair, Google Docs eventually tells me I am disconnected from the server, and it hasnt saved the document ;-) However I've worked on some large spreadsheets and docs without problems, so I think their app doesnt like something about the G. W. Bush article. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 07:33, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

It's bizarre to see it be that much slower on a faster computer. What OS/browser is that? Here's a full measurement on my machine (4000 bogomips/2 Ghz):

Chrome 28/Ubuntu 12.04

Switch into VE: 13 secs

Ctrl+A: instant

Delete all: about 5 secs

Firefox 22/Ubuntu 12.04

Switch into VE: 26 secs

Ctrl+A: instant

Delete all: 5 secs

I wonder if there's any other JS that might be slowing down execution. Do you see the same performance editing a long article as an IP?--Eloquence* 15:23, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I do seem to remember that VE/Parsoid is very dependent on caching. So probably if you reload the same page twice, it will be significantly faster. Another issue might be cache fragmentation between users due to options these users have set. If you have an option enabled that is 'not default', it might be that it has to start from scratch for certain users. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:55, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

My test results, all done on List of jōyō kanji on Windows Vista (2.00 Ghz):

	Logged in	Logged out
Chrome 28.0	Switch to VE: 66 sec Ctrl+A: 12 sec sec Delete all: 28 sec sec	Switch to VE: 67 sec Ctrl+A: 19 sec Delete all: 27 sec
Firefox 22.0	Switch to VE: 88 sec (6 errors) Ctrl+A: 81 sec (6 errors) Delete all: 17 sec (1 error) sec	Switch to VE: 85 sec (6 errors) Ctrl+A: 70 sec (6 errors) Delete all: 15 sec (1 error)

Quick summary: Load times and errors do not appear to be affected by user status, but are affected by browser. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 22:07, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

extraneous "nowiki" tags around in-line citation

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54266

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54268

I noticed another editor made a change that was marked "(Tags: nowiki added, VisualEditor)" [5]. An in-line reference was added, but with nowiki tags enclosing it. —rybec 07:33, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

@Rybec: It appears that this contributor attempted to add old-school markup while using VisualEditor. Any time you try to add a <ref> tags, or {{curly braces}}, or '''Bold Text''', VisualEditor will add <nowiki> tags to the offending markup. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 12:20, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I just noticed another. The "nowiki" tags were added around an existing space that was next to an HTML comment: [6] —rybec 03:55, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

I've reported that one as bugzilla:52266. In the last change on that diff it has also added nowikis around "[Wikitech-l", I'm just going to do some testing of that one. Thryduulf (talk) 09:28, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Indeed that second one is repeatable, so reported as Bugzilla:52268. 10:08, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Difficult interface editing long vertical template

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T51922

Typo fix. I found the "thems them" in the text, clicked on it ... blue box. No "template" puzzle piece. Scrolled right up, at which point the template was no longer highlighted - so of course the clickable puzzle piece would no longer be visible. Clicked on what I thought would be the right template and eventually found it. This was confusing to me for a moment, and I have a mental model of what's happening; it would utterly flummox a new user ("oh, I can't edit that ... but it's wrong ... why would someone lock a typo?") - David Gerard (talk) 08:10, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm fairly certain this is Bugzilla:49922. Thryduulf (talk) 10:24, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Removing spurious bulletpoints removed reflist - and red notice too late

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52779

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T47132

Editing a page which had 3 spurious bulletpoints, I backspaced to remove them - and removing the last one removed the reflist. If I then went on to save the article, the red notice ("Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist}} template (see the help page).") about the existence of refs without a reflist didn't show up until after I saved the article, even when I looked in "Review your changes". In Edit Source, it shows up in Preview. OK, in VE I could see that the reflist had disappeared, but (a) it shouldn't have gone and (b) VE should have shouted in red to tell me it was missing, allowing me to revise my edit before I saved the whole thing.

Ah, on further looking: the three bullet points didn't appear in the article when viewed as an article, only when seen in VE. They separate two comments in a template of some sort which the original editor used - see first version. So these bulletpoints appear on screen in VE, inviting the careful editor to delete them (and to cause problems by doing so), although they're invisible in the article as displayed. Hmmm. PamD 08:23, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Your main issue appears to be exactly the same as Bugzilla:50779, the removal of the reflist looks to be Bugzilla:45132. Thryduulf (talk) 10:39, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the detective work. Yes: T52779 is about the bullet points, and T47132 about VE's failure to protest about saving an article with refs but no reflist. PamD 11:09, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, one issue fixed, at least.

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T50789

For the record, the issue I had where scrolling up and down caused major issues seems to have been mostly fixed. It's not a perfectly smooth scroll, but it scrolls in real time, unlike before when it took a second or so to respond. Good work on that, anyway. Downside: The test page I use still takes about 10 seconds to load up before VE becomes active, though I'm pretty sure that's still a lot quicker than last time I tried.

However, today's testing was towarss a purpose - answering some questions I was asked, and, while answering one, I tried out the adding a link thing I had heard a lot about, but hadn't tried because of the system slowdown VE caused.

My experience was not at all good. I clicked the link tool while not focused on any text, to try and add a new link. I got a largely empty box with no instructions, and the next word in the article highlighted within the box. I fiddled with it a few times, and still don't know if typing in the box A. changes the text of the link. B. allows me to select more words. C. Changes what is linked to, or D. is followed by another, nearly identical box for a secondary function. It probably doesn't help that I have never used a GUI for text editing beyond basic Microsoft Word and Powerpoint stuff. So, frustrating experience, poorly documented, and I didn't feel the need to try out anything else after that. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 18:26, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

It's good that the scrolling is getting better, do you happen to know if there was a specific bug raised for that as I can't seem to find one if there was?

I've added your comments about the link input to the existing report at Bugzilla:48789. Do you think that separate boxes clearly labelled as being for the link target and the displayed text would be better than what we currently have? Thryduulf (talk) 11:01, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, but do make sure it's on the same page. Don't give one dialogue, then a second. Also, if one of the boxes is left blank, it should be auto-completed from the other box. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 19:11, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree with both of those points, doing it on the same page is how I envisaged it anyway. Autofilling the link text box from the link target box (or treating it as the same) is obvious, but I hadn't thought about doing it the other way around so I'll add that to the suggestions. Thanks. Thryduulf (talk) 19:29, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Honestly, given some of the VE interface decisions, it's probably better to spell things out exactly. I mean, we have hover links for editing sections, and that after the inital plan was not to allow editing sections with Wikitext at all after beta, and only as a user preference during beta, despite VE having no functionality for editing sections without loading the whole page. Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive_2013_06#Impossible_to_edit_sections_with_wikitext. This is not a group very good at interface design, although I will grant the underlying coding is pretty clever. Is that Parsoid? Because whatever it is is getting quite good; it just needs the current front end thrown out. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 19:38, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

More problems for occasional editors

Adding a reference link is too hard for your target audience. I did ask weeks ago for the planning documents, design mockups, or whatever concerning the reference template interface. Maggie said she'd look into it. Did these ever turn up? - David Gerard (talk) 18:27, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

We've already changed the references panel a fair bit, getting rid of the confusion of presenting the user with a prominent choice of selecting an existing reference. The mid term plan is to implement support for citation templates (in a manner where each community can configure its set of preferred templates, if any). I know Vibha (Interaction Designer) has done some initial thinking on that, let me ping her to see if there's anything in shareable form yet.

I suspect T54241 also plays a role here; the fact that URLs show up as plaintext is confusing.--Eloquence* 20:31, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I think it's more that adding references is actually harder with the VE, and that how to give a text label to a URL is still all but undiscoverable. (I remember there's a way, I forget what it actually is, and if I have to read a manual then the VE interface has failed.) - David Gerard (talk) 20:56, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

The easiest way is type text->select text->add link. The reason it doesn't show a "link label" type dialog when you add a new link or edit an existing one is that this would require yet another full-fledged VisualEditor invocation, as links can be made around mixed content (including e.g. inline images). However, we could show a link label input when a new link is being added, and possibly when we detect that the link is purely unformatted text (the majority case).--Eloquence* 21:42, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

See Bugzilla:50945 and Bugzilla:48789 for discussion about link label input. Thryduulf (talk) 11:05, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Some ideas for 29 July

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54248

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53314

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54270

Here is a list of my ideas for this day:

1. Move beta information to notification area
2. Add Behavior switches options, like __NOTOC__ or __DISAMBIG__ to page settings dialog
3. We should completely rewrite VE reference dialog,it should be similar to the insert citation dialog from the Classic, wikitext editor.
4. Add more formatting options to the toolbar, like underline, strikeout and font color.
5. Themes. We should make VE themeable. It look best in Vector skin, but should be able to manual css theming.

Issues:

1. Borders around the image in the infobox disappears
2. <pre> tag breaks and framgents

--Rezonansowy (talk) 20:07, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I've added a new T54248 for the Behavior switches. NOTOC is probably useful, DISAMBIG is not needed here as we have a template {{disambiguation}}. __NOINDEX__ might be handy for user pages.--Salix (talk): 22:25, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Underline, etc is covered by T53314, rewriting the reference dialog is being worked on (see the section above). I've added the theming as an enhancement request, see T54270, but I don't expect it to be given anything more than a "lowest" priority and it is possible it might even be closed as WONTFIX. Thryduulf (talk) 11:14, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't like it.

While I was hoping for a visual editor, it just makes it more difficult to make things like infoboxes, references, etc. MatthewHoobin (talk) 21:45, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor is still very much a work in progress and so things should get better as bugs get fixed, etc. If you have any specific issues then please note them here so particular improvements can be identified and tracked. Thryduulf (talk) 11:19, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Odd issue with copy/pasted template

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54271

I have been noticing that when I cut and paste a template repeatedly in VE I sometimes see parameter values that I am convinced I did not set. I can't quite reproduce the behaviour I believe I've seen, but I can give steps to something similar that is certainly odd and seems likely to be related. To reproduce:

1. Edit User:Mike Christie/Sandbox3 in VE.
2. Select the ¹³
   C (produced with {{chem|13|C}} ) in the middle using the mouse; make sure to select some text on either side, since pasting a template doesn't work unless it's embedded in a string. The colons are there to make it easy to be sure you've got some text in addition to the template.
3. Copy the selected text and then paste it at the end of the sentence.
4. Click on the pasted template, click on the jigsaw piece, and change the 13 in parameter 1 to a 15. Apply changes.
5. Now paste again at the end of the sentence. You'll see that the pasted template contains a 15, not a 13; so the copy/paste buffer was modified by the edit to the pasted template.

I suspect that if you fiddle around with copying, pasting and editing multiple copies of a single template (as I've been doing in radiocarbon dating) then you could find more bugs; I'm sure I've seen a case where I edited a template but after subsequent edits elsewhere the parameter values changed again without being edited. If anyone can reproduce that behaviour I'd like to see it. In the meantime, this does appear to be a bug in its own right. -- Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:53, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Well found. I have reproduced this with other templates too (e.g. {{tlp}}), and also found that if you paste into a text editor you get what you originally copied, not what you get when pasting in VE. I've reported this as T54271. Thryduulf (talk) 12:23, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Great bug! Thanks for identifying it, and thanks, Thryduulf, for triaging it :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:46, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

IE Support

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Is there any known timescale for when Visual Editor will be supported for IE10? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.128.0.206 (talk) 03:30, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Not to my knowledge; I'll ask :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:43, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Answer comes back; no specific timescale, but we're probably talking weeks rather than months. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:43, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Improvement in template support

The recent (last couple of days?) improvement in the template interface -- presenting some documentation information on screen in the jigsaw puzzle piece dialog -- makes a huge difference in usability; thanks for that. I have been using VE whenever I could while editing an article with lots of templates, and was unable to quickly figure out how to use the parameters in a template I wasn't familiar with. That's no worse than ordinary editing; normally what I'd do is bring up a second tab with the template documentation and work from that. However, now that the params have definitions on screen, the interface is significantly better than with the wikitext editor -- I'm still going to have to go to the template page for some things, but this is a big milestone and very welcome. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:03, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll pass this on to the dev team :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:45, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Issues with Images

I've experienced issues to do with image search, size and captions. AFAICS these aren't fully documented in the existing bug reports:

• When adding a new image, the media search feature doesn't find long names.

Steps to reproduce (tested in Chrome 28.0.1500.72m on Windows 8 Pro 64-bit, logged in to https:enwiki as Pointillist (talk · contribs)):

1. Find an image on commons with a long filename (e.g. File:St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph.org.uk - 501812.jpg).

2. Choose a relevant article in which to insert it (e.g. W. S. Lach-Szyrma).

3. Click the "Edit" tab to edit the entire page using VE.

4. Place the caret at an appropriate insertion point and then click the media button.

5. Enter the filename in the search box (e.g. St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph.org.uk - 501812.jpg)

The image is not found

6. Progressively trim the filename by destructively backspacing from the end of the string. After each backspace, pause to allow the search results to refresh:

In my test, the search first succeeded with the string "St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph.or"

Search also succeeded with "St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph.o"

Search then failed with "St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph."

Search then failed with "St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph"

Search then succeeded with "St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograp" and all shorter strings

7. Save the page (the result was this version).

• The image was inserted with a fixed size (in this case 225x225px). As discussed (here) a few weeks ago the Forced image size guideline discourages this, saying that fixed image sizes "should be avoided where possible, since it overrides the user's default." Bug 50379 says it would be preferable to have no explicit size. It might be better to make upright=1.0 be the standard for newly inserted images.
• The VE provides convenient grab handles for resizing images. I question the need for this. It is just making it easy for inexperienced users to do something they shouldn't be doing. If an experienced user has a valid reason for using a non-standard image size, they can edit the source. Image resizing should be done using the upright parameter anyway. Ideally an attempt to re-size an image using VE should convert the pixel-based width into the equivalent upright parameter using the contributor's current or default preference. That would transparently promote best practice rather than undermining it. It would also help with bug 47804.
• For similar reasons the proposed image property dialog (bug 38129) should default to using upright-based ratios.
• When I clicked on the search thumbnail to select the picture I wanted, the image was immediately inserted into the article. I had to manually invoke the Caption dialog. The contributor should automatically be prompted to provide a caption when inserting a new image. Perhaps this could be added to the improvements listed in bug 49662 or bug 38129.

Thanks - Pointillist (talk) 11:04, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

To elaborate on the last item - currently there are two image-related dialogs: "Insert media" and "Media settings". There should be just a single dialog: Media. If the dialog begins with an image selected, then it would offer various edit options, plus the options to replace and to delete the selected image. If it begins without an image selected, then it would offer the option of selecting a new one. In both situations, the dialog box would include edit options for thumb versus frame versus full (radio buttons; default is thumb), the text of the caption (including retaining the existing caption for a replacement image), and left versus right alignment (radio buttons; default is right). And selecting an image would not terminate the dialog; it would move the user to the choices related to that image, including size. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:12, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

That sounds like a very good approach. - Pointillist (talk) 17:12, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

WONTFIX on nowiki's

There is now a provisional WONTFIX on the nowiki bug T52527. JDF thinks its better left to an abuse filters, like Special:AbuseFilter/550. As there is no likelihood of this getting better we might need to toughen up the filter. One thing which could be done is to set it to "Prevent the user from performing the action in question" but only if the edit comes from VE. I'm not quite sure how to test for such though.--Salix (talk): 16:19, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

The point of the bug was to have what the AbuseFilter currently does baked into the software. I'm not sure how rejecting that request means we need to strengthen the AF. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:42, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Because as it stands, the abuse filter can't block the edit. It has a non-zero false positive rate, and VE's habit of placing the nowikis in really odd places relative to what it is trying to escape makes a regular expression nearly impossible to code. On the other hand, if VE would just stop behaving in a way that every user that has commented on it says that it should not, the problem could actually be fixed.—Kww(talk) 16:49, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

I think it also still the case that VE doesn't tell the user in any manner useful to humans why an edit blocked by the edit filter didn't succeed. Thryduulf (talk) 17:06, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

That has been fixed: the edit filter notice is displayed properly now.—Kww(talk) 18:28, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Can I just clarify: are you saying that there is no intention to stop VE spraying text with nowikis? -- Clem Rutter (talk) 18:36, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes; James and Erik have stated in some detail (I can't find the specific bug, I'm afraid) that this will remain the case. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:49, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Then I think using Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Default_State_RFC to ask the WMF to turn VE off is the right step, if VE is not going to be fixed. Look, I'm trying to rant less, but I really do think the VE team is horribly ignorant of what users actually want out of VE. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 18:58, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

In that case, a major task for the proposed WikiProject VE will to plan and organise a permanent, ongoing clean-up-after-VE task force: devise scripts to list affected articles, see how much can be entrusted to bots and how much will have to be done by human volunteers. There will be a lot of work: I see that Filter 550 was tripped 50 times in the hour from 18:00 to 18:59. JohnCD (talk) 19:09, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Even at 50 trips per hour, this can be managed feasibly with AWB. I am not competent enough to start doing this on my own, but am teachable. We need the edit filter that logs new nowiki tags to produce a list of articles, so we can review each one quickly in AWB. AWB can automatically remove the nowiki tags, and the operator can skip any new tags that are warranted (which appears to be the small minority).

Just so we are clear though - we are talking about maybe an hour of experienced editor time to manage this, every day forever, because WMF is unwilling to accept feedback on how the software is actually used. Sheesh. VQuakr (talk) 19:55, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Yeah that's pretty much correct. Creating a script for AWB or something else to strip the nowiki tags is easy. The problem lies in that we have no way of knowing for sure of the nowiki tags on an article were placed in error by Visual Editor or were there already for some valid reason. It would be better IMO to assume that the users want stuff to display rather than assume they do not and surround the text with nowiki tags. This adding of nowiki tags wsa stupid to begin with there is no reason to continue doing it. It needs to stop. That's not a request or a suggestion. That is a requirement if the WMF wants VE to be accepted by the community. Kumioko (talk) 20:17, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Agreed that we cannot write a bot to remove all article space nowiki tags, for the same reasons that we cannot block all nowiki tags via an edit filter. Fixing this will require a person in the loop, and will be more efficient if performed using a semi-automated script. VQuakr (talk) 21:40, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

That clearly demonstrates that the VE leader doesn't give a damn about the encyclopedia quality, with hundreds of articles being damaged every day for nearly a month. Stop that nonsense and shut VE down. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 20:40, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

On a more constructive note, WPCleaner now has some functionality to deal with 550 errors (see Wikipedia talk:WPCleaner#Fixing VisualEditor errors). There was also some discussion at WP:BOTREQ about coding a bot, but that has been archived. I remain convinced that a bot that posted a note on user talk pages would really be helpful: "You seem to have damaged [article name] with [diff this edit]. Please help repair that damage. If you intend on continuing to use VisualEditor, please don't use wikitext. If you used VisualEditor by mistake, you may want to opt out." -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:28, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Meh. We can discuss more on the bot page about notification functionality, but do we really need another bot throwing out notifications that no one will read? Putting the cart before the horse by attempting to modify user behavior to fit a crappy interface never works. Better to just clean up the nowikis and move on. VQuakr (talk) 02:19, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Can 550 be set to identify VE edits and disallow? That would solve 99% of the problems. Black Kite (talk) 02:23, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

There is presently no way to distinguish VE edits from other edits with the filters. There is a bug report requesting that ability. Dragons flight (talk) 02:30, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Bah. I was hoping it was possible to distinguish ?veaction from ?action. Black Kite (talk) 02:37, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

I am confused by 550 log entries. There are lot of entries there, but only a fraction (~110 in 12 hours that I counted) have a diff link that corresponds to a nowiki being actually added. I looked at last 500 entries tagged VisualEditor and found only 5 entries in the 1 hour that the log corresponded to (21:46 to 22:46 CST). So, the current rate of nowiki seems to be < 10 an hour and not 50 an hour as has been claimed earlier in this thread. Can someone independently verify this? Ssastry (talk) 03:57, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

The filter has been set to warn editor before they save, giving them a chance to correct their work. This means some have "Actions taken: Warn;" (a warning to the user) and others have "Actions taken: Tag;" (the edit was actually saved). You can ignore the warnings. Also of note is the filter instructs them to try source editing to remove the nowiki, so you do see a number of cases where the user corrects in a subsequent edit.--Salix (talk): 05:45, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Re: David Barton

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The poor writing on this page is exactly why I would not give one red penny to Wikipedia. Biased and unprofessional reporting. 173.65.21.197 (talk) 23:51, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

If you have an issue with a particular article, you should discuss it on that article's talk page. Or, you can be bold and take a shot at improving the article yourself. This page is for reporting bugs with the recently-added VisualEditor interface. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 00:43, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

VE slows Wikipedia even when NOT used?

Over the last few days- possibly the same time frame where the "opt-out" was introduced- I'm getting several-minute load times and pages that load with no content. Edits and previews may time out instead of completing. This is browser-specific and site-specific: The slowdowns occur only on Wikipedia and only in Safari 5, which is unsupported and doesn't even give me the option of using VE in the first place. It's clearly not a CPU issue, or the fan would rattle loudly. Yes, the obvious answer would be to use a different browser, but I have my workflow set up. A new computer is not in my near future, so it's only a matter of time before VE supports none of my browsers. It's just a web page: It ought to work.

I don't have a complaint with the existence of a visual editor, but it should be an "opt-in" thing, not the other way around. It could be handy for small edits, but I do a lot of copy editing, the kind of project that works better in a text-based editor. Why make it harder on the people who have demonstrated the most commitment to the site in an effort to accommodate those who have made little or no commitment? Is there really a huge pool of talent just sitting there waiting to make its presence felt if only there were a visual editor? Dementia13 (talk) 14:44, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

I too have suggested the "opt-in" but like everyone else on here making valid suggestions, it was shot down in the rudest manner by people who seek to remind us that wikipedia is not a democracy. What future does a website have if it doesn't listen to the people who use that website? The answer is it doesn't have one. I too have had the problem of slow loading times and glitching and thus have been going elsewhere to find my information. I say vote with your feet and do the same. You're not going to get civility, sensible answers, compromise or common sense from the people running this fiasco. --Rushton2010 (talk) 18:30, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

@Dementia13 and Rushton2010: - Just to be clear, have you opted out via the new preference (the one on the editing tab, not [just] the one on the gadgets tab)? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:23, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

It's possible this is an issue with the mw:Universal Language Selector, which was introduced at the same time and gave strange bugs of this sort. Ask on Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) - David Gerard (talk) 08:24, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm opted out via prefs: There's no sense opting out via gadgets, as VE doesn't display in my browser anyway. Regarding ULS, I tried the suggestion of loading some different Wikipedias that have not yet enabled VE, and I'm having trouble with those as well. This suggests that ULS might be the problem, and it offers even less recourse. I've heard of Safari slowdowns with the introduction of style sheet elements that it can't render, so I'll give that style sheet-based solution a shot. If that doesn't help, I might finish the article I've been working on and then ride off into the sunset. Dementia13 (talk) 16:19, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I imagine speed improvements are probably high on the list of ULS focus areas; I appreciate this is very frustrating. @Runab WMF: any updates coming down the pipe? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:02, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Schedule for TemplateDate enhancements ?

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Hi,

James said that it also depends on us working together in partnership to ... add template metadata (which is used by VisualEditor to make templates more user-friendly). I understand and agree to that, but currently several enhancement requests have been made on what can be done when defining TemplateData. Several of them would be really nice to have before creating the TemplateData block for each template, because without them we will have to go back to modify the blocks once the enhancements are available. So what's the schedule for the following enhancements ?

• T52656 parse wikicode and/or HTML in interface text: basically, it would be really useful to have some formatting capabilities for all the descriptions.
• T52760 support suggested values (and T53375): being able to define a list of possible values for a parameter.
• T53374 add parameter type for wikitext: being able to tell that a parameter value can contain wikitext.
• T53428 add an autofill attribute
• ...
• and also T53734 to have an editor provided to edit TemplateData (or advertising the existing editors).

And also a suggestion to get more people creating TemplateData: when an editor inserts a template without TemplateData, would it be possible that VE displays a short message telling him about TemplateData (a link to an explanation) ?

--NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 22:29, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I'd add T53311 to that list (although it may be a duplicate of T52656). Thryduulf (talk) 11:36, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Good question; I've asked Krinkle. He reports his efforts are primarily focused on VE/Parsoid directly at the moment, but that they have a developer working on a better editor for TD. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:15, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Another case of a horribly mangled table via VE

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53954

Might want to take a look at this, where a good-faith attempt by an unregistered editor to update a table on a sportsman's page resulted in...very strange things happening to the table. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 18:52, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

It looks to me like it's just "tidying" the formatting of the table code. This may or may not be desirable, but is essentially harmless - unless I'm missing something and it has altered the table display at all? Thryduulf (talk) 19:01, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, it did, see the lower right corner. I just encountered this, possibly related. The table originally contained invalid html-leftovers, but displayed correctly. VE tidied that up by adding more invalid code, with a result that wouldn't display as a table anymore. Of course it's not VE's fault if there is invalid code beforehand, but we have to expect that such invalid, but correctly displaying code is present on many pages, and transforming it into invalid, wrongly displaying code is not too helpful... — HHHIPPO 19:13, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Ah yes, I see the problem in the first diff now, it seems to be an instance of T53954. The second diff you give is a different bug, but I don't have time right now to investigate whether it's a known one or not. Thryduulf (talk) 19:57, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

So in the second case the > definitely wasn't intended? The rankings table actually doesn't look broken to me. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:22, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, try the immediately following edit. That added another >, this time on the line the table starts, which breaks it. It's definitely a VE artifact, you can verify that by editing one of those revisions: make a trivial change anywhere else on the page and then 'review your changes'. What triggers VE to do that seems to be the extra > at the end of the line the table starts, but I've no idea why it's doing it. — HHHIPPO 21:26, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Link with large font size in image caption

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54285

If text has a size specified, e.g <font size=12>, then you cannot edit it in VE at present. The bar that notifies you of this is fixed to standard line height so you can click on links that extend above or beyond this, e.g. text with a link.

If such a link appears in body text, then clicking it takes you to the link target in the same window (i.e. exactly the same as if you clicked on it in read mode). If you ctrl+click to open in a new window/tab then you get the same behaviour as described for section links in T53122.

If such a link appears in an image caption, then ctrl+clicking has the same effect as in the paragraph above/bug 51122. Left clicking does take you to the linked page, but instead of using the main window it uses the media settings dialog's frame (see screenshot attached to bug). You cannot close this frame - the close button has been replaced by the link target and it doesn't respond to escape.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Edit https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Thryduulf/sandbox2&oldid=566460073#New_section in VE
2. Click on the last image and open the media settings dialog
3. Left click the link above the "can only edit in source" bar.

I've reported this as T54285 but I can only test it in Firefox 22 on Linux. It would be useful if people could test it in other browser/OS combinations too. Thryduulf (talk) 18:54, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Gladly. Tests done on Windows Vista in the Monobook skin.

• Firefox 22.0: Replicated.
• Chrome 28.0: Replicated.

Seems like it might be universal. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 22:14, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you, I've noted your results at Bugzilla. Thryduulf (talk) 23:41, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, both! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:39, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

This needs said

Why abuse nowiki for situations such as James' mistake"? Shouldn't it be marked ''James'<!-- -->'' mistake? If marked correctly, it also has the advantage of being far easier to find the bad nowikis. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 20:09, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Another option is James' mistake. GoingBatty (talk) 03:05, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, we could, but it would prevent the problematic text being visible at all, and would cause snarl-ups once we get HTML comment viewing and editing fucntional within the VE. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:42, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Error loading data from server: Unsuccessful request: Invali

while attempting to change List of Minor Recurring Characters in Star Trek The Next Generation. Error happens in beta version, on Fx 22 AllanVS ^{talk contribs} 20:35, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

This is some sort of timeout error, see the section with this same title further up this page. Thryduulf (talk) 21:43, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Is this happening consistently? How long did you have the page open for prior to hitting save? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:43, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Watchlist notice

There's a request to advertise Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Default State RFC at the watchlist at MediaWiki talk:Watchlist-details#Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Default State RFC. Participation in either or both discussions is appreciated.—Kww(talk) 22:31, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

• Related poll at German WP of 98% to make VE only opt-in: The similar, but 2-day, poll (27 July 2013) at German Wikipedia logged 98% of 465 reponses under the choice to keep VE as only Opt-in. See 458 responses (in German) on page:

• de:WP:Umfragen/VisualEditor_Opt-in#VE vorerst nur als Opt-in (wie vorher)

That thread translates as "VE only as Opt-in (like before)" and had 458 responses (98.49% of 465) within 2 days, while 7 responded to extend VE as the default for IP users (although one said the extension was to increase WMF's damage to the German Wikipedia, to show more people what the Foundation was planning to do). Anyway, the only-Opt-in decision, of the German WP poll, was submitted as Phabricator to leave VE configured as the initial user-opt-in feature. -Wikid77 (talk) 08:38, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

That bug is marked "RESOLVED". Here's why (7/29 posting):

In response to community feedback, VisualEditor will be temporarily switched back into opt-in mode on the German Wikipedia. We don’t intend to otherwise alter the near-term VisualEditor deployment schedule, except in case of emergencies.

As we did in the case of Dutch Wikipedia, for instance, which was exempted from the phase 2 rollout, we try to accommodate community concern in the process of this rollout. VisualEditor is the single largest and most disruptive change to the user experience in the history of our projects. Not only is it still beta software, it also depends on us working together in partnership to update documentation, add template metadata (which is used by VisualEditor to make templates more user-friendly), and deal with unexpected issues. We appreciate your patience and feedback, and we have no intent of taking your partnership for granted.

We also recognize that there are still significant areas for improvement (e.g. performance, handling of tables, insertion of special characters) as well as work we can do to reduce the incidence rate of problematic markup changes. As we continue to support the beta where it is deployed, we’ll also update the German Wikipedia community on progress in these areas, and prepare for re-enabling VisualEditor later in the calendar year.

As a reminder, VisualEditor has always been optional to use, and can now also be completely hidden from the user experience (as an individual preference) in wikis where it is enabled by default.

-- James Forrester, Product Manager, VisualEditor team

-- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:45, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Deleting a section

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52100

So here, all I did, in VE, was to highlight a section, including the heading, and press the delete key, then save. The section header had a wikilink in it, which may be relevant.

VE added a nowiki tag in the heading, rather than just delete it all. It didn't tag the edit as "nowiki added" either, as far as I can tell looking at the history. Maybe that's because it was a userspace edit? Begoon ^talk 05:18, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Filter 550 only applies into main namespace, so it won't appear in user space edit. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 06:12, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, yeah I guessed that in the end. The question is really why did it add "nowiki" at all, leaving a "blank" section header behind - highlighting a section and header and hitting delete seems to me a pretty much uncontroversial thing to do in a visual editor - that's pretty unexpected and buggy, I'd have thought... Begoon ^talk 06:40, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I agree. It has been reported in T52100. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 07:09, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks again. I'm not surprised I'm not the first person this has confused. Begoon ^talk 07:14, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Save page box drops, button invisible without scrolling ... but fixes itself given time

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54317

Editing a stub I clicked Save Page and the box appeared dropped down the screen so that the "Save Page" button wasn't visible unless I scrolled it.

Tried to follow Thryduulf's notes on how to upload a screenshot but they don't match my on-screen experience (Vista, Firefox22, vector I think): no "summary" box visible, no indication how to proceed, thoroughly frustrated - there must be an easy way to add illustrations to this page?

... and now that I tab back to the offending page, the dialog box has moved back up to the top where it should be. But I've still got the screenshot, could upload if useful if given advice on how to do so. Perhaps it was just VE being v-e-r-y slow. PamD 07:32, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

PamD, the save box did exactly that to me at around 05.01 UTC. It moved to the bottom left corner of the screen, partially off screen, with the only way to click its contained buttons being to use a scroll bar. I assumed it was because I had just made a change to my vector.js (adding John V's switch editor script), so i cleared my cache and everything was back to normal. Now I wonder if it was just a temporary site js/css glitch if it affected you too. That's all I've got... Begoon ^talk 11:11, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, the screenshot would be helpful as I can't quite picture what you mean. Sorry the instructions don't work for you - I don't have a Windows computer so I can't see what you are seeing. If someone who does can help, please edit User:Thryduulf/How to upload screenshots of Wikipedia to improve it. Thryduulf (talk) 09:56, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

I've made some changes to the guide, including adding a couple of screenshots (don't know why I dind't think of that earlier!), let me know if that has helped. I have also added a link to it from the editnotice here, Maggie/Oliver/etc do feel free to move or copy it to somewhere else if you think that is better. Thryduulf (talk) 11:02, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Screenshot of the problem I encountered, the left edge of this screenshot is the left edge of my screen.

Believe it or not, when making a change to the guide I think I've encountered the problem described - see screenshot! It seems that the top right of the dialog box is positoned below the location of the last change, without reference to placement within the window. As my change was to the left end of the page, the left of the dialog was off screen, although there was plenty of vertical space here so it looks like no scrolling was required. Was this what you saw? Thryduulf (talk) 12:04, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Almost, but mine was off the very left hand edge and bottom of the screen, and the save box had a vertical scrollbar which I needed to use to even make the buttons visible for clicking. I didn't take a screenshot unfortunately, because I thought it was a js/css cache glitch, having just updated my vector.js.

From memory, though I'd say your astute observation that it positioned relative to the change made sounds correct - I was editing at the very bottom of the screen.

I'll try and make the same sequence of edits again exactly - to see if I can replicate it. Begoon ^talk 12:23, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Mine, complete with scrollbar...

Heh - that actually worked, it replicated - Windows XP SP3/Chrome Version 29.0.1547.18 dev-m - edits in my contribution history from [7] marked as test sequence in edit summaries. Note that the edit isn't marked as Visual editor in my history because I used JV's switch editor before saving, as that's what I did last time - but the glitch occurs before that, when I click save in VE to invoke the save box, then save again without putting a summary - that's why you can see the edit summary warning (it was similar to yours before that but then "moved" to the "worse" position) Begoon ^talk 13:04, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't use the switcher so that isn't relevant. After a bit of testing it seems that if an element is selected (picture, link, template) when you click save then the dialog aligns itself to the top right of that element, regardless of whether there is space on screen for it, with scroll bars if there isn't sufficient vertical space in the window to show the whole dialog. If you close the dialog, deselect the element then open the save box again it appears in the same place, only based on what that element is in the view now. If you close and select a different element then save, it relates to that element. If you have not selected any elements during your edit it appears overthe save button. Thryduulf (talk) 13:43, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Well I guess all I can say to that is that I'm utterly amazed we seem to be the first people to report it... That's the kind of dialog I'd just centre on screen, or tie to the green save button top right maybe if I was programming it. Letting it wander off screen with inaccessible buttons I can't believe hasn't caused more issues. But what do I know? Begoon ^talk 14:20, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

It seems we aren't the first to report it - see Bugzilla:52317. I've just linked this thread and added my observations to that, and feel free to add yours too. Thryduulf (talk) 14:27, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I just saw the report below too. JohnCD must be right - it surely has to be caused by a recent change.Begoon ^talk 14:29, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Indeed, it must have been introduced in the latest deployment - something that is consistent with this being alpha software rather than production ready. Thryduulf (talk) 15:12, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Yeah - I used the word alpha in the RFC, and I haven't yet wondered if that was too harsh. It's a shame, and I think we'll only go anywhere once that reality is accepted, but I'm not holding my breath. Your work here deserves a medal, by the way. Begoon ^talk 15:57, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

PamD's screenshot

And here, to show that Thryduulf's revised how-to-do-it notes really work, is my screenshot from this morning! PamD 16:28, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Horray - you're a star - that's another thing that irks me - how hard simple things like providing that screenshot is for people who don't do that kind of thing frequently - but whoa, off-topic, and yay - you did it. Seems like the error is well known now, but you know what, I reckon you were the first to report it, and yours is a nice different example to ours. Begoon ^talk 16:41, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Fixing garbled wikilinks from 10 days ago

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I had hoped *all* of the garbled wikilinks were being fixed, but I found another add-extra-letter, nowiki wikilink in "Six Flags Over Texas" (at bottom of dif447 of 01:16, 21 July 2013), which I fixed as part of full-page copy-editing for wp:GOCE's July backlog drive:

• originally:  former [[Texas Chute Out]] was located, and it will feature
• VE garble:  former [[Texas Chute Out|Texas Chute Out. I]]<nowiki/>t will features
  which appeared as:  "former Texas Chute Out. It will features"

In this case, the easy clue would be "nowiki" added by VisualEditor, but the example shows another peculiar garbled wikilink, where the article name is duplicated, then a letter added from the follow-on text, plus "<nowiki/>" after the link, and then text continues. Anyway, the article has been fixed. Feel free to hat this thread if this extra-letter wikilink pattern has been logged before. -Wikid77 (talk) 09:00, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

This looks like an example of fixed T53463, which was targeted for deployment on the 25th (and I don't recall seeing it since). As this diff is from before that deployment its not something that should be repeated now. Do report any you find from after the 25th though. Thryduulf (talk) 09:45, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Trouble putting text in superscript.

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53611

Sorry, I don't like this editing mode. Current problem: Can't find a way to put the v in vmeme in superscript. Can you make that option easier to find? DBlomgren (talk) 09:11, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Unfortunately at present there isn't a way to do that in VisualEditor, but Bugzilla:51611 notes that this needs to be added. I'll add a comment to remind the devs of the necessity of this. Thryduulf (talk) 09:33, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

"Save your changes" dialogue misplaced, half off screen

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T51969

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54317

I made several attempts to use VE to add a "Notability" template to an article, the first time I have used a template with template data. I found it unintuitive, and eventually gave up when the "Save changes" dialogue box appeared half off the screen, and inaccessible, at bottom left - see screenshot.

This is repeatable. Steps to reproduce:

• Start with this test file, though I think any file will do. Click "Edit"
• Place cursor at top left, click jigsaw-puzzle icon
• Fill in "Notability", click "Add template". List of parameters appears.
• Click on "Guideline", fill in "Companies". Usability complaint: now what? Next step is far from obvious. "Apply changes" takes you out of the template dialogue, and you have to start again. Some flailing around finds by experiment that clicking "Notability" in the left margin gets you back to the "Add parameter" dialogue. I think buttons saying something like "Add another parameter" and "No more parameters" are required. Also, if you make a mistake during this dialogue, there seems no easy way to go back one step, you have to go back to square one and start over.
• Click on "Month and Year", fill in "July 2013"
• Click "Apply changes". It looks OK.
• Click "Save page" The "Save your changes" dialogue box appears half off the screen at bottom left.

I think these dialogue boxes should be moveable, like windows. JohnCD (talk) 14:10, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

We are just discussing the placement of the dialog box off-screen above, see the section #Save page box drops, button invisible without scrolling ... but fixes itself given time. I was just about to file a report but it seems I was beaten to it - see T54317. The ability to move the dialogs is requested at T51969. The "add another parameter" is something that has been requested but I can't find the right bug at the minute. Thryduulf (talk) 14:20, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, so I see - after posting this I scrolled up to see what else was going on. The misplaced box must be something new, surely, or it would have been seen before. JohnCD (talk) 14:26, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, the misplaced box is new - per T54317, it happened with the VE update last night. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:24, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Overlapping toolbar

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54326

In Firefox 22 on Linux with Monobook skin (not tested in other combinations) sometimes the VE toolbar overlaps the page head links and tabs (userpage etc). See the screenshot attached to the bug.

I haven't figured out how to reliably reproduce this but the following sequence usually seems to work.

1. Make one or more changes to a page in VE
2. click on an element near the left or bottom of the window (to trigger T54317)
3. open the save page dialog
4. with the dialog still open, scroll to the very top and very bottom of the page
5. close the save dialog without saving
6. click a different element and repeat steps 3 to 5.
7. scroll to the top of the screen and observe the position of the toolbar.

• If it doesn't work, try again from step 2.

It doesn't always work, but actions like this do seem to trigger it more often than not. I don't know whether this is dependent on bug 52317 but it was in testing that bug that I found this one.

Is anyone able to reproduce this in other browser/skin/os combinations, and/or figure out how to reliably reproduce it? Thryduulf (talk) 14:48, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

I'll give it a shot.

• Firefox 22 / Monobook / Windows Vista: Reproduced (followed steps, occurred in one attempt)
• Chrome 28 / Vector / Windows Vista: Found similar effect after step 3. See screenshot.

--Cryptic C62 · Talk 15:22, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, I've added that to the report. Thryduulf (talk) 17:20, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Focusing on improvements

I think we should recognize that VisualEditor is the future and try to spend time and energy focusing on possible real, actionable improvements to VisualEditor. --MZMcBride (talk) 17:19, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't personally believe its the future but if the WMF is going to force us to use it, then I agree it needs to be improved. Its still a long way from being a useful integrated part of Wikilife IMO. Kumioko (talk) 17:23, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Kumioko: Nobody is being forced to use VisualEditor. But from everyone I've talked to and listened to, it does seem that VisualEditor will be a major part of the next chapters in Wikimedia's history. We can work together to provide, for example, an easier opt-out mechanism for VisualEditor (going to Special:Preferences is annoying and disruptive to user workflow). --MZMcBride (talk) 18:04, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Again, I understand what your saying but we disagree. The WMF is forcing us and others to use VE whether the application itself or cleaning up all the mess and problems it leaves behind. That's why I haven't edited much for the last month or so. The WMF doesn't want to listen to our concerns but wants us to clean up their mess. I have a major problem with that mentality. But we do agree on the underlying problem that the VE app needs to be improved. We just disagree with why. Kumioko (talk) 18:20, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

I've got no problem with the idea of working to improve Visual Editor so long as improving Visual Editor doesn't get in the way of improving the encyclopedia.—Kww(talk) 17:30, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Kww: I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. In fact, I think the two go hand-in-hand. :-) We can focus on both making VisualEditor better and making it easier to disable/re-enable. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:06, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Absolutely. That's why I spend time working up little test cases and trying to find the simplest cases that can reproduce bugs. I don't see that as conflicting with my drive to ensure that unwitting people aren't exposed to buggy and incomplete software.—Kww(talk) 18:17, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

The reason why I spend time on this page is to try and enable those improvements by making the devs aware of what needs to be done, and making the commenters on this page aware of what the devs do and don't know. I'm not a good content editor myself, so I spend my time trying to enable those that are to add that content and trying to help readers find the content those people add. Thryduulf (talk) 17:50, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

And as I mentioned in one of the above sections, you deserve a medal for that. I genuinely mean that. I can't imagine where the WMF would be without the kind of help and support you've given here, and I'm certain they can't either. I hope they've tried to imagine it though - such a thought experiment would be educational for them. Begoon ^talk 17:58, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Thryduulf: I see the "Feedback" page as somewhat distinct from the "Improvements" page. "Feedback" is basically a way to filter/triage issues before they reach Bugzilla. "Improvements" is a way to (hopefully) focus on the most annoying/cumbersome/painful aspects of VisualEditor and try to see what can be done to immediately improve the user experience. I think there are also some higher-level issues (such as advertising that VisualEditor is beta software) that wouldn't get reported on a "Feedback" page, but could be discussed on an "Improvements" page. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:02, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

@MZMcBride: I'm ok for talking about improving VE, but just reading the first sentence of improvements made me go away from this page (The ongoing default state RFC ... does not seem to be particularly constructive). The feeling for many users is that currently VE is doing more damages than good on the encyclopedia, and that the VE team isn't even listening to that (the bugzilla which creates most of the nowiki in filter 550 has just been marked as WONT FIX): the opt-in would allow to reduce the rate of damages and focus on improvements. So, honestly, if you want editors to help on improving VE, that kind of introduction should be removed...

About improving VE, I still don't understand why the VE team is not proactive on that: they never came here to ask what important features of VE should do, and how. Why don't they launch focused discussions on some points: template editor, reference editor ? From my point of view here, they seem to be developing features without specifying before. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 21:29, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Bug while editing image caption

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54341

On the page Earth, we had the following markup code:

[[File:(filename)|thumb|700px|center| (caption here) |alt= (alt text here) ]]

The VisualEditor parsed this incorrectly and assumed that “alt= (alt text here)” was the caption.

Changing the order of the items fixed this despite having no effect on the rendered page, which indicates that it’s a bug in VisualEditor and not incorrect MediaWiki markup. — Timwi (talk) 19:22, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Testing in my sandbox shows that it also requires the presence of the {{val}} template in the alt text. I've not been able to replicate it without that or with a different template (e.g. {{convert}}). I've reported it as T54341 so hopefully the devs can pick apart what is different about that template. Thryduulf (talk) 19:59, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Red links

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T39901

Just make red links red . --Rezonansowy (talk • contribs) 20:27, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes indeed. This is T39901, and there seems to have been some discussion about how best to implement it. It will be fixed but I can't promise when. Thryduulf (talk) 20:42, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

<tt> vs. <code>

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54352

Take a look at the text this page. The first two sentences may appear to be identical. If one activates VE, one will find that the first sentence (which employs <tt>) cannot be edited, but the second one (which employs <code>) can. My question is this: If the editor is supposed to be visually intuitive, why are two (almost) visually identical elements handled differently? --Cryptic C62 · Talk 20:54, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

A very good question! I've asked the devs at T54352. Thryduulf (talk) 21:06, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Bug -- Can edit page in view-only mode

Hey - I'm able to edit this page 'Omerta' when I should be in the view-only mode. Please address this issue asap. -- 170.121.14.12 (talk) 20:59, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not seeing any page protection for Omertà. Assuming you're talking about another page, my guess is that you can go into edit mode (that's a bug, though a minor one), but are still prevented from actually saving your changes.

It would be helpful if you did a very minor change (for example, inserting an extra space at the end of one sentence, immediately after the period) and then tried to save your edit. If you actually are able to save the change, please let us know. Thanks. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:39, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

No VE

I've got no VisualEditor option even though I have "Remove VisualEditor from the user interface" in my Preferences unchecked. Please fix this. --Sp33dyphil ©^hat_ontributions 07:47, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

What browser do you use? VisualEditor does not work with InternetExplorer and some other browsers. Try using Firefox or Chrome.--Salix (talk): 08:27, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Same here. I disabled it originally because it was so buggy but now I can't find it again. I also have "Remove VisualEditor from the user interface" in my Preferences unchecked, and under Gadgets > Editing I have "Remove VisualEditor from the user interface" unchecked. This in spite of the fact that I must have checked at least one of them in the past to get rid of it in the first place. Odd. Using a rather old Firefox (aka Iceweasel) v 3.5.16. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 19:57, 29 July 2013 (UTC) [Update 20:02, 29 July 2013 (UTC). Same issue with Epiphany 2.30.6]

Yeah, it's not going to work (read: ever) on firefox 3, I'm afraid. I think it appeared to start with because of blacklist/whitelist problems that are now fixed. @Sp33dyphil: what browser are you using? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:13, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Opera v15. It worked originally but for some unknown reason the VE option has disappeared. --Sp33dyphil ©^hat_ontributions 05:34, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Opera after version 12 look like they are supported. It was removed from the blacklist on the 29th and should be useable on this wiki in a day or so.T52813--Salix (talk): 06:29, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Problem is fixed. Cheers --Sp33dyphil ©^hat_ontributions 06:57, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

OK, thanks Okeyes. It would be nice if the "no dice" help messages included a bit more about older browsers than just IE. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 10:57, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

@Steelpillow: the one on the VE page, or...? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:09, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, also the FAQ and anywhere else that explains you need a modern browser; explain that the user won't even see VE as an option in the UI unless the browser is supported (or whatever). Maybe also add a FAQ question "Why can't I see VE in the UI, even though I have disabled the options to turn it off?" — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 10:29, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

I also get "no VE". Also while using Iceweasel v3 — perhaps not considered "modern"? Well, I'm fine with this feature, but perhaps there ought to be a notice somewhere (user preferences?) when options are curtailed on the basis of the browser one is using. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:01, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

old warning

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Got notice i had a talk that I replied to days ago. -DePiep (talk) 21:32, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

You aren't the only one, but this isn't a VisualEditor issue - see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Random "Talk: you have new messages" messages?. Thryduulf (talk) 21:42, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Sigh: when I tried to write it on plain VP/T I was lead to this page. -DePiep (talk) 22:17, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

To be clear: it was through WP:VP/T. Anyway, thanks for the null. -DePiep (talk) 23:27, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Hey, User:Thryduulf, where are you now? Now that I wrote facts (and you know/knew about facts), where are you? Are you payed by WMF? Are you fee to say that VE sucks? -DePiep (talk)

@DePiep: Remember to assume good faith and don't make personal attacks. Allow me to clarify two important points. First, when one edits VP/T, one should see a message which reads "If you are here to discuss issues with Visual Editor, please go to WP:VE/F". Notice the word at the beginning of the message: "if". This implies the statement is conditional. It should be interpreted thusly: "If you are here to discuss issues with Visual Editor, please go to WP:VE/F. Otherwise, please post here."

Second, looking at the VP/T section in question, VisualEditor was mentioned exactly once before your post there. The very first comment says "I didn't notice this before I selected the VE opt-out and disabled the gadget disabling, however reversing that didn't make it stop." Italics mine. Here we see that VisualEditor is mentioned only for the purpose of eliminating it as a possible cause for the observed effect.

To summarize: No, you were not "lead to this page" when you "tried to write it on plain VP/T". And even if that were the case, there is no reason to bite Thryduulf, who has been literally working his butt off to maintain this page. Literally. He has no butt anymore. Why would you bite a man with no butt? --Cryptic C62 · Talk 00:14, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

So we are here on page Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback. How did I come to write here? Through the WP:VP/T banner. I was lead to this page. The en:WP:VP/T dark banner there says: "Visual Editor Issues/Complaints/Feedback If you are here to discuss issues with Visual Editor, please go to WP:VE/F". To be simple: how should/could I know my point was VE or not? And that is I what I asked Thryduulf. -DePiep (talk) 01:10, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

As I explained in the above paragraph, the very first comment of the relevant VP/T section indicates that this is not a VE issue. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 03:20, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

An indication it was. That's how we roll. -DePiep (talk) 03:41, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

To answer your questions above, I am not paid by the WMF. I'm just a regular editor with no official connection to the WMF at all. I just happen to think that it is worth my time to help the devs identify the bugs in VE and to thank the people who report them here. I am free to say what I want about VE (it will be really good when it is finished, but it has been pushed way too early). As for where I was, I was sleeping. A quick glance at my userpage would have showed you that I'm in London, where the timezone is presently UTC+1 so your message for me was left shortly before 1am my time. Thryduulf (talk) 07:33, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

re Thryduulf I'm sorry, that was too intrusive. I should not have made it this personal. Clearly, I needed a good sleep too. I'm sorry. -DePiep (talk) 21:50, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Village Pump

Since all VE talk is lead here, this should be a Village Pump page. -DePiep (talk) 01:37, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Meh, this may or not be an active page in the long run. VP/T may become the target for VE comments once the volume comes down. VQuakr (talk) 04:01, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Indeed. All AFT5 comments went one place, all Page Curation comments went one place... we'd end up with a village pump for every extension. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:50, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Inconsistent tab names

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52402

On pages for which VE is enabled, the VE tab is labelled "edit this page", while the SE tab is labelled "edit source". Seems clear enough.

On pages for which VE is not enabled, the SE tab is labelled "edit this page". If one has been editing VE-enabled pages for a while, one will automatically assume that "edit this page" always activates VE. As such, the SE tab should always be labelled "edit source", regardless of the namespace. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 02:39, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

T52402 is requesting that the meaning of "edit" should not vary by namepsace, which is marked as a normal importance-major severity bug. It hasn't had any comments in about 10 days though, so I'm not sure what the current state is. Thryduulf (talk) 07:42, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

This is really low-hanging fruit - it requires only changing some CSS id tags, so each Wikipedia could modify the appearance of edit tabs. I've posted a comment at Bug 50402, in the hopes that it will spur some action. Here. The amount of programming effort needed is, frankly, trivial. It would be great, for example, if we could relabel tabs as "Edit (VE)" and "Edit (wikitext)", though, of course, getting to consensus on that or any other names could be a huge problem. But at least it would be our problem, not something we need the developers to do. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:37, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

FYI, this might be addressed by the new James' proposal I linked somewhere at the bottom of this page today :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:02, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Far too slow and doesn't seem to work in Opera.

What it says in the title really. Takes ages to load, and when it has loaded, doesn't seem to actually do anything except enable the spell checker and make the page slow to a crawl. --Muzer (talk) 14:14, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

@Muzar: what version of Opera? Are you getting a note warning about Opera support when you load the editor? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:09, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Just been told that it is now working in Opera. With Opera 12.14 (the last usable version for me) it also loads very slowly. I did not try and edit anything before I rapidly disabled it in my preferences. I got the note warning me it was not a version officially supported by VE. Dsergeant (talk) 05:51, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Darn. It's hard to tell if that's Opera-specific or general slowness; does anyone here have Opera + experience using the VE in other browsers? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:51, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Need editor functionality for the template parameters

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Currently, editing a template parameter value requires knowledge of MediaWiki markup, negating the purpose of the Visual Editor. Instead, the parameter value UI should employ other little copy of the Visual Editor to allow visual editing of the parameter value, complete with toolbar and everything. Timwi (talk) 19:13, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

@Timwi: I've only used the template dialog box for a couple of different templates, but none of them required wikitext markup in the parameters. So obviously you're editing a different template than what I've seen, personally. Which one involved the above problem? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:43, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

It's fairly common, unfortunately; things with links in them. I'm pretty sure this is on the to-do list :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:18, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Spellchecking wikilinks causes odd behavior

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54372

Go to this page in Firefox. Activate VE. On each of the first six links, right click and select one of the spellcheck suggestions. Observe any unexpected changes, then press Ctrl+Z (undo). Observe any unexpected changes. Here's what I got:

1. Changing "meepblossom" to "blossomy" removes the link. Ctrl+Z reverts to "meepblossom", but only "eepblossom" is linked.
2. Changing "blumpkin" to "bumpkin" causes no problems. Ctrl+Z causes no problems.
3. Changing "blumpkin" to "pumpkin" only links "umpkin". Ctrl+Z reverts to "blumpkin", but only "lumpkin" is linked.
4. Changing "metacritic" to "meta critic" only links "meta" and "ritic" to be linked. Ctrl+Z reverts to "metacritic", but again the "c" is not linked.
5. Changing "metacritic" to "meritocratic" causes no problems. Ctrl+Z causes no problems.
6. Changing "metacritic" to "arithmetic" only links "tic". Ctrl+Z reverts to "metacritic", but only links "etacritic".

Strange that any of these effects would happen, but perhaps even stranger that they are inconsistent. Can anyone reproduce in other browsers? --Cryptic C62 · Talk 21:11, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

For ease of reference I've change your list to numbered one. My results in Firefox 22 on linux:

1. Same as you
2. Same as you
3. Same as you
4. Same as you
5. Same as you
6. I don't get offered "arithmetic" as an option (different dictionary would be my guess why), but I do get "meteoric" as an option. Changing to that caused no problems, ctrl+z caused no problems.

This is all very strange. I'll not report it just yet pending reports from other testers and possibly theories or patterns. Thryduulf (talk) 21:20, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

The following table of results may be helpful.

Detailed results
Pattern	Original	Spellcheck	Ctrl+Z
No change	shamrads	shamrocks	shamrads
	turkleglove	turtledove	turkleglove
	trugde	trudge	trugde
	droconian	draconian	droconian
Multiword	metacritic	meta-critic	metacritic
		meta critic	metacritic
	dumpnuts	dump-nuts	dumpnuts
		dump nuts	dumpnuts
Lead break	blumpkin	pumpkin	blumpkin
	apathosaurus	brontosaurus	apathosaurus
	chrsky	Chomsky	chrsky
	hotsaucebottle	bluebottle	hotsaucebottle
	aoeign	foreign	aoeign
	coroglian	Carolingian	coroglian
Lead break (undo only)	gloading	loading	gloading
	vbirth	birth	vbirth
End break	soliquilistry	soliloquies	soliquilistry
	lethrym	lethargy	lethrym
	lrkwd	legwork	lrkwd
End break (undo only)	wrenchj	wrench	wrenchj
	cubew	cube	cubew
Full break	meepblossom	blossomy	meepblossom
	bumguitar	guitarist	bumguitar

I've developed an incomplete understanding of the different patterns, but it's not always clear why a particular pattern will occur for a given string (or why the bug occurs at all). --Cryptic C62 · Talk 02:57, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

I've not done any better at understanding this, so I've now reported it as bugzilla:52372. Do say if you gain any further insights. 07:53, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, both! This is a great catch. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:20, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

New Error

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54317

I was just editing a page using the Visual Editor, and when I saved it and it asked for the edit summary, the edit summary box was off the edge of the screen in the lower left hand corner. I'm using Chrome if that helps at all. Red Fiona (talk) 21:52, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

• Editing to add: Error appears to be intermittent. Have just saved changes to a different article and didn't have this problem. Red Fiona (talk) 22:11, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Please take a look to Feedback:Save page box drops, button invisible without scrolling ... but fixes itself given time. Jacopo Werther ^iγ∂ψ=mψ 22:12, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

This just happened to me as well. I typed my edit summary, but I couldn't see all of it. -GTBacchus^(talk) 23:45, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

The fix for this should be deployed today according to Bugzilla. Thryduulf (talk) 06:49, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Comment on this page's edit notice

If I see a notice where the first heading, which is larger than all the later headings, is "If ..." (eg "If you are here for information on disabling Visual Editor") and the condition is false, I will probably not look at any of the box including the two sections with smaller headings, inferring that the irrelevant content has sub-sections. The edit notice might be more useful if the three headings were the same size, or if in some other way we highlight that the second and third paras are independent of the first heading. PamD 22:53, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi PamD, thanks for the feedback. Usually, I'd be bold and reduce the size, but the two threads below suggest me it wouldn't help much ;) Rephrasing the first sentence might not work as well, because different sizes, as you say, seem to imply that the rest of the content is still related to the first one. Also, since it actually isn't, it needs to stay separated, and this text would be read even less if it was just attached at the end of the first paragraph. So, apart from increasing the size of those two headings, does anybody else have another solution? Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:25, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Would making it into two separate columns help? Put the info about disabling VE into the first column with a header like "How to disable VisualEditor" and give the right column an equally sized "Other issues" (or similar) heading. Thryduulf (talk) 09:48, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, I thought of this as well; we would not even need a real table, writing something to the left and the rest to the right of a vertical bar might do, but I am no expert in doing it so that it shows up nicely :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:58, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

A bit of fiddling has produced this:

That's probably bad coding/syntax and I can't get the header centered, but other than that how does it look? Thryduulf (talk) 10:24, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, that's why I did not even try in the first place :p It might work, if you ask me. Let's wait for more feedback though. Thank you. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:37, 1 August 2013 (UTC) PS: I am also wondering, after reading Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback#No_VE, if info about browsers belongs to this editnotice space instead than to the top of the feedback page, where only IE is mentioned? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:40, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

What a f***ing nightmare!

How freaky, what happened to the wikitext editor? (i know i know it's a beta-run but what a goddammed unpleasant surprise) Beuurrkk! --2.0.94.224 (talk) 22:53, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

The wikitext editing method is still available as noted elsewhere on this page. Just choose to "edit source". --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 00:23, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Is there anything specific that doesn't work for you? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:23, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Some refs not displayed...

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54371

When editting Christian Scott, I noticed only ref #1 is displayed, out of five well formatted ones. Changing <references/> into {{reflist}} solved this, no idea why. trespassers william (talk) 01:40, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Going back to an earlier version, only 5 of 27 are shown. I can't see a reason for it either. Reported as T54371. Thryduulf (talk) 07:13, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Strange; this just got reported as having been fixed last week. Reopened the old report :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:25, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Punctuation in markup warning

The markup warning currently reads:

• "You are using VisualEditor - wikitext does not work here. Click "Edit source" to edit the page in wikitext mode – unsaved changes will be lost."

But the first hyphen should be changed to an n dash:

• "You are using VisualEditor – wikitext does not work here. Click "Edit source" to edit the page in wikitext mode – unsaved changes will be lost.

--Cryptic C62 · Talk 03:22, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

@Cryptic C62: Thanks for the suggestion; do you think two endashes is too much? What about "You are using VisualEditor; wikitext does not work here. Click "Edit source" to edit the page in wikitext mode – unsaved changes will be lost." instead? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 03:33, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

@Jdforrester (WMF): I'm down with that. Another idea: "Edit source" should be a link. This changes the user experience from "Oh, a warning! Edit source... where is that?" to "Oh, a warning! Edit source, that's what I want." Surely it must be possible to pull the page title into the markup warning, yes? --Cryptic C62 · Talk 03:40, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

@Jdforrester (WMF) and Cryptic C62: I'd go with something like "You are using VisualEditor; wikitext does not work here. Click "Edit source" to edit the page in wikitext mode (unsaved changes will be lost)." Making "Edit source" a link is a good idea, but more in-depth than changing the display text, I imagine... (PS is there a Bugzilla for this yet?) Ignatzmice•talk 03:50, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi Ignatzmice, I found two open bugs related to that pop-up message, but they are not dealing with punctuation or wording. Since James is reading this thread, I think we can just keep posting proposals here, and once we all (well, more or less, of course) agree on one of it, we might bring that up on Bugzilla. Just my 2c here, please feel free to act differently if it makes more sense to you. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:13, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

I thought about opening a bug, but basically all I could say was that this discussion was happening and ongoing. The only thing such a bug could practically achieve would be to make James aware of this discussion, but it couldn't even do that as he is already actively contributing here. Like Elitre notes, once we have agreement on what to change it to (and I rather like Ignatzmice's suggestion) then we can have a bug that says "Change X to Y" and James can assign that to one of the team (who will probably like having something simpler to do than figure out the spell check bug above!). Thryduulf (talk) 09:42, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

I am not sure if James will like what I say, but we completely rephrased that pop-up at it.wp :p It now reads something like "Wikitext won't work here. To link, use the "chain" icon, and click here to learn more. If you ignore this message, you'll need to fix your edit later!" with the bold part linking to VE's user guide. Some patrollers felt this would help more against avoidable nowiki tags. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:53, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

@Cryptic C62: Yes, we could make it a link, but it's a bit fiddly (we'd need to preserve random attributes, your entry point, and other bits and bobs), and we'd need to change how the interaction with these notifications works (currently a click dismisses MediaWiki's notifications, rather than taking any particular action). Changing the language is something we can do in a few seconds, though. :-)

@Ignatzmice: I'm not sure I like using brackets in this context over an endash – the claim isn't a sub-ordinate clause that users can safely ignore, but a run-on observation.

@Elitre (WMF): Hmm; the request from the community was to warn against using wikitext, rather than encourage to understand how to use VisualEditor, but I can see that that might work. However, changing it that much probably needs a proper discussion about what's working and what people want.

@Thryduulf: Yeah, no need to open a bug. :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:19, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Feedback for suggested changes

Hi everybody. Earlier today James Forrester posted this message at one of the ongoing RfCs' talk. It is a proposal of four changes, so feedback is welcome; I am not sure how many of you are actively following these discussions, but it would be very useful if people who are using VE daily considered reading and commenting this proposal. (The thread also contains an explanation about how VE is benefiting right now from a large and diverse pool of users making real world edits). As usual, thanks for your time! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:02, 1 August 2013 (UTC) Please remember to add comments there, not below ;)

Thank you for the note, I've not been actively following all of those discussions as there is too much vitriol from some quarters for my liking. Thryduulf (talk) 09:36, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Wikitext popup warning when irrelevant

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54155

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54386

I edited an article and found I'd got the popup saying I'd been using wiki markup, I should go into Edit Source, my edits wouldn't be saved, etc. I knew I'd input a pair of ''s at one time but had then remembered the error of my ways, removed them, and marked the title as italic in VE style, so was pretty confident I hadn't used any wiki markup and went ahead and saved the edit (difficult because the popup was sitting on top of the savepage box). I can't see anything VE would object to in that edit: it was very disconcerting to see the popup. In fact it deterred me from adding the references I was about to add as sources... will now go and do so. In VE if I'm feeling brave.

So what seems to have happened is that VE is hassling me about some wikimarkup I added and immediately removed! Is there a bug about this (or is it a feature?) PamD 10:02, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

I think T54155 is relevant here if I've understood you correctly. Thryduulf (talk) 10:09, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Looks like it - so if I'd clicked on the box it would have gone away... ? Not obvious! There are too many of these situations in VE where something needs to be clicked on to make it go away, or perhaps to make it work, or... . Even adding a link never feels quite comfortable. But against that, when I add a single template I need to remember to click on both "add template" and "apply changes". It just doesn't (yet?) feel natural. Anyway, thanks for tracing this bug. PamD 10:54, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Good point! I've raised the lack of indication that it can be closed as T54386. Thryduulf (talk) 11:33, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

VE cannot display chess boards

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I tried VEditing Chess, which makes extensive use of {{Chess diagram small}}. I found that VE does not display this template correctly. In the image at right, the upper section shows how the chess boards are displayed in view mode. The bottom section shows how they are displayed in VE. This occurs in Firefox 22.0 and Chrome 28.0; this occurs in Monobook and Vector. Presumably, this is related to an existing bug, but I don't know which it would be.

In terms of pervasiveness, {{Chess diagram}} is transcluded onto 778 pages, and {{Chess diagram small}} is transcluded onto 256 pages. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 14:23, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi there. There's an open bug related to chess, Bug 51932. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:27, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Ah, I didn't even think to Ctrl+F for "chess". Thanks! --Cryptic C62 · Talk 14:49, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Article title as wikilink

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52240

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52497

Would it be possible for VE to disallow the linking inside an article to its own title? SOmething like this (first line of article) doesn't result in a bluelink anyway, and is e.g. automatically removed by AWB. Note that this edit also contained some unwanted nowiki tags... Fram (talk) 14:46, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

See Bugzilla 50497 for current discussion on selflinking. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 14:51, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

That seems to be about how self-links should appear when in VE editing mode. My request is more on why VE allows the addition of self-links. Fram (talk) 14:55, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi, maybe it's something we might include in this request? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:54, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, that may be a good location. Fram (talk) 14:56, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Done. The other bug gives a good explanation for why "auto-links" happen in templates, but I don't think they should happen in the text as well. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:14, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Thoughts on "Page settings"

Today, while fiddling with VE, I clicked on the "Page settings" button for the very first time. I was very surprised to find that it contained UIs for categories and interlanguage links. Here are some thoughts:

• When I imagine what might be found in "Page settings", I think of display options, such as font size. Neither categories nor interlanguage links match up with my notion of what constitutes a "setting" in this context.
• Any UI for categories should be placed near the bottom of the VE window. Why? Because that's where the categories are displayed in view mode. Hiding it in a menu at the top of the screen is not intuitive.
• The languages tab claims that the interlanguage links "can only be edited in source mode", which is simply untrue. Look at the toolbars on the left side of the screen. Scroll down until you see the "languages" box. Scroll down to the bottom of that box. Ctrl+Click on "edit links". Done. I'm not sure why you would want to take the time to write a new UI for this when one already exists.

-- Cryptic C62 · Talk 14:47, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi there, as for your third point, I believe that the point of that message is "you can't use VE to edit interlinks right now". In order to edit those, you are redirected to Wikidata. If you do that while editing with VE, wouldn't you lose your changes? (I haven't tested this myself yet). So the real point is that you can add interlinks without editing the rest of the page, with or without VE. I suspect the original wording might have been chosen even before Wikidata arrived, so it might be updated. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:25, 1 August 2013 (UTC) PS: I am not implying anything BTW, but it would sound reasonable to me if somewhere in the future VE managed to handle interwikis so that those you wanted to add ended up straight on Wikidata. Now that would be cool!

"Page settings" is a cryptic label, especially since we older editors think of the category tag as being part of the page, rather than something about the page. But so far, nobody's come up with an alternative that's relatively compact and makes sense. If you've got suggestions, please post them. Even if you don't think it's a good suggestion, maybe it will inspire someone else. I think that everyone's agreed that the name needs to be improved. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:00, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

@Elitre (WMF): Ctrl+Click opens the Wikidata page in a new tab, which prevents you from losing changes.

@Whatamidoing (WMF): Should we even assume that interlanguage links and category pages need to live together? Why not just have a button for each? We can fuss around with a single name all we like, but nothing is going to be more self-evident than this. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 02:19, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Page Metadata (or just metadata?) is one possibility. Ssastry (talk) 04:09, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Permanent opt-out option?

Right now there is an option to opt-out while it's in BETA. I would like to see this option given permanently for registered users. CRRaysHead90 | ^{Get Some!} 17:47, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Your opinion should be made known at the Default State RFC. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 17:55, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Visual Editor sucks

Get rid of it. --Astrocratic demokraut (talk) 21:40, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

There are a few ongoing, related RfC: I am not sure if you are familiar with them, but I'd suggest some rewording before writing there :) We are actually interested in hearing from you if you encountered specific problems. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 21:43, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Horrible

Visual editor is horrible and so wikia like. I hate visual editor for people just can click on stuff automatically without having them learn anything. It is like giving a easy job to a person who has no idea of the job.--Micronationalist1999 (talk) YOUR PROUD BANANA 22:27, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

I'd say they still have to learn *a lot* of stuff. Just think about all our policies, guide lines, rules... This way, at least, they can focus just on that. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 22:33, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Minor bug: note not visible in reflist if defined in caption

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54427

Take a look at radiocarbon dating, and in particular see the Notes section, which has four text notes showing. Edit the article with VE; scroll back down to that section and you'll see that only three are visible. The first one is defined in an image caption, which I suspect is why it's invisible. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:41, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

This the same sort of thing as T53829 which is about references in infoboxes not showing in the reflist. That bug is marked as fixed but the fix hasn't been deployed yet. I'm don't know how specific the fix is though, so I can't say for certain whether this will solve the issue or not (although obviously I hope it will!). I've asked on the bugzilla page though. Thryduulf (talk) 22:54, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Well I got a reply much sooner than I was expecting, and it seems this is a new bug :(. I've reported it as T54427, sorry to get your hopes up for a quick fix. Thryduulf (talk) 23:05, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Do you think this is distinct from T54300?—Kww(talk) 23:16, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, in that bug the reference is defined in the body of the article and appears wrongly, in this one the reference is defined in the image caption and doesn't appear at all. Thryduulf (talk) 23:31, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Better tracking of bugs and requests

It appears to me that we need a better way of documenting problems and feature requests for VE. Using AWB as an example, when someone submits a bug or suggestion they are asked to fill out a template that gives some details about the problem. This helps to document the problem and reduce questions. I think if we are going to continue using VE in its current state (which I still think is a tremendously bad idea) then we need to start to work smarter not harder. I suggest creating a template with the following fields:

{{VE bug
 |status      = new <!-- when fixed replace with "fixed" -->
 |description = <!-- Place description of the bug here --> ~~~~
 |reproduce   = <!-- Directions to recreate the bug (i.e. what did you do that caused this bug); leave blank if unknown or not applicable -->
 |page        = <!-- The page you were working with when the error occurred -->
 |OS          = <!-- Your operating system (Windows, Linux, Ubuntu, etc.) -->
 |net         = <!-- What version of .NET Framework you're using -->
 |browser     = <!-- What internet browser you're using -->
 |skin        = <!-- What skin you're using (usually Monobook or Vector) -->
 |workaround  = <!-- Any workaround for the problem -->
 |bugzilla     = <!-- Bugzilla tracking number if applicable -->
}}

Any objections? Kumioko (talk) 20:28, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Seems sensible to me. I made a few changes. It might be good to have a few more statuses: "tracked" for when it has been added to bugzilla, and "wontfix". --Cryptic C62 · Talk 00:49, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

This is a great idea, Kumioko! Is the .NET parameter helpful for troubleshooting VE? I suggest we encourage users to specify the version of the browser (e.g. Firefox 22 vs Firefox 3). Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 03:09, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, I honestly don't know if there is value in the .net for this or not. I agree that certainly the browser is important. I also agree that some additional statuses would be useful. Just getting ready for bed now though. I'll create the template and link it tomorrow unless someone beats me too it. Kumioko (talk) 03:14, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Well please don't make ".net" a compulsory parameter, as I haven't a clue what it is, or what mine is! A question: where's this going to be used? On this feedback page, or where? Is it just a reporting mechanism, or intended to be an ongoing record? (The feedback page gets archived very quickly.) PamD 08:09, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

I would say it would generally be used on this page. The template or the fields in it shouldn't be required IMO. Just available for those that are submitting problems if they want to use it. The more information we can give the developers about the problem the better and easier they can fix it or respond to it. Kumioko (talk) 11:30, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Could even be used with a "preload" and an "add report" button to give reporters a blank template to complete. We do that at the Graphics workshops, and most people fill it in just fine. Even when they don't fill the whole thing out correctly we get more info than if it wasn't given as a blank. Cool idea. Begoon ^talk 11:38, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

This is great. Improves usability (making it easier for users) and prompts users for additional information. Can you please put this at the top of the page and/or include the template in the new section page? CaseyPenk (talk) 15:20, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

That's what my "preload" comment was about. We could replace the current Add a new comment link at the top of the page, which currently just adds a new section, with a link which preloads this new template as a blank for people to fill in, or with a nice big attractive graphical button which does the same thing. Easy enough to do once the template is finalised, and works well on many other pages, such as the Graphics lab ones I mentioned. Begoon ^talk 16:12, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Ok I made the template andn setup the preload at the top of the page. The documentation still needs some work and we might need to tweak the template as we go but its a start anyway. Kumioko (talk) 16:58, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Kumioko, that's simply brilliant. It's late here, so no time tonight, but tomorrow I'll play with some graphics if you don't mind - just to make it a bit more "in your face" and attractive, but I'll bet your dollar to my cent that you've already increased the usefulness of responses here by a huge margin, and anything I do will just be tinkering. Kudos. Begoon ^talk 17:28, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Test bug report

For those who are interested this is a sample of what the Report a bug functionality looks like when filled out. Kumioko (talk) 18:24, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Status	New:
Description	This is a sample bug report Kumioko (talk) 18:23, 31 July 2013 (UTC)
To duplicate:
Operating system	Windows 7
Web browser	IE 8
Site	En-WP
Workaround	N/A
Skin	Monobook
Resolution	Unresolved
Bugzilla	N/A

Actual bug report

Here's a bug I found a few days ago in the proposed format:

Status	New:
Description	When adding a new image, the media search feature doesn't find long names
To duplicate:	1. Find an image on commons with a long filename (e.g. File:St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph.org.uk - 501812.jpg). 2. Choose a relevant article in which to insert it (e.g. W. S. Lach-Szyrma). 3. Click the "Edit" tab to edit the entire page using VE. 4. Place the caret at an appropriate insertion point and then click the media button. 5. Enter the filename in the search box (e.g. St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph.org.uk - 501812.jpg) The image is not found 6. Progressively trim the filename by destructively backspacing from the end of the string. After each backspace, pause to allow the search results to refresh: In my test, the search first succeeded with the string "St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph.or" Search also succeeded with "St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph.o" Search then failed with "St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph." Search then failed with "St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph" Search then succeeded with "St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograp" and all shorter strings 7. Save the page (the result was this version).
Operating system	Windows 8 Pro 64-bit
Site	En-WP via https
.NET Version	2.0.50727.4927, 3.0.30729.4926, 3.5.30729.4926, 4.5.50709 client & full
Internet browser	Chrome 28.0.1500.72m
Workaround	N/A
Skin	Vector
Resolution	Unresolved
Bugzilla	N/A

A few points occurred to me while I completed the template:

• To create a multi-line list of steps to duplicate, it's necessary to put <br /> elements between lines. When there's a list of steps, it might be simpler just to put it underneath the completed template.
• The template doesn't prompt for date/time the bug was encountered, which could help to identify what version of VE was in use when the bug was seen.
• Perhaps it would also be relevant whether the user was logged-in at the time?
• Not sure how the .NET versions are used, but it's quite fiddly to find them. Per Microsoft KB318785 you have to dig around in the registry and then copy/paste the strings.
• A "comment" field might be useful, e.g.:

Comment	The media search is actually pretty smart, e.g. it finds the image file given the jumbled string "Newlyn Church St Peter's". But searching for an exact match to a specific filename should also be supported. Maybe it could be activated by detecting a namespace prefix, e.g. "File:" in "File:St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph.org.uk - 501812.jpg".

Happy editing - Pointillist (talk) 07:26, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Just my 2c here - it looks really promising, thanks everybody for coming up with this. I am looking forward to importing the final version on my home wiki :) A few questions:

Is the .NET version field really necessary?

The resolution field refers to the Bugzilla status. Should we use a different field for the discussion status, so that we don't need to use the "Answered" template anymore?

If discussion is going to happen outside the form, I'd say the Comment field is not really required as well - but as I said, this is just my reaction after first reading this :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:11, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Comments aren't essential. I just thought having a specific field might be a way of improving the feedback to the WMF tester/developer without overloading the other fields. In my example I was saying, sort of, "hey I appreciate that you have already implemented a really clever search, it is just this [maybe] edge case that should be supported too." Sometimes developers can feel unappreciated when they receive a bug report that doesn't acknowledge what's already been achieved. - Pointillist (talk) 12:43, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying this. I assumed that, since the form is going to be used here and not on Bugzilla, it should be more "testers-oriented", which is, helpful for those who test reported bugs before going to report them furtherly on Bugzilla. From this POV it makes sense to me that there is a Comment part where the first person reporting the bug tries to guess what went wrong and why and, if he/she knows how to do so, also proposes some solutions. Do you have ideas as to how to use the form once it is fully filled, with regards to Bugzilla? Copy/pasting does not seem doable :) Thanks! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:54, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Regarding the status part, I've just discovered there is a gadget in special:preferences that reads the status of a bug a bugzilla and updates the {{tracked}} template. I haven't a clue how that works but it might be possible to link to this template somehow. Thryduulf (talk) 13:21, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

It would be good if plain numbers input into the "Bugzilla" field automatically linked to the bugzilla bug. Thryduulf (talk) 08:46, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I don't like it

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I personally don't like it. Go back to the old editing format, please. Thank you. Lacobrigo (talk) 23:17, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

As noted elsewhere on this page, classic-style editing is still available via the "edit source" option. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 00:22, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

"If you want to opt out of using the VisualEditor while it is in beta testing, go to the "Editing" tab of your preferences and scroll to the bottom of the page. Tick the box labelled "Temporarily disable VisualEditor while it is in beta" located in the "Usability features" section, then click "Save"., disabling VE." That should do it, temporarily. What to do once the beta testing is done, is unknown. Manxruler (talk) 08:56, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Can't re-use ref in one edit

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53689

In the #References_-_still_dreadful thread above, @OrangesRYellow: said "Reuse function does not work on refs which have not been saved yet.". Have we got a Bug for this? It's ridiculous. I created a very short stub recently, to fix a redlink in a hatnote (no, it's not a great stub, but it'll do until a lepidopterist turns up to expand it). I found a good ref, cited it, and wanted to cite it again for second fact: in VE it appears that I can't do this. As so often, had to follow my VE edit with a "VE cleanup" edit in Edit Source.

... Just searched Bugzilla and found it at T53689 "unprioritized normal". How do we expect new editors to create well-cited new articles if they can't use the same ref more than once? I've commented there. PamD 08:38, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Agreed, and thanks for your comment :). Hopefully it will get more attention soon. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:26, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Update: it's now been labelled as "Highest normal" - but it was created on 19th July, which makes one wonder how long it's taking for bugs to be considered and prioritised.

On the other hand, I'm amazed it was only created on 19th July. Presumably very few editors have persevered to try using VE when creating a serious article with references, and most of us have just given up on it. Or people just accept that the whole references area is a mess and aren't picking out particular elements to report as bugs.

I haven't done much work adding references in VE - a lot of what I do is stub-sorting and miscellaneous cleanup of those stubs, and working on dabs and hatnotes, and I don't create very many articles. The experience which led me to comment on this bug was creating a stub to resolve a redlink in a hatnote in a stub I was sorting: that's pretty typical. I wonder how many articles are being created in VE, whether by newbies or experienced editors: and how many of those editors then choose VE next time they want to create an article? PamD 06:59, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I do get the impression that most people who are actively reporting bugs seem to be gnomish editors rather than detailed content writers. I guess that the latter are generally going to be less interested in trying new things. Also bug reporting tends to be a series of small tasks (identify problem, test problem, describe problem, report problem) that more naturally fits with the way gnomes work than the single bigger task that major content editors typically do. As gnomes generally don't do much adding of multiple references this means that bugs affecting that workflow are going to take longer to be observed. This is all just guesswork though! Thryduulf (talk) 08:06, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

When you've got a chunk of material like this with lots of quotes and references, it is much more effective to work offline. You can spend as long as you want getting the content right, having multiple edit windows open and copy/pasting between them. Once the text is good to go, you can transfer it as a single edit without little risk of edit conflicts when you save. As we know, VE's handling of references isn't yet adequately baked – IMO would benefit from an up-front requirements process – so VE is only really suitable for simple edits at the moment. But that's how inexperienced contributors get started. - Pointillist (talk) 08:52, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I hadn't thought about that, but you are right. VE's handling of copy/paste also needs work before this sort of workflow is possible with it. Thryduulf (talk) 09:37, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Just a silly question

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Who is the VE team, where are they listed? How do I call my representative? And isn't the answer on the fancy white rightbox? trespassers william (talk) 12:11, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

You should find tech team names in the smaller box at mw:VisualEditor. As for the "representative", I assume you are talking about other people like the Community Liaisons (I am among these). There is no list of our names because you shouldn't need to contact us personally as you would do with a Senator :) We read these pages and learn about problems here, not in our inbox. Plus, there is not just a single liaison for en.wp: I am usually at it.wp, but today I shall be your "representative" here if you need help :) Also notice, the volunteers on this page are doing a great job and will be able to help you maybe better than I do ;) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:39, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Well, it's a fair question. Listing the community liaisons shows that you are someone specifically assigned to this project, and not just another WMF staffer wandering over to comment or answer a specific question. Risker (talk) 12:59, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Of course the question is fair. But nobody AFAIK is specifically assigned to en.wp (for instance, since we are talking here) or even to specific pages. And other staffers as you noticed do weigh in and help from time to time. In some cases, it would be more helpful to get assistance from, say, James Forrester (who is not a liaison) than from a liaison who is mainly dealing with smaller wikis and might be unaware of specific en.wp issues. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:11, 1 August 2013 (UTC) PS: you can find some names at the Product section here (not that all of them are CLs). This said, also other people are involved (as the ones listed in Community Advocacy). I am not sure how knowing this can help, but still :)

Thank you both. Indeed I don't have a clue about the workings of WMF, like what is the CL, are there some contractors, or all volunteers, and how many people do the internal VE communications. I understand now there is a chance of finding more info on the MW pages, but it takes some doing.

First I was assured by Thryduulf prompt replies about bug reports, and guessed he was in charge of something. Then I saw an exchange (can't find) where he too referred the VE devs as they. So the teammates might be reading this page very carefully, but are not making themselves very present in discussions. This field is inevitably less "democratic" than the usual WP decision making, and I wish people would state their position when signing.

In particular, I hope to find out if it is possible that more nuanced internal desicions will be brought to the community, and whether there are any major crossroads in front of you people. What features are not yet released but are in sight. To be honest, I don't feel VE is implemented "more or less smoothly", as in your Talkpage, and don't know if that's how softwares are usually born. Thanks, and sorry I didn't use my lucky day. :). trespassers william (talk) 14:03, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Just a quick note that I have no official position with VE at all - I'm just a normal volunteer editor who happens to be spending his on-wiki time helping out here. If someone is employed by the Foundation they have a "(WMF)" at the end of their username (although not all communications they make with that account are necessarily in an official capacity). "CL" stands for "community liaison", which basically means someone who's job it is to provide a link between volunteer editors and the Foundation or some specific part of it. Thryduulf (talk) 14:20, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Thinking about it, an organisational chart of the VE team would be handy to have - does one exist? Thryduulf (talk) 14:28, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi again Danny. I don't have a list of "all" the people who are working with WMF for VisualEditor - as I said, some of them can be found in the linked pages. CL is short for "Community Liaisons", which is the role of some contractors (like me), and you can read more about this here, for instance. AFAIK, it is very easy to distinguish between people who work for WMF and people who don't: the latter don't have this (WMF) label in their signature, but in any case, their user page will should tell you whether they are writing in their work capacity or not. People like Thryduulf instead are precious community users who decided to lend a hand with this project. This page stands in the middle between everyone and the developers, and is intended as a place to triage bugs and to identify problems which are then notified to developers on Bugzilla, which is a system that helps tracking such bugs. So, developers do not need to read this page as someone does bring issues from this page to the Bugzilla system. However, actually many people "in charge" (Erik, Alexander, Philippe) do read and edit not just this page, but also the others related to VE and encourage discussion (recent example). Everyone on this page will do whatever can be done in order to help users, but please notice that people answering here are not the same who actually fix the code, so there is not much that can be done on that aside from keeping in touch with devs and reporting about the status of the bugs :) (As for the decision making part, it might be useful to keep WP:CONEXCEPT in mind.) Should you have other questions, don't hesitate to ask. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:32, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor adding 5K inside a category...

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52502

No idea if this has been documented yet here or at Bugzilla. In two subsequent edits, VisualEditor managed to completely mess up the bottom of an article (apparentmly without the editor involved wanting this to happen): [8]. Fram (talk) 14:43, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

I think this might be T52502 but I'm not at all sure. I know I've seen something like this before and that wasn't the bug report I was thinking of, but I can't find the one I was thinking of. Thryduulf (talk) 15:18, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Yep, it is. Thanks to Fram and Thryduulf both :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:07, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

I'll just add some more examples here as I come across them, to see whether it happens a lot (too often certainly) and if there are any patterns to it. Fram (talk) 11:38, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

• [9]

Links and Redirects

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54420

When I was trying to add a link to Classic XI, (didn't know it didn't exist) it repeatedly took the word "Classic" and continually tried to make the link go to Classical music. I don't know what you could do to stop it, but could you fix that for me? --buffbills7701 19:42, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

@Buffbills7701: how very strange :/. Were you hitting return/enter to fill in the link, or..? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:10, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

I filed this, since I can reproduce what he says also on it.wiki, I don't think this is intended and I see it can be annoying. Should it happen again, please use the "old" editor to get the desired result (and thanks a lot for reporting!) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 21:13, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I had this problem earlier trying to link to Portable Network Graphics it insisted I wanted Portable Document Format. I've also confirmed it is happening with Classic* → Classical music and Thing* → Thing (comics). The way I got round it was to continue typing after its suggestion, then highlighting and deleting what I didn't want - far from ideal. I forgot to report it earlier, so thank you for reminding me - it's now T56241. Thryduulf (talk) 21:21, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

At 01:52 UTC James commented the fix for this will be deployed "tonight", almost certainly meaning San Francsico time. Thryduulf (talk) 07:39, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

"WebKit2WebProcess.exe has stopped working"

I sometimes receive the above error message when attempting to load VE on large (>200kB) pages. This only happens when I use Safari 5.1.7 on Windows Vista. Unlike some of the other error messages that pop up, this one crashes the loader and forces me to refresh the page. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 02:00, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Possibly related: partial logout?

Somehow logged in and logged out at the same time...?

After the above error message occurred, I reloaded the page I had been looking at: List of moths of Turkey. I clicked "edit this page" again, and VE loaded with no problems... but then I got a notice saying that I was logged out, even though the rest of the interface appeared as though I was still logged in. Clicking on a link confirmed that I had actually been logged out. Two questions: How did I get logged out midway through the VE loader? Why did the interface not change when I got logged out? --Cryptic C62 · Talk 02:12, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

As for the first issue, I don't think it is strictly VE-related, I googled that process and it seems a quite common issue with Safari (you might want to re-do such a search in order to find a solution closely related to your OS or computer make). As for the second, as you said, it might be related to the first one, and also a cache problem might explain that, although I'd like to hear more than a second opinion on this. Thanks (also for the screenshot). --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:54, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Links autofilling, can't override

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In this test, I tried to create a link to link as a test. The link dialog insisted that there is no article called "link", and insisted on linking to Linkin Park instead. Seemingly nothing I could do could make it link properly:Jay8g [V•T•E] 02:05, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

See #Links and Redirects and T56240. There is a fix for this that, around the time of your post, James commented will be deployed "tonight" [San Francisco time]. Thryduulf (talk) 07:37, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Can't edit team rosters

I like updating the independent baseball team rosters but it won't let me. I am also trying to add my images of the managers of the league that are former MLB players and it won't let me. Asapherg (talk) 02:16, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

There are currently types of content that visual editor can't edit (such as block quotes), some that it can only partly edit (e.g you can only edit existing cells of a table), and others that you have to edit through a dialog (e.g. templates). There should be no issue with editing most lists or adding pictures though. It's difficult to know whats happening without being able to see the articles you are having trouble on, could you give some links please? Also it would be useful if you could note what browser and operating system you are using. Thryduulf (talk) 07:50, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Broken gadget for disabling said gadget?

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I selected the following option in Special:Preferences (months ago, I believe):

[x] Remove VisualEditor from the user interface

Everything was going great until a few minutes ago I noticed my interface had reverted back to having two separate edit tabs. The one for VE is non-functional (which is fine, except it's a visual distraction and I don't want it to be there). Also the language on the other editing link (and on all section edit links still says "edit source" which is similarly annoying). ―cobaltcigs 05:49, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

They have a notice now posted right above the edit box for this page. It says in part, "If you want to opt out of using the VisualEditor while it is in beta testing, go to the "Editing" tab of your preferences and scroll to the bottom of the page. Tick the box labelled "Temporarily disable VisualEditor while it is in beta" located in the "Usability features" section, then click "Save". You can reactivate VE access at any time by unticking that box." I'm also very annoyed that "edit" now refers to using this ridiculous piece of software (while "edit source" now means what plain old "edit" used to mean). "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" - I can't be the only one who's mentioned that here. LazyBastardGuy 06:09, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Oh, another checkbox. I didn't realize I had to opt-out in two separate places. WP:MOLEWHACK. ―cobaltcigs 06:18, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

You don't have to opt out in two separate places, it's just how you opt out changed from a community-written unsupported gadget to a WMF written and support preference about two weeks ago. There was an update to VE last night (UK time) that is quite likely to have partially broken the gadget (which is impossible to prevent). Thryduulf (talk) 07:56, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I see the second checkbox says:

[x] Temporarily disable VisualEditor while it is in beta

Do we know what the procedure will be to disable VE when it is no longer "in beta"? ―cobaltcigs 08:32, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

No. AIUI, that remains undefined, but if an option to disable it is provided by the WMF then it will most likely be exactly the same as currently. It might even be that only the wording changes and people who have currently set the preference don't need to do anything. However the end of beta is several months away at this point and decisions like this simply haven't been taken yet. Thryduulf (talk) 08:58, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I just discovered that VE is basically back, even though I too have long since removed/hid it in my preferences. That's one of the things which really ticks me off, how seriously difficult WMF is making it to opt out of this contraption. And, of course, once the WMF have decided that VE is no longer beta, it's all fun and games again, with VE. Never mind that many editors don't want VE, ever. Manxruler (talk) 08:44, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

@Manxruler: what you experienced was not intended at all (see Wikipedia:VisualEditor/August_2013_update). It is my understanding that the recent changes happened to somehow "break" the unofficial gadget that you were using. You can still use the official one which you can find in your Preferences. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:58, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, Elitre (WMF). I know that, and that's what I've done. So now it's gone again, temporarily. What I really want to know, is where is the permanent opt-out/disable/remove gadget? Manxruler (talk) 09:05, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

What I know is that this (official) option is going to be available during this stage, and that in the page I linked James refers to "the beta period, which we anticipate will continue for several months at least". --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:16, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Why not just make it permanent? I've been here for more than eight years, a fix that will work for several months is nothing. I've tried VE, on several occasions. Sometimes it bungles everything, at other times it works to way it's supposed to. Even when it works, I dislike it. I'll never convert to VE, so just give folks like me a way to opt-out, permanently. Manxruler (talk) 09:25, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I am pretty sure this must have been asked before, but I guess that places like this are better venues for your point. Thanks! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:43, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

It became enabled—intermittently—for me today. I'm not using an unofficial script. It can be disabled by turning off Javascript, or by using certain versions of Internet Explorer. —rybec 20:09, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Intermittent behavior is definitely new. Switching off the "unofficial" gadget and instead ticking the box of the official option in your Editing preferences worked for everybody I read of today. Your problem is more likely to be related to you using an unsupported browser, as it seems from some threads below. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:48, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

visual editor

I did not find place to let comment about my own correction

so it seems to be little unusefriendly Chudzoskruo (talk) 06:41, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

If you are talking about leaving an edit summary, then you do this after loading the save page dialog. Thryduulf (talk) 07:58, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Worked well

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T50570

It was easier to make my minor edit. Printphi (talk) 06:50, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi, I also believe VE is easy to use for this kind of minor edits, but could you tell me if doubling a whitespace character was intended by you or it's an incorrect change made by VE on its own ? --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 07:24, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I'd like to point out that adding such a space is such a trivial thing that one can actually do it without realizing it (also with the classic editor, of course). A related bug was closed in June, from what I saw until now, when it's VE's "fault", you can tell because it will add "many" of those. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:31, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Well, I tried editing the old version of the page with VE and applying the intended modification (removing a '). When I try to review the difference, VE says that there's no difference (probably with the current version). When I save, VE saves the page but no new version is created (null edit). So, it appears that VE is doubling the space character on its own... --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 10:58, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

And I also reproduced the same kind of problem on Indian Bank: try removing the ' after Binny & Co., an extra space is added before the next internal link. So, definitely VE's fault. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 11:01, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Not sure if it is related to ', but definitely adding to the bug I mentioned earlier, thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:05, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Reproduced in my sandbox with " and - as well [10]. Thryduulf (talk) 11:31, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Inserting references and pictures

The equivalent of a macro facility is needed to insert references. The names of the fields can be difficult to remember.

A paste of the [...] from Wiki Commons should insert a picture. Andrew Swallow (talk) 07:01, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

The reference editor will definitely be improved. If by "names of the fields" you are talking about references generated by specific templates, the one you used probably lacks TemplateData to work properly - when it does, you don't really need to remember anything :) As for the [...], I am not sure what it stands for? Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:44, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

VE kicks you to the end of the page

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54445

Status	New:
Description	Pressing down kicks you to end of page. Cainamarques (talk) 07:18, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
To duplicate:	Edit the page Laurence of Canterbury, specifically this version leave the cursor at the top of the page press down (the cursor will move to the right of the hatnote template) press down again
Operating system	Windows 7
Web browser	Firefox 22.0
Site	En-WP
Workaround
Skin	Monobook
Resolution
Bugzilla	T54445

I've confirmed with a bit of testing that this affects all articles with a single-line hatnote template, e.g Oxford. You can't scroll down at all if the hatnote has more than one line, e.g. An American in Paris. I've reported it as T54445. Thryduulf (talk) 08:45, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

In Firefox ESR on Linux, I don't see the bug on the given page [11] but I see it with [12].

With [13] the cursor can be seen to stay at the end of the hatnote as I keep pressing the down arrow, but once I type something, the text appears at the lower, correct position. —rybec 20:20, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

References inside section headers

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54450

This is not really a VE bug (it is possible in the standard editing mode as well), but it is something that happens more often in VE, and that perhaps can be automatically disabled in VE as well; inserting references inside section headers. This is never needed or wanted (it is ugly, and the thing that needs to be referenced should be in the text of the section, not only in the title anyway). Example (spam, but the principle applies): [14]. Fram (talk) 07:31, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I could not find anything related in Bugzilla, so I filed this: [15]. Thanks for your feedback! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:39, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Tweaking transclusion and save dialog

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First of all thanks for the interface changes for beta. Not sure, all disputes are solved now (probably not ;) ), but the beta situation is a lot clearer now, especially for inexperienced users. I did some random testing with the transclusion and the save dialog (sorry, if some points may be duplicate):

Templates dialog (transclusion)

• If the last parameter of a template is removed, it would be nice to offer a "new parameter" again immediately. Currently the parameter list is just completely emptied and the user has to figure out the "+" symbol.
• Why hide the puzzle and content icons until mouse-over? In general, if a function is active, it should be always shown - no idea, what hiding tries to achieve here.
• The button to add a parameter is labelled with the name of the parameter. Confusing and problematic for long parameter names - just "Add" or "Add parameter" is clear enough.
• I really like the template selection list, but non-template pages and internal templates need to be filtered out (a known issue afaik)
• A (optional?) confirmation box for the "x" to discard all changes would be nice. Imagine adding a complex template and pressing "x" by accident.
• A warning box, if an unknown (not in selection list) template is added with "add template" would be nice, with options to add it anyway or to cancel.

Save dialog

• TAB-key jumps between summary text, the link of "minor edit" (??) and the "Save page" button. Ideally you would want to tab through summary text -> "Review" -> "Save page" -> "minor" checkbox -> "watch page" checkbox (or don't TAB at all).
• The "<" button on the left top to switch between save windows and review window is confusing (no meaningful label) and redundant, both windows already have labelled switch buttons.

Other

• The "edit source" and "edit beta" links for the lead section stay visible and active in VE edit mode - should be removed in edit mode like all section edit links. GermanJoe (talk) 07:49, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Here are some quick replies to your points, sorry if this seems a little curt.

• The "last parameter" issue is T52281.
• This (always showing icons) could get confusing for links and inline templates, but for larger items I can see your point. I've reported it as T54447.
• I'm not sure what you mean by "The button to add a parameter is labelled with the name of the parameter." I see a section called "add parameter" followed by a list of parameters and a search box to find others, clicking on a parameter adds it (Firefox 22/Linux).

• My mistake. The internal parameter name is displayed in the top right corner of each parameter box, no error. GermanJoe (talk) 10:21, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

• "non-template pages and internal templates need to be filtered out" yes this is a known issue, the discussion was at [[16]] but it seems no bug was actually filed, so it's now T54448. Thanks for reminding me about it!
• "A warning box, if an unknown (not in selection list) template is added with "add template" would be nice". I think "are you sure?" would be better than a warning, but it's a good idea. Tracked as T54449.
• The order of the tab key was changed recently. There was a consensus that pressing tab in the summary box should lead to the minor edit check box (but not the link!) because that is the same as in the source editor. See T53918
• Re the "<" button, is T51147 the same as you are asking?

• Basically yes. GermanJoe (talk) 12:53, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

• Lead section editing is provided by a gadget, so you need to discuss changes like that with the gadget's author/maintainers. It's not something the VE team have any control over.

I hope that's helpful. Thryduulf (talk) 09:33, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

No worries about being "curt", being unfamiliar with Bugzilla myself your help here on VE feedback is greatly appreciated. GermanJoe (talk) 10:21, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Visual Ed comment

I think you should restrict use of this new tool: otherwise you're gonna get soooo much vandalism, it'll be hard to control! Thanks for the attention. Keep up the good work... Monozigote (talk) 08:48, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi there. As long as we work on open wikis, there will always be vandalisms ;) There's something we need to decide here: if VE is slooow as some say, it ain't gonna cause more vandalism now because, you know, I guess vandals don't really like having to wait so much to reach their intended outcome! (there is also a related part at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/FAQ). --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:04, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Copy/paste with separate application

With wikitext sometimes I might write something up but run out of time before finishing, so I copy it to a notepad (I use Zotero), and finish it later. Are there any plans to bring functionality like that to VE? --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 09:09, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi there, I don't recall a specific request on Bugzilla, but there are a number of open bugs there which aim at improving VE's behavior about copy/paste, so I guess that when it is more stable, this is definitely something worth asking. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:26, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I can see the advantage in something like an offline VisualEditor that generates all the code and saves it via an API (or something) or maybe just gives it to you to paste into the source editor, offering you the chance to deal with edit conflicts, etc. As Elitre says though it's not worth doing anything about it until VE is stable though. Thryduulf (talk) 09:42, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

How about a "save to a sandbox" option? Of course, full copy/paste functionality would work too. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:02, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Beta is annoying and unreliable

Beta didn't inform me, until after I'd already gotten deeply into editing an article, that my changes would not be saved. I'd rather not have this feature at all, if it will waste my time that way. Froid (talk) 10:39, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Froid, thanks for warning us with yet another horror story; several editors have noted trying long edits, unable to Save at end. -Wikid77 12:48, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Froid, it's sad to hear this, but this should not have happened, of course (you should always be able to save). Can you provide more details so that we can try to figure out what happened? Thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:44, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

There are known issues with blocked users, but you don't appear to be blocked so that's unlikely to be related. Based on your contributions, the most likely article you experienced this on was Blowing Smoke which is not protected, so as Elitre says there should be nothing stopping you save. Did you perhaps try and enter wikitext (e.g. [[ or {{) and get a pop-up warning you about it? If so the warning just means that edits wont be saved if you change to the source editor without explicitly saving your VisualEditor edits. If that is what you encountered then we need to improve the wording. Thryduulf (talk) 10:59, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

• Perhaps click on warning to proceed to Save: Others have noted a warning which seems to deter the Save, and the advice was to click-clear the warning so then a Save would be allowed. Does that sound logical, or is that still the case? -Wikid77 12:48, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
  • The aim of the dialog is to discourage people from adding wikimarkup but not to discourage them from saving at all so we need to strike a balance. I'm not sure that a bold like that wouldn't undermine the first aim. Relatedly T53701 would help here (basically it says to hide the warning when the markup that caused it is removed), as would T54386 which is about making it clearer that the popup can be closed, which again might help. Thryduulf (talk) 13:17, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Festering heap of putrescent cack seems to have returned

I've just notices that that foul and egregious visual editor crap seems to have returned, even though I specifically set my preferences in such a way that it was banished forever to the realms of "never see". Short of coming round and personally throttling the developers, is there any way that I can make it so that it never again blights my editing sessions? I mean, come on, Wikipedian techies - are you seriously trying to rival Facebook for the annual "worst possible unwarranted changes on a website" award? Grutness...wha? 11:29, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

PS - I mean no offence to the techies in this. My complains are solely with VisualDung. For that reason I have deliberately made my comments as calm and restrained as possible :) Grutness...wha? 11:36, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) It seems that the update to VE last night broke the unsupported gadget that some people used to hide VE. There is now a proper opt-out available in the editing section of your preferences (as noted in the FAQ and the large edit notice above).

If you want to opt out of using the VisualEditor while it is in beta testing, go to the "Editing" tab of your preferences and scroll to the bottom of the page. Tick the box labelled "Temporarily disable VisualEditor while it is in beta" located in the "Usability features" section, then click "Save".

Whether this option remains after the beta ends is currently unknown, but you can make a civil comment in the RfC linked from the top of every page. Thryduulf (talk) 11:38, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I'd clicked that "no beta" option, and it didn't do any good. For some reason, though, it seems to have gone again. Chalk it up as another bug undocumented feature. As to a civil comment, this was civil. You should have seen what I considered writing. Grutness...wha? 12:23, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

And this was not expected or intended, for what it's worth. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:45, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Good to hear :) Grutness...wha? 12:23, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Moving images in the middle of words

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53292

I have mentioned this last month at another page, but it doesn't seem to be solved yet, so a repeat performance; it should be made impossible that when people move images in VE (which is very easy), they put it (inadvertently) in the middle of a word. Preferably, images should only be movable to spaces between paragraphs, but they certainly shouldn't be movable to the middle of a word. Example: [17].

The problem seems to be that when you move a picture, the final location is not decided by the upper left corner of the image (which seems more intuitive to me), but by the location of your cursor somewhere in the middle of the picture. Fram (talk) 11:43, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, this is T53292 which is marked as having a high priority. I've copied your comments above to the bug, which will remind the devs of its existence. Thryduulf (talk) 11:53, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. Fram (talk) 12:01, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

this is horrible

while it good for correcting spelling errors and such, it is horrible because you can't add anything to tables and charts. 74.139.33.169 (talk) 11:52, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi, proper handling of the elements you mentioned is definitely planned. I'd also note that some tables are already supported (at itwp I actually have grateful reports of people being able to edit tables in a simpler and faster way). Do come back should you need further help with something. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:55, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Unnecessary nowikis

Bear with me :-) This has nothing to do with people adding wikicode, but with VE adding nowikis on its own and where it isn't necessary or even wanted. If people accidentally select part of a term instead of the full one, and then add a link (using the VE link button), Ve will not only add a piped link (perhaps understandable but not really smart), but will add a closing "nowiki" between the piped wikilink and the remaining letters. This is totally unnecessary in nearly all cases: editors very rarely want part of the word to be blue, and part to remain black (which is the effect of this "nowiki"). This is an example where I corrected an old instance (few days), but I could easily reproduce the problem.

Suggested solution: when the part inside the link plus the part not linked are together the same as the wanted link, don't create a piped link plus nowiki remainder, but create a simple link instead; when the two are not the same, pipe the link but don't nowiki the remainder, unless there is a hyphen (or other dash) or slash between the two parts (as in that case they may really be two parts, something like Armenian-American or the like). The current situation creates many incorrect nowikis for only a handful of correct ones. Fram (talk) 12:43, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Improvements for adding images

Just tried to edit some images with the VE, and here are some suggestions for improvements:

• Show a tooltip with the full image name if you hoover the mouse over one with a long name
• After an image is inserted, it would be helpful to directly open the dialog for editing the caption
• If you add an image, could the caption be autofilled with the description from the file on wikipedia or commons?

This is T53032. --WS (talk) 14:49, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

• When you have a block of text selected, and the add an image, the text disappears. This is most likely not what most people want/expect and will lead to unintended deletion of text (also does not happen in the same way while inserting templates).
• Images that are added have their size in px specified; only specifying thumb should be enough unless they are resized by the editor
• For templates that have a field for an image or media file, could the media chooser be integrated there? (its need could be specified by templatedata)
• When editing the caption, it would be nice to have a preview of the image displayed in the dialog
• It is should be possible to move/drag the image as well as the template dialog around, they are in a fixed position right now
• Can the image and template dialogs have a cancel button next to apply changes? you can only quit them by pressing the X in the upper-right corner, but it is not obvious if this will cancel your changes or not (same goes for the save your changes dialog).
• When no image is found, please display a message saying so, now it looks like nothing is happening (especially is yoou missed the short busy animation of the search bar)
• It would be great if the image addition dialog could suggest images that are being used in the same article in other languages as a suggestion in addition to just searching for the article title

That's it for now. --WS (talk) 14:14, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Going through your points in order:

• "Show a tooltip with the full image name" Good idea, noted as T54459
• "directly open the dialog for editing the caption" There was recently a suggestion, which I can't currently find, to instead combine the two dialogs. Which would you prefer? Thryduulf (talk) 16:33, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

If it is only the caption, you can combine them, but I imaging other things such as image size and placement will be added later so that could be cluttered then. --WS (talk) 16:50, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

• T53032 as you note
• "When you have a block of text selected, and the add an image, the text disappears." Reported as T54460
• Don't specify thumbnail size: Indeeed, that is T52379.
• "For templates that have a field for an image or media file..." I'm not entirely sure I understand what you are asking there, sorry.

e.g. an image shown in an infobox in the lead, instead of entering the filename in a textbox, show the image editor. --WS (talk) 16:50, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

• show a preview while entering image caption: Very good idea, reported as T54461
• Draggable dialogs is T6969
• Cancel buttons: T53288, T54462
• "When no image is found" another good idea, see T54463
• suggest images used on other languages: and again, see T54464.Thryduulf (talk) 16:33, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for going through them! --WS (talk) 16:50, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

VE keeps adding stray code

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T51839

On Premier League, every recent edit using Visual Editor seems to add a stray line of code: || 18 || 12 || 12 || 21 above a table. Examples: 1, 2, 3, 4. Every edit using VE has added the code. Is this a bug? Woody (talk) 14:31, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, it's T51839. I've added the missing quote [18] that it was failing to correctly deal with so you shouldn't see this problem on that article again. Thryduulf (talk) 15:33, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

VE strips some table attributes for no reason.

Status	New:
Description	VE strips some table attributes for no reason. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:45, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
To duplicate:	See [19]. Since this was done by someone else, I have no idea what OS/.net/browser/etc... the editor was using.
Operating system
Web browser
Site
Workaround
Skin
Resolution
Bugzilla	T54473

This is a Parsoid issue. I filed a bug reported and updated the table above. Ssastry (talk) 19:12, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Redirects

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54471

On going to a redlink, I'm offered "Create^beta" or "Create source". If I click for VE, I get a notice telling me - among other things - that I can look for another title to redirect the page to. However, there's no apparent way to create a redirect using VE. Until this functionality is included, should we suppress this suggestion? Andrew Gray (talk) 18:11, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, but it isn't as simple as that unfortunately. That text is pulled from MediaWiki:Newarticletext and is the same as appears above the edit window in the source editor (note the MediaWiki page generates different content based on the namespace, so it doesn't look the same when viewing the MW namespace page). AFAIK there is no way for MediaWiki messages or editnotices to detect whether they are being displayed in the source or visual editor. I've raised T54471 as a request for this. Thryduulf (talk) 18:51, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Error: No response from API

I tried to leave feedback, but received this error. —rybec 18:44, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi Rybec, did you mean "leave feedback" about an article with the relevant feature? Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:22, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

overly long text not fully displayed

In Firefox ESR on Linux, the text below was not fully readable. I suggest shortening it, increasing the size of the window it's shown in, providing a scroll bar, or (if possible) having a window that adjusts to the size of the text.

This is our new, easier way to edit. It's still in beta, which means you might find parts of the page you can't edit, or encounter issues that need to be fixed. We encourage you to review your changes, and we welcome reports abou t any issues you might encounter in using VisualEditor (click the 'beta' button to submit feedback). You can keep using the wikitext editor by clicking the "Edit source" tab instead - unsaved changes will be lost. —rybec 18:45, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I believe this happens because ESR is not supported. There's a bug about it here, and I am adding your comment there, please read that discussion, and add here or there the number of your version. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:24, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Too easy to delete invisible templates within current editing session, as well as later

Status	New:
Description	It's probably an existing bug, but: if I add invisible matter to an article (eg {{coord missing}}), it's too easy to delete it later in the same edit while "tidying up" blank lines etc. I notice that {{Use British English}} seems to be automatically put at the end of the article, and it seems impossible to delete it there by using delete or backspace keys: perhaps all templates which produce no visible output should be placed at the end (though probably playing havoc with WP:ORDER). I seem to remember similarly losing a more substantial edit - something with multiple parameters perhaps - recently, but didn't record it at the time and can't remember what it was. If I hadn't used "Review changes" mid-edit, ie if I'd just been editing rather than testing the bug, I'd have assumed I'd forgotten to click "Apply changes" and not added the template as I'd intended to. PamD 18:57, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
To duplicate:	Add {{coord missing}}. Check in SavePage, ReviewChanges, that it's there. Do some other edits. Backspace to remove some blank lines in the area where you put the template. Check in SavePage, ReviewChanges: it's gone.
Operating system	Vista
Web browser	Firefox22
Site
Workaround	Edit with 100% concentration and alertness at all times, paying special attention to the vicinity of any possible hidden templates, don't make any attempt to remedy dodgy formatting in existing articles, ... ???
Skin	Vector
Resolution
Bugzilla

This is covered by T51806 ("Hidden templates should display as an icon in-page so they can be interacted with (e.g. a puzzle piece?) ") which has a high priority major impact rating. Other than encouraging the relevant people to fix that bug I don't know what can be done. Any ideas? I have had an idea - just treat them like <noiki>s and make them undeleteable in VE. Occasionally it might leave in ones that were intended to be deleted but that's going to be very rare and this would just be a workaround until they were handled properly Thryduulf (talk) 19:22, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

adding text to an existing hyperlink is inconvenient

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T50789

I have an existing document that contains a hyperlink enclosed in square brackets, like [20]. Instead of this being displayed as a number enclosed in square brackets, I want to add text that will be displayed, like example.com Web site. In the traditional editor I would insert, after the hyperlink but before the closing bracket, a space and the link text, and I'd be done. In VE I clicked on the number, then on the chain icon, and found nowhere to add the link text. The "Editing links" section of the user guide covers the case of adding a hyperlink to text that already exists, but not adding text where the link already exists. It seems that completing this task in VE may involve either:

1. clicking the existing link
2. clicking the chain icon
3. highlighting the URL happens automatically
4. copying the URL
5. closing the hyperlink dialog
6. typing the desired link text
7. highlighting new text
8. clicking chain icon
9. pasting URL into dialog
10. closing dialog

or retyping the URL. This seems inefficient. —rybec 19:06, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, this is a frustrating bug. At present the method that should work is to change the text to what you want the link to display as, select the link and all that you want to show as the link, open the link dialog and confirm the existing link. However, this is buggy and can produce all sorts of strange wikicode. For the requested improvement see T50789 (comment #3). Thryduulf (talk) 19:31, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

There needs to be a way of adding a ref name inside VE

There needs to be a way of adding a ref name inside VE, or I end up adding the ref in VE, then placing the ref name and the child references in the source editor. Insulam Simia (talk) 19:12, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Can you clarify? I thought about requesting this enhancement but so far I haven't found I need it; I just add the new reference in VE, then click "Use existing reference" to add it in other locations. Is that not what you're looking for? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 19:14, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Well the my problem is that when I added a new ref to the Danny Worsnop article, it didn't show up in the 'Use an existing reference' feature. Insulam Simia (talk) 21:16, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

This has to do with the absence of a full featured preview mode; in such a preview, everything edited would be available to build upon through the interface. The classic editing preview is about as full featured as you can get. The VE preview has a long way to go to catch up. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 22:09, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Yes, that is a known issue - T53689. It is marked as "highest" priority so hopefully it shouldn't be too long before it is fixed. Thryduulf (talk) 22:12, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

User Manual should open in new tab/window

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54475

Status	New:
Description	Clicking on the "Read the User Guide" link (within the Beta/questionmark popup) has the effect of losing all current editing, because it opens the User Guide in the current window, without warning that it's going to do so. Imagine: half an hour's editing, find a problem, remember seeing that link and think it might offer advice, click for the popup, click to open the User Guide, and ... one very unhappy editor. I suggest that either the User Guide should open in a new tab or window, or, if this is impossible, there should be a warning "Read the User Guide (and lose any current edits)". PamD 19:28, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
To duplicate:	Make an edit, click the BETA popup, click the "Read the User Guide" link.... Use Back button to revisit the page you were editing, observe that your edit has vanished.
Operating system	Vista
Web browser	Firefox22
Site	En-WP
Workaround
Skin	Vector
Resolution
Bugzilla

I've reported as T54475. As a workaround you can hold down CTRL while clicking on a link and it will open in a new window/tab. This will work on almost every link on almost every website so it's a useful one to know. I don't expect you'll have to wait long though as the similar T54093 which asked for the same thing for the "wikitext" link in the popup warning was fixed rather quickly. Thryduulf (talk) 19:40, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

When I said it would likely be quick I didn't think it would have been fixed in less than 2 hours! Don't expect to see the fix instantly though as James' comment when marking it fixed was "next scheduled deployment is not until 15 August, however. :-(". Thryduulf (talk) 20:29, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks: Good that it's been "fixed", rather depressing to hear that, if I understand James rightly, nothing about VE, including this, is going to get any better for almost a fortnight. Ye gods. PamD 22:50, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Well if anything major crops up then I'm sure the fix will be deployed as fast as they can do it, as they did with the save page issue. If that happens then other fixes waiting in the wings will, I think, be deployed too. The chances of that happening are slim though :/. I'll ask whether adding something like "(hold ctrl while clicking this link to open it in a new window)" could be added to the note sooner. If it can then that would help a little bit. Thryduulf (talk) 23:17, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

James has commented on my suggestion, "The text is controlled by MediaWiki:Visualeditor-help-label - but I'd counsel against putting a lot of text into it, as it may not look very good.". Brevity is very much not my strong point, so suggestions please! Thryduulf (talk) 23:45, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

visual error

the create account / login button in the top right is covered up poorly while in edit mode. maybe hide it when entering edit mode? 74.202.39.3 (talk) 19:30, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi, actually it shouldn't be covered in that, when you are at the top of the page, the bar should load below. Browser/OS/wikipedia skin? Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:11, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

extraneous "nowiki" tags and numeral added to hyperlink without link text

With the traditional editor, I made a page containing only:

[http://example.com]

I wanted to try using VE to change that to:

[http://example.com example.com Web site]

by the procedure I described in another feedback post

1. clicking the existing link
2. clicking the chain icon
3. copying the URL
4. closing the hyperlink dialog
5. typing the desired link text
6. highlighting the new text
7. clicking the chain icon
8. pasting the URL into the hyperlink dialog
9. closing the dialog

I didn't bother deleting the original hyperlink; the numeral "1" surrounded by brackets (what one would see while viewing the rendered wiki) and nowiki tags was added to the document: [21]. —rybec 19:38, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Regarding new August changes

I'm not sure where to post this since the talk page of that subpage redirects to the main WT:VE, but my comments are indeed regarding this. I think this is a good idea. I have a habit of clicking right next to the "read" button and I often end having to wait for the buggy VE to load before being able to change to the wikitext editor. In addition the clear "beta" label was a good idea. Finally, a step in the right direction. — kikichugirl ^inquire 19:48, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Kikichugirl, here will do :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:12, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Topicons don't work

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53420

In the WYSIWYG editor, the topicons do not appear where they normally would and there are blank lines around them that do not appear in the rendered page. APerson (talk!) 22:00, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, this is a known issue - T53420. Thryduulf (talk) 22:18, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Nowiki gone wild

So this happened. Anyone know what's up? Kevin Rutherford (talk) 22:33, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

When VE does things like that it's often (but not always) due to a formatting error somewhere in there. Particularly check whether there are any unmatched quotes anywhere. I'm neither awake enough nor sober enough to spot anything at that level of detail! That might not be the cause but it's not a bad place to start looking. Thryduulf (talk) 23:22, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Cite toolbar

Can the cite toolbar be made available in VE?

I had to switch to "Edit Source" in order to cite a source for an edit that I otherwise happily made using VE. APerson (talk!) 02:01, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

This has been asked before, and the answer apparently is no (I can't remember why, sorry). It is known that there needs to be significant improvements to reference editing in VE, and I the aim is for it to become at least as easy as the cite toolbar, but it's not there yet. Thryduulf (talk) 06:27, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Named references

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52568

When referencing, can there be a field so you can put in the name of a named reference?

You could put the text field in the "Options" section, along with the group. APerson (talk!) 02:09, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, this is something that needs to be done - see T52568. I've added your suggestion there, thanks. Thryduulf (talk) 06:31, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Unable to move earlier than bullet at start of article

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54620

This article version starts with a bulleted list (i.e. there is a star as the first character). When I tried editing it in VE, I was unable to move the cursor earlier than the first bullet, to add something before all of the bullets. Neither mouse clicks nor arrow keys worked. OS X / Chrome / MonoBook. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:14, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

I was not able to find a related bug, I'd need a second search, but in the meanwhile, hope you can appreciate a workaround for this: after clicking Edit beta, click on the bullet list and then press Enter. You should now be able to add text, you just need to put the first item back in the bullet list. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 07:32, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

I love it!

The following discussion is marked as answered. If you have a new comment, place it just below the box.

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As a new to Wikipedia editor, the VisualEditor function is invaluable. The first edit I tried to make I had to rely on someone who knew Wikicode to make for me. The edit has yet to be made, even though it was sourced by the US Code. The second attempt I was given a chance to use the VisualEditor. The edit went on the page as soon as I was done writing, no bugs at all, at least in this instance. Trueist (talk) 06:21, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Note: User's first edit could not be made because the page was semi-protected; not done due to lack of consensus. Ignatzmice•talk 13:43, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Detail

The following discussion is marked as answered. If you have a new comment, place it just below the box.

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I'm keshav kumar mishra work is SEO & web developer Keshavtech (talk) 07:41, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi. I'm not sure why you've posted this here. This page is for feedback regarding the new VisualEditor interface. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 17:04, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Infobox display of team kit is mangled

The following discussion is marked as answered. If you have a new comment, place it just below the box.

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Open Roosters FC or Aalborg RK in VE, and the diagram illustrating the team kit is mangled. It's within the "pattern..." components of {{Infobox rugby team}} ... and also happens with {{Infobox football club}} as in Morecambe F.C. (so presumably for thousands of others). Probably a known bug, but didn't find it on a quick check for "infobox image". Vista, Firefox22, Vector. PamD 08:09, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't know of a specific bug it's something that Erik mentioned in his Signpost OpEd as being one of the most difficult uses of templates to get right so it's obviously known about. See Gospel Oak to Barking Line for another example of how template-positioned graphics doesn't work. Thryduulf (talk) 08:18, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Reference naming

The following discussion is marked as answered. If you have a new comment, place it just below the box.

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Please allow the naming of references, so the same one may be reused easily. Presidentman talk · contribs (Talkback) 15:00, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Never mind. I figured it out. - Presidentman talk · contribs (Talkback) 15:09, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Actually, I don't think I can't find it anymore in the user guide, while there's a related bug. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:11, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

First-open warning box

The following discussion is marked as answered. If you have a new comment, place it just below the box.

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I don't know when the first-open warning box was implemented, but I just saw it now. Seems pretty useful in terms of making sure people know what's up. I also notice it utilizes a cookie, so dynamic IP editors will still see it. Kudos! Ignatzmice•talk 15:51, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

For you and the previous editor, this was announced here. Glad to hear from you. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:05, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Sound files

The following discussion is marked as answered. If you have a new comment, place it just below the box.

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It seems that sound files do not display correctly in VE. While VEditing Brazil, the anthem file in the infobox simply appears as "noicon". In Cuba, the anthem file does not appear at all.

One minor consequence: If you press "play" on a sound file while viewing an article, then activate VE, there is no way to pause the file after VE finishes loading.

Using Vector skin on Firefox 22.0

-- Cryptic C62 · Talk 16:19, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi, this looks related to this bug and another one linked in it which has actually high priority. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:36, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Load time experiment

Hey all, I've spent the past few days collecting data on VE load times for large articles in different browsers. The main graph is at right. Full results can be found here. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 03:31, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

That's both very interesting and very useful data, thank you. Pinging @Jdforrester (WMF) and Eloquence: to make them aware of this. Thryduulf (talk) 06:41, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

I wonder what makes it exponential (lined up in semilog plot) instead of linear. Anyone know? 70.59.30.138 (talk) 08:20, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure that's a valid conclusion. If you look at each browser individually, they look not far from linear up to 400KB, and there are only a few data points larger than that, which are probably unusual articles -- lots of references or lots of templates, maybe. Looie496 (talk) 22:52, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Are you serious? each browser individually is much closer to exponential on this graph than linear. 70.59.30.138 (talk) 01:49, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

@Looie496: The graph looks linear because the t-axis is displayed with a logarithmic scale. If you check out the full study results, you'll see every exponential regression has a significantly higher correlation coefficient than the corresponding linear regression. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 22:18, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

I attempted to edit List of United States counties and county-equivalents in Firefox ESR on Linux. First I tried the traditional editor: the load time was around 5 seconds. On my first attempt with VE, Firefox informed me that

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.

Script: https://bits.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=ext.visualEdito r.core%2Cicons-vector%7Cext.visualEditor.viewPageTarget.icons-vector%7Crangy&skin=vector&version=2013080

3T022159Z&*:131

and the browser became generally very slow to respond, and I noticed in top that it was consuming around 520 MB more RAM. I closed Firefox without letting the page load completely in VE.

I had had some other tabs open (as I had with the old editor). I made another attempt, with nothing else opened.

• Firefox showing just a blank page consumed 549 MB
• 612 MB for the page opened in the old editor [22] with JS turned off
• while loading the page in VE [23], RAM use gradually increased, peaking at around 1518 MB
• once the page was fully loaded, RAM use dropped to 1398 MB
• load time with the old editor was around 7 seconds
• load time with VE was around 10 minutes 44 seconds
• loading was CPU-bound, with Firefox showing ~100% CPU usage
• during my second test, the Firefox process was small enough that swapping was unnecessary
• once the page loaded in VE, I clicked on "cancel"; cancelling took around 52 seconds

Figures for "RAM use" are from the "VIRT" column shown by top:

o: VIRT -- Virtual Image (kb) The total amount of virtual memory used by the task. It includes all code, data and shared

libraries plus pages that have been swapped out.

—rybec 22:59, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

VE for Persian?

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I can't use visual editor on Persian (Farsi) Pages. There is no Edit button for VE. Vsg24 (talk) 05:50, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi, you need to enable it before as it is not the default there yet, there is an option in your Editing preferences, can you check? :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 07:16, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

Disabling option

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Instead of "Temporarily disable VisualEditor while it is in beta" which sounds very lawyerish, why not simply "Disable VisualEditor"? How is it temporary if disabled, and what does its dev status have to do with my decision anyway? Will I not have the disable option after beta? Moondyne (talk) 14:57, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I just happened to answer a similar question here. Thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:17, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I read all that and you still have not answered my question - at least not in plain English. Simple question, why say "Temporarily disable VisualEditor while it is in beta" when you could say "Disable VisualEditor"? You said there that you can't be sure that such an option won't be offered in future. But your apparently loaded question implies that it wont (be offered). I'm still confused. Moondyne (talk) 02:11, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

Just how many times do I have to switch this damn thing off. Today, in darkest Europe on a poor connection- edit- had become edit source, and on the tabs edit beta- and the connection glacial. So, I find that I have been reconnected- but not only that, I have been reconnected on fr:wikipedia and no doubt others. The switch off option, we are promised is back in edit. All that is now offered is

Temporarily disable VisualEditor while it is in beta

which is hardly the point- the option I am looking for is

Permanently disable VisualEditor on all wikipedias.

I don't know if there is anyone in the dev team who has a degree in psychology- but you have already alienated 88% of your editors, and are starting to infuriate them too. In a further attempt to lose 88% of you volunteers- you post a patronising whitewash piece in Signpost. Look kids, your toy doesn't work, it damages the database, and can never work. How many engineers does it take to just say sorry?-- Clem Rutter (talk) 16:15, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Not sure about the engineers part, but I already explained many times today that VE reappearing was certainly not done on purpose to annoy people - the unofficial gadget just happened to break. And each time I said I was sorry for that. Also, most of the changes only happened on en.wiki only - as a matter of fact, nobody until now reported seeing VE again on it.wp, for instance. I guess this only affected who used the unofficial gadget rather than the official option which has been available for a while. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:26, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

There is no global preference setting for anything. VisualEditor preferences are stuck with the same single-wiki prefs system as everything else. This may change in a year or two, but for now, that's what we have to live with. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:46, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Safari on iPad editing - leading to a suggested revision of scope for VE development

I am trying to use the Visual Editor as my predominant editor while working on my personal computer (Chrome / Linux). However, I've found it quite difficult to use VE on Safari on the iPad and have decided not to try any longer, using the Wikitext Editor when on that device. This does seem counterintuitive as VE would seem to be a more touch-friendly interface than WE. One thing for further development to consider is a revision of scope for VE, focusing down on editing from a mobile device. I think this would be an area for major improvement over the Wikitext editor and would align reasonably well with the massive increase in use of mobile devices over deskbound PCs in general. There are some stats available somewhere related to what platform people are editing from, I think -- anyone know where these stats are? --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 01:47, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

What specific things are not working/could be done better? I don't recall seeing any stats about which platforms people are using to access VE, but I would be interested in them if anyone knows where they are? Thryduulf (talk) 06:23, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

I should come with specifics, yes. One of the problems is the invariant size of the dialog boxes like those used to add a reference or a template. These should be better scaled for the mobile platform. Another item is mouseover behavior; as far as I can tell, on the iPad there is no equivalent of mouseover behavior, so clicking an element is always equivalent to doubleclicking and the mouseover event is not supported as a "fingerover" event. A third item is the edit/save bar which in a browser like Chrome under Linux floats and is present when you scroll down a page; on Safari on the iPad, it is necessary to scroll up to the top to get to this toolbar (i.e. in order to add a template or save the page), which is doable but quite inconvenient. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 12:48, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

A separate version of VisualEditor is being worked on for iPads and mobile editing. When it's released (no reliable date announced, AFAIK) I think you'll find many fewer of these problems. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:35, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Chrome on iPad 3

I started fiddling with VE in Chrome on my ladypal's iPad 3, and I've found some usability issues as well:

• Broken spellcheck/undo is back with a vengeance
• No way to resize images
• Toolbar stuck at the top of the page
• Loading VE on large pages causes the browser to freeze

I'll update this list whenever I get more fiddling time. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 03:26, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

good idea, not mature enough for primetime

great idea,... work more before pushing this: by first experience was *****, lots of black boxed instead of images?! (chrome) Sorin Sbârnea (talk) 07:52, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

I can't find related bugs and it's the first time I hear this. Can you try with a different browser? Also, Wikipedia skin and OS? It sounds more like a browser-related thing than a VE one (maybe some plugin/extension interfering)? Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:09, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi Sorin Sbârnea,

Were these small boxes where you should have seen words? Which article did you attempt to edit? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:57, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Top bar not staying at top during VE article creation

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54504

All looks OK at the top ...

...but when I scroll down to bottom I lose the top editing bar.

While creating Liquorice (disambiguation) I found that the top bar of editing icons etc was scrolling away out of sight instead of staying fixed at the top of the screen. It was persistent enough for me to scroll up and down a few times and get screenshots. I've tried creating a couple more articles, and haven't been able to reproduce it. It's obviously very serious when it happens, as it's pretty much impossible to add templates etc to the end of the article if you can't see the bottom of the article and the editing bar at the same time (I was about to add {{In title}} to the "See also" section but had to give up.) PamD 18:07, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Hey PamD, I think that it is related to something included in that specific page. As a matter of fact, I pasted the content into my sandbox and voilà, toolbar gone for me as well. I am going to test now again removing each element to understand which one is causing this. After that, I will see whether it is known and will let you know. Thanks in the meanwhile :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 19:23, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

It's the first line which actually causes this! ?!? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 19:30, 3 August 2013 (UTC) PS: Also, did you notice the little "arrow point" at the beginning of the article when editing? Not sure whether it has to do with recent changes to VE, I'll find out. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 19:34, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

It also happens if you do this (which is, if you add something "on" a link). --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:02, 3 August 2013 (UTC) PS: there you go, PamD.

Thanks for your work. Weird, because that first line looks quite respectable. I didn't notice any "arrow point" as far as I remember, and I don't see it if I open your 20:26 sandbox version in VE right now. (Vista, Firefox22, Vector). I still lose the top bar when I scroll the dab page, even after making a few minor edits today.

Ahah: unbolding unlinking the first word seems to make the difference. Given that most dab pages for topic which have a primary source start off with the main word linked and bolded, this is ... unfortunate. PamD 08:20, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

It's definitely the linked first word: compare problem and no problem. PamD 08:44, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

So to reproduce the problem, try editing London (disambiguation) or almost any similarly-titled dab page! PamD 08:50, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

I wonder whether someone thought that no correctly formatted WP article would ever start with a link? PamD 08:51, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

Even if no Wikipedia article should, there are lots of non-article userpages that begin with a link, or indeed contain nothing except a link. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:17, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Incredible

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This is much easier, a really good innovation. JordanSchneider77 (talk) 22:38, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment. It's still pretty new software, so if you run into problems, then please let us know. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:19, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Wikilinks were going to Wikimedia

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While editing Thottavaram I tried to follow the link to Attingal (either by right-click and "open in new tab" or by ctrl-click), and I got a 404 at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/Attingal . Consistent behaviour from other links. I'm sure this is new and I've been able to follow links from within articles (as long as they aren't in tables, templates, etc) in the past.

... It now seems to have gone away - can't reproduce in either that article or others - but it was disconcerting while it happened! PamD 09:19, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

I remember that in earlier versions of VE, the links were indeed formatted like that. It might be that it just got fixed, or that perhaps some old stuff was still in a cache and that the old link is cleared now that an edit has been made. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:21, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

That was T53122 but it has been marked as duplicate of T50915 which has been a "high priority major impact" bug open since May. Thryduulf (talk) 12:51, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

feedback

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ITS a very nice and easy to use -- DragonSLAyernatsU (talk) 12:35, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

Thank you. Keep using it! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 21:38, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

< br > breaks section heading

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53444

Hi,

Please do see this edit diff on mr wikipedia article. It broke section heading with <br /> getting automatically getting inserted between ==<br /> section heading==

Only the section heading text portion was copy pasted since ULS does not work in VisualEditor.Browser was FireFox(updated) After adding the section heading I clicked enter button to write further text.

Sorry if the problem is already reported but I did not see the same in Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Known problems list,(may be I missed), so I am not sure whether to file a bug or not .Please do guide.

Mahitgar (talk) 13:52, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

I added it here. Thanks for stopping by! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:01, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Anonymous feedback

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it is good 220.225.87.4 (talk) 16:40, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 21:37, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Missing feature: Cannot set background colour for table cells.

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54180

Status	New:
Description	Cannot set background colour for table cells. K7L (talk) 22:25, 4 August 2013 (UTC)
To duplicate:	For example, highway rest stop table listings "Barrie km 92" in Ontario_Highway_400#Services and "Cambridge km 286/295" in Ontario_Highway_401#Services are greyed as "temporarily closed for renovation until July 2013". Try updating this to un-grey the cells (as the rest stops have reopened)... there's no way with the Visual Editor to remove this table attribute.
Operating system	I'm running a 1337 pir8 copy of Linux, although presumably all platforms are affected.
Web browser	Firefox/Ubuntu
Site	en-wp
Workaround
Skin	Vector
Resolution
Bugzilla

@K7L:, this is indeed not yet supported in VE, but more importantly, can I make the note that you should not communicate information solely with color ? Not all people have the benefit of vision when reading an article. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:16, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

In the example I mentioned (and presumably all of our freeway road articles), colour is not the sole means of conveying the information. The text says "closed for renovation" and the background colour is dark grey. When the rest stop has been demolished, rebuilt and reopened both the "closed" text and the greyed background need to be removed. VE won't do that. K7L (talk) 12:26, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Indeed VE can't currently do that because the code for editing table cells (other than their text content) has not yet been written. T54180 notes this, although it is currently unprioritised. Thryduulf (talk) 12:45, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

New articles

Of the 50+ articles created since 10AM until now, only 1, Populin, was created using VE, and the editor creating it with VE then made 8 further edits to the article, 1 with VE and 7 with the "old" tool. It's anecdotical evidence, but it does give the impression that VE is not used to create articles, and that it isn't sufficient to create decent stubs either.

Is there any research in the percentage of new articles created with VE, and has there been any research in the findings of the authors of these articles? It may give a different perspective as to what is lacking and what is working well in VE. Fram (talk) 11:29, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Not sure about research into this but I've created a couple of articles recently with VE and found it a much easier experience than I would have done had I created them with just wikitext. VE is more than sufficient for article and stub creation. WaggersTALK 11:48, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Not sure whether there's a way to show up only VE-created articles, but it is definitely being used (see TeamGale works on Defiance episodes). At it.wp I maintain a short list of such articles, it needs to be updated by hand but is certainly useful for those wondering not just if it is used, but also if it can be used effectively. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:18, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

One reason might be that if you click a red link you are thrown straight into the wikitext editor instead of having to make a conscious choice which one to use. --WS (talk) 14:13, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for suggesting this, it's very useful info. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:16, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Non-WYSIWIYG elements

If you want a true WYSIWYG, then you have to change

1. How to edit template parameter values
2. The preview changes as it is now
3. Page settings: languages
4. Page history: compare versions
5. Elements that are not shown in the VE mode the same way they are in the view mode (e.g. in The Adventures of Tintin, near the bottom, there is an audio file; in VE, there is a "no icon" text and some other changes compared to the actual result)

Anything else? As long as these exist, the VE can't be claimed to be a true WYSIWYG in the mainspace, and editors can't be "blamed" for using wiki-markup in it (never mind those aspects that you simply can't do yet in VE, liking editing galleries and creating or modifying redirects). Fram (talk) 13:15, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi, VE uses some WYSIWYG techniques in some of its work to serve the "principle of least surprise" (which I'd re-dub "principle of least fear", because sometimes the code can be pretty scary!). But as you can see from more or less official descriptions of VE, it is never called as such: this is very much a secondary objective, because actually the project aims to create a reliable rich-text editor. As also stated here, the result might be very similar, but it really ain't the same thing. While working on VE, developers sometimes break this model to make it easier for us to do tasks we want to do. :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:55, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

More (I changed your list to a numbered one):

1. - A duplicate of this bug was closed with James saying this is going to be supported soon;
2. - looks related to this;
3. - the settings are available from the Language settings on the left, did you mean something different?
4. - might be added to #2 bug?
5. - it is a known, [24]. Thanks! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:14, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

3. The language settings are also included in the "Page settings" at the top (where you also find the categories). There, they aren't VE but old school

As for your general point about this not being a true wysiwyg: fine, but then the major philosophical argument against allowing wikimarkup like double brackets for wikilinks is invalid as well. Fram (talk) 06:33, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Quote box

In The Adventures of Tintin, there is a quote box. It seems as if I'm unable to open or edit this with VE (but I don't get the green diagonal lines either). Fram (talk) 13:16, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Note: apparently this only happens with the first quote box in that article, I can edit the second one like any other template. Strange... Fram (talk) 13:19, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

The transclusion icon is there, it's to the right of the "History" header (in the middle of the infobox). On my monitor i can barely see it on top, when i scroll the quotebox to the botton of my screen. The problem is, that the infobox pushes the quote box down, far away from its intended original placement. Apparently the icon placement depends on the element's location in the source - and should be recalculated after moving the quote box. GermanJoe (talk) 13:31, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

A related issue is the missing table of content, which causes misplaced article elements near the lead section, but that's a known bug afaik (?). GermanJoe (talk) 13:44, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Ah, thanks. Fram (talk) 13:56, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Tracked T54547. --Salix (talk): 14:30, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Bug for the missing ToC is T51224, but with no news lately. GermanJoe (talk) 14:39, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Changing file names

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53033

How can I change a filename? I can change the caption, but replacing one file for another seems to require the deletion of the old file and the addition of a new one, which is more cumbersome. Fram (talk) 13:19, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

At the minute you can't, but this is requested at T53033. Thryduulf (talk) 13:32, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

@Fram and Thryduulf: This is from the User guide:

"To replace an image or media file, click on it to select it (as mentioned, it will then have a blue background), and then click on the media icon on the toolbar. You'll then be able to select the replacement image or file." [emphasis added)

I realize that's not exactly intuitive, and you do lose the caption (that's a bug, I think), plus the existing size is replaced by VE's default (that's probably a bug, too). Still, perhaps this option will be helpful until VE is improved. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:03, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Foreign language versions featured article icons

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53420

At the bottom of The Adventures of Tintin, in VE mode, there is one FA star and three "return" symbols (very WYSIWYG again...). Removing these return signs (with backspace), the result is that some of the "Link FA" templates have been deleted. (I haven't saved an example, previewing it was sufficient). Fram (talk) 13:33, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, this is known. See T53420

That is the issue for topicons yes. I created a new ticket for Link FA issue, bugzilla:51322, which is slightly different in terms on cause and effect. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:34, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Add A picture

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I would like to add a photo to my profile> Zak willis (talk) 13:39, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

This is a page for giving specific feedback regarding the new VisualEditor. For help with adding pictures see Wikipedia:Picture tutorial. If that doesn't answer your question you can ask at the Wikipedia:Help desk. Thryduulf (talk) 13:45, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Problems with wide elements

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53867

See this page for some tests on wide elements. As T53867 indicates, VE does not correctly render any table wider than the screen, nor does it allow horizontal scrolling. This effect seems to extend to any wide element, including math formulas, images, transclusions, and text with non-breaking spaces. Some other findings:

• A horizontal scroll bar does appear when hovering over some elements with a mouseover effect, specifically images and uneditables (Strangely, the scroll bar does not appear when hovering over the {{Details}} template in this example). Scrolling can then occur if you have a clickable mousewheel.

• By placing the text cursor near the visible end of wide text, and pressing the right arrow key, it is possible to sneak the text cursor off of the page.

--Cryptic C62 · Talk 14:43, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Thank you, I have added your comments to that bug. Thryduulf (talk) 15:02, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

"Expand section" template parameters not recognized

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In the Transclusion dialog, the parameters for the {{Expand section}} template are not recognized, listing "No unused parameters" instead. —DragonLord^{talk/contribs} 16:46, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Not all templates have had the required TemplateData specified yet. I've now added the data for {{Expand section}} so it should work better now.--Salix (talk): 17:09, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict)The transclusion dialog gets he parameter information from the TemplateData defined on the template documentation page. The TemplateData for {{expand section}} was only written today, and it takes a while for VE to see it. If it hasn't appeared after 24 hours try a null edit on the template page and it should work. Thryduulf (talk) 17:15, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Release mouse click to activate button

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54561

Procedure: Load VE on any page. Click and hold the left mouse button anywhere inside the browser window. Move the mouse on top of any button in the VE toolbar. Release the left mouse button. This activates the button. This behavior should not occur, as it is unlikely to be useful and will probably cause confusion among new editors. Some testing shows that this is universal (Firefox/Vector, Opera/Vector, Safari/Monobook). --Cryptic C62 · Talk 15:32, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Of course, adding this to Bugzilla is not a problem, I was just wondering, do you expect this to happen a lot? I wouldn't, because doing as you say is basically dragging and it results in "selecting" a few lines (the title of the page and the Wikipedia subtitle under that), so I would definitely release the mouse before reaching the icons. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:26, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Here's a fairly plausible example: A user quickly clicks on a template or image and attempts to drag it up to the top of the article. After an instinctive little wrist flick, the user releases the mouse button while hovering over the "numbered list" button. The element doesn't move, a numbered list suddenly appears without explanation, and now the user is totally confused. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 16:28, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

I think we should file this. Erica, I couldn't see one in Bugzilla, so it's bug 52561 now, and if you already filed it, then we can get mine marked as a duplicate. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:11, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

I've not been able to reproduce this in Firefox 22/Linux/Monobook. @Cryptic C62: am I correct in thinking you use Windows 7? Thryduulf (talk) 21:24, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

@Thryduulf: Windows Vista. I've found that the effect does not usually occur when highlighting text inside the editor. Try clicking somewhere inside the toolbar, moving the mouse onto a button, then releasing. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 12:50, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Ah right, I do see it then. Very odd. Thryduulf (talk) 12:56, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

wiki link to image - unintended removal of square bracket, not shown in "review your changes"

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I wanted to edit the text of an article. VE damaged the markup in a different part of the article, where an image was linked [25]. I used "review your changes" but the unwanted change was not displayed. —rybec 20:40, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

I fixed your link. It is known that you can't remove a missing image as it does not show up. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:13, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Thank you; that is the proper link. I wasn't trying to change the image: that change was made by VE. If you make the same edits to the paragraph above, this is repeatable. —rybec 00:13, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

I made a sandbox with just the image link and some paragraphs lacking markup, but couldn't reproduce this. When I also copied the citation and a section header from the article, that was enough to trigger the bug: [26]. Note that VE does not show a box for the image, even prior to editing. —rybec 00:44, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, that why I mentioned it in the first place, I think it might be related to the image being missing and therefore not showing up. Now at [27], thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:10, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Message popups

Some of the editor message popups get stuck (sometimes in the English wiki, mostly in the Hebrew wiki) and hide the text or controls. 93.173.235.19 (talk) 00:15, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi, don't they disappear if you click on them? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:43, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

See also #Markup warn doesn't even go away after editing has finished, below. As I noted there, the warning message/popup lacks any visible indication that clicking on it will close it. Perhaps people think that if they fix their (wikitext markup) error, VE should detect that and then close the warning box, since it no longer applies? (I realize that's extremely difficult to do for any software; I'm not suggesting that VE do it, but rather that it more obvious what to do with the warning box.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:16, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks John, see below: here I just needed to make sure that the "stuck" issue can be solved with a click :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 18:34, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Laggy

Clicking objects the first time lags alot, running latest stable version of Firefox 122.108.156.85 (talk) 10:49, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi, are you referring to videos, or something else? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:19, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Normal text converted to heading upon deleting heading line

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When you remove the text of a heading, and then on the empty line press delete, the following paragraph of text is converted to heading. This is almost certainly not intended by the editor and is inconsistent with how other editors such as ms word, work.

I see above that this was reported as T53829, which was marked as a duplicate of T52100, however that last bug doesn't cover the turning all paragraph text into heading part. --WS (talk) 11:25, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Furthermore, when pressing delete on an empty heading line, if there is a template such as {{main}} on the next line, it is unexpectedly deleted. --WS (talk) 11:01, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

All added to 50100. Thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:39, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Do not show 'add parameter' for templates that don't take parameters

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When the templatedata does not take any parameters, as specified by the corresponding templatedata (e.g. {{fixed}}, don't show the add parameter heading/text field and 'no unused parameters'. --WS (talk) 11:08, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

[28] was already covering this, but I added your thoughts as well. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:47, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Provide links for templates in transclusion dialog

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For templates, it would be helpful to provide some links to the actual template page from the transclusion dialog. At least a direct link, but perhaps something like v*t*e (view/talk/edit) like included in many navigation templates. --WS (talk) 11:12, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Same as above :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:52, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Remove box icon from transclusion dialog

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Icons can be useful to help a user navigate an interface, however in the transclusion dialog, the same box-shaped icon with the thick left border is shown so many times (when editing a template with more than a few parameters) that it is obnoxious. Almost every occurrence should be removed, keeping it displayed at at most one or two places.--WS (talk) 11:22, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Now at [29]. Bye! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:02, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure I agree with this. The icon is the symbol for "paramater" and so it indicates that this is what the adjacent item is. Thryduulf (talk) 13:15, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

I am not sure either, but WS just wants devs to know that those specific icons can be perceived as being too many, obnoxious, inconsistent or whatever, this don't mean we or the devs will agree :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:22, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Indeed, basically the problem is now you have the same icon displayed many times. If there are different data types in the future, it might be of (some) use. --WS (talk) 13:38, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Don't allow creation of random parameters for templates with templatedata

For templates with templatedata specified, it should not be necessary and possible to add random parameters by typing a name in the search box. In addition, when there are no unused parameters left, there should not be a search box for parameters at all (either not displayed or greyed out). --WS (talk) 11:28, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

I don't agree, I think it should be possible to add unknown parameters, especially unnamed parameters. Some templates can accept a long (even unbound) list of unnamed parameters, and you don't necessarily want to document them with TemplateData. Displaying a warning should be enough. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 11:34, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Why wouldn't you want to document them (or at least the first of them)? - Pointillist (talk) 12:49, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

I find this interesting, can I see examples of such templates with parameters that can only be added by Those Who Know Them? :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:04, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

{{hlist}} and {{flatlist}} are examples if I've understood this correctly. Thryduulf (talk) 13:17, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Over at Wiktionary, wikt:Template:homophones and wikt:Template:also are perhaps even better examples. Thryduulf (talk) 13:23, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Basically, some templates are developed to use their unnamed parameters as a list of elements: parameters 1, 2, ..., 100, ... are just elements of a list. So, documenting them would mean adding as many parameters as you want to be able to handle (the limit may not even be defined), and the description will be the same for each parameter... Usually, you document the first one saying that the next ones can also be used: with your request, VE wouldn't allow to use the next ones since they are not defined ;-)

Eltire, I was talking about unnamed parameters, so not really parameters that can only be found if you know the template ;-)

Or an other way would be to be able to tell TemplateData that parameters from 1 to X (possibly unbounded) can be used as a list of elements. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 13:32, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

I thought we were not discussing parameters such as the positional ones (I think this is their real name? anyway everything is documented about the templates Thryduulf linked - thanks BTW). I understood this more as if, say, Hlist had a parameter named "color" which works with it but is not documented :) But not every template has those, right? What's wrong with preventing people to add "fake" parameters to templates once you have already added all the real, supported ones? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:37, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

I guess there might be an issue if someone updates a template because a need arises and then has to update the TemplateData and wait for that to propogate to VE before it can be used. It would also be an issue if a template only had partially defined TemplateData - nobody will be able to write {{convert}} in one go for example. Thryduulf (talk) 13:48, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

In the first case, the slow propagation is the problem to be fixed. In the second case, there could be a specific setting in the templatedata to (temporarily) allow freeform parameters. --WS (talk) 13:53, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Slow propagation is not really a problem anymore as long as you can do a null edit. I've found things now update within 10 min and it may be much quicker. Only problem for some template you need admin rights to do a null edit, so you might need to find a friendly admin (eg me) to do it.--Salix (talk): 14:19, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54582

If a template uses unnamed variables it should also be documented in some way in templatedata so that an 'unnamed' option is always displayed in the unused parameters list, so you can add them one by one. In case of sequentially numbered variables that are used to hold several values for the same parameter: the most helpful thing would be to only show the next one when the previous one is in use (only show entry2 if entry1 is already in use). Undocumented parameters should not exist IMHO, but if there really is a good use case for them, it should be specifically specified in the corresponding templatedata, so that all other templates can prevent addition of bogus parameters. --WS (talk) 13:53, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

The citation templates may prove a problem here. Since being written as a module, it allows for parameters {{{author1}}}, {{{author2}}}, ... and there is no upper limit (I think). There are a lot of these numbered parameters see Module:Citation/CS1/Whitelist.--Salix (talk): 14:19, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

So, we probably need an enhancement in TemplateData (and then VE) to be able to handle these kind of parameters (eventual prefix + counter, with lower and upper limit). --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 16:03, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

I've created bugzilla 52582. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 16:09, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

bad edit

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52502

I used VE on this edit to insert a hyphen, and it messed up some other stuff. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 14:43, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

This looks like T52502, thanks for the report as it shows that the previous time I saw something like this it wasn't a one-off. Thryduulf (talk) 15:07, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

The table at the end was not closed. I fixed it (for consistency's sake, I used the s-end template) and VE edits and saves should not introduce dupes on this. Ssastry (talk) 19:28, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Markup warn doesn't even go away after editing has finished

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53701

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54386

The markup warning doesn't even go away after editing has finished. Insulam Simia (talk) 17:31, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

@Insulam Simia: Did you click on the markup warning box? That normally makes it go away.

As for design, I think it's a mistake that the warning box doesn't have a "close" button or an "X", even if clicking specifically on such made no difference (that is, the entire window could still be clicked on, to close). Right now, without such a visible clue - to close the window - editors are more easily confused about what to do with the warning.

And yes, it's possible (though difficult) to click on "Save page" while the warning box is still open, and then type around it when filing out the edit summary. I suppose for the sake of completeness VE ought to close that box once "Save page" is clicked. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:47, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

No I didn't. I know that will remove it, but anyway as you've said, the notice shouldn't still be hanging about after 'Save page' is clicked. Insulam Simia (talk) 17:50, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

The box having a close button is T54386, auto closing it when save page is clicked I'll add to T53701. Thryduulf (talk) 17:58, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

I'd note that there are many pop-ups that one can get when editing with VE, as the one about creating a new article, and for each of them you are required to either click on the box or on the 1-notice link to make them disappear. So if the markup warn behavior is changed, even slightly, I guess this should then propagate to others. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 18:32, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

The bug already included "(and other popups)" in the title but I've modified it to also explicitly mention edit notices (the source of the article and 1-notice popups) as well as you are absolutely correct. Thryduulf (talk) 19:19, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

BETA dropdown

See item 4

In VisualEditor, there is a button in the toolbar labelled "BETA".

1. The button itself should not be labelled "Beta", not "BETA". The latter looks like it might be a mysterious acronym.
2. The default behavior of the "Read the user guide" link should be to open in a new tab or window. Yes, most browsers will give the "unsaved changes" warning, but even with that, computer novices might not know how to open links in new tabs/windows.
3. When the dropdown is open, if the mouse cursor is anywhere inside the dropdown or hovering over the "BETA" button, both the "BETA" button and the "Leave feedback" link become underlined. (occurs in Firefox/Monobook and Safari/Vector, may be universal)
4. It is possible to break the "Submit feedback" form by doing the following procedure:
   • Shrink the browser window so that there is at least an inch or two between the top of the browser and the top of your screen (in other words, don't maximize the window size)
   • Drag the "Submit feedback" form as far up as it will go
   • Click and hold the top edge of the form to begin resizing, then drag the mouse up to the top of the screen.
     • In Monobook, this causes the "submit" and "cancel" buttons to disappear off the bottom of the form.
     • In Vector, this causes the bottom chunk of the form to become disconnected (see screenshot).

Meep. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 20:08, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Quick replies in order:

1. Good point, particularly now that the edit links use lower case. T54586
2. PamD raised this the other day. T54475 has been fixed and is just awaiting the next deployment (scheduled for 15th August I believe).
3. Yes I can reproduce this in Firefox 22/Monobook/Linux. What I can't do is work out how to concisely summarise this for a bugzilla bug summary - suggestions welcome!
4. Reported as T54588. Thryduulf (talk) 20:37, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Beta button and Leave Feedback links getting unexpectedly underlined? (I am not a particularly creative person, and English is not my mother language :D ) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:41, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

How about Beta button and Leave Feedback links: inextricably intertwined interface items ? --Cryptic C62 · Talk 21:41, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Better than anything I came up with, so I was about to use it but when doing so it told me about T53500 which is this exact issue. Thryduulf (talk) 21:44, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Can't use Visual Editor when logged in

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54563

I can't use the visual editor when I'm logged in. When I press the "Edit ^beta " tab, nothing happens, and when I press the "edit beta" link right next to a section (section editing can be enabled in the preferences), the page address changes and "&veaction=edit&section=1" is added to the end of it as well as "title=" before the title, but then nothing more happens. I still can't edit anything, and I haven't got any toolbox. Sometimes the page appears to start loading the toolbox since a progress bar appears, but it never finished loading the toolbox. When I'm logged out, however, editing pages with the visual editor works perfect. —Kri (talk) 21:01, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

First thing to do is to disable in custom Javascript you may have enabled. If you have none, please list out the gadgets you have turned on: there may be an incompatibility.—Kww(talk) 21:07, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

I believe that the only thing he has installed is a copy of User:EpochFail/HAPPI.js. Aaron, is there anything in there that might be conflicting with VisualEditor? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:25, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

I tried adding the HAPPI.js code to my Monobook and found that I too couldn't use VE - it just never finished loading. However neither did the HAPPI gadget load for me in the source editor either. The gadget tries to connect to http://wikiepdia.grouplens.org which gives a "server is taking too long to respond" error when I try to view it in my browser and an "Unknown host" error when I try to ping it.

It seems therefore that the fault is with the gadget not with VE, but VE should handle this situation better than indefinitely waiting for a server that is not responding, which I've reported as T54563. Thryduulf (talk) 21:54, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

This definitely wasn't VE's fault. It was the poor behavior of my script that caused the problem. I've removed the offending, included library in HAPPI. It looks like HAPPI still has some issues with the wikitext editor, but this merely prevents it from changing the UI. The changes I've made have solved the issue with the VisualEditor. You'll need to refresh your cache in order to make sure that the new code is loaded. If there's interest in getting HAPPI up and running again, let me know. I'd be happy to do so. --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 22:47, 5 August 2013 (UTC) (forgot to ping Kww, Thryduulf and Whatamidoing)

Okay, I disabled HAPPI, and now the visual editor works even when I'm logged in. I had actually forgot that I had that gadget installed. Thanks. —Kri (talk) 17:50, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

VE removing content when it encounters incorrect/non-standard markup

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In this change by another editor [30] some incorrect or non-standard markup, and associated text, was removed by VE (replaced by nowiki tags, natch). I was able to reproduce the damage by copy-pasting the previous revision to a sandbox and editing just the lead paragraph in the same way in VE. The unwanted changes are displayed in the review window. —rybec 21:17, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

I'll look for a relevant bug to throw this in as for the part concerning content removal, but also notice that your edit did not fix the article, as those info were probably from some Cite template which is now missing. Thanks! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 07:34, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I didn't correct the article, but just restored it to its previous state. Thank you for checking into it. —rybec 23:04, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for reporting it, it is now at [31]. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 21:42, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

Parts duplicated

Following a report on frwiki, I tried a simple modification by changing a text into a wikilink. VE messed up the article by duplicating parts (not even complete parts), see diff. It seems to be reproducible on this article. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 15:51, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Do you think this is the same bug as in the previous section (T52502)? Thryduulf (talk) 15:55, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Maybe, but there's also a nowiki tag that has been partially deleted... --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 15:58, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the report guys. I'll investigate this and the one above this later today. Ssastry (talk) 16:39, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

This has been a tricky bug to nail. I have so far narrowed this to a performance optimization in Parsoid. Hard to describe it without spitting a lot of detail. Now to reproduce the bug in testing conditions and fix it. FWIW, the latest version of the page does not seem to have this problem. Ssastry (talk) 17:14, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

TemplateData ideas

I just finished a moment ago creating a TemplateData for {{Infobox website}}. I've got some ideas.

1. Parameters section and TemplateData section looks similar. Can we merge parameters section with this in all templates.
2. Can we enable wiki markup in TemplateData?
3. I've added this to the template doc, but I don't see any effect in VE's transluction panel.
4. VE's transluction panel searchbox shows all subpages of (for example) infobox website. I think, it shouldn't.

--Rezonansowy (talk • contribs) 21:10, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

1. Is there any reason this can't just be done by removing the parameters section where it duplicates TemplateData? In some templates, might the parameters need more explanation than TD allows? (related also to point 2)
2. There is an open request for this already, but I can't immediately find it. Watch this space! Found it: T52656 Thryduulf (talk) 21:38, 6 August 2013 (UTC)
3. In theory it should be near-instantaneous (although you'll probably need to reload VE if you had it open before you wrote the TD). If it hasn't appeared after a few minutes then make a null edit on the template page and it should fix it.
4. Yes, this is requested at T54448 (typo fixed GermanJoe (talk) 07:42, 7 August 2013 (UTC)).

Thanks for the reports. Thryduulf (talk) 21:32, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

I suggest we do adopt the term "transluction"! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 21:46, 6 August 2013 (UTC) PS: thanks for adding TD :)

Phantom link on opening page edit

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T51680

On this page, when I start VE, the page opens with cursor showing a mysterious link icon at the start of the page. Opening that link icon shows it is populated with the content "Monier Williams", which happens to be the first link in the opening image caption, but of course the image caption isn't located at the top of the page. Somewhat weird going on here. Dragons flight (talk) 04:30, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

This is T51680 which occurs every time the lead image starts with a link. Thryduulf (talk) 08:11, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

Size of explanatory popup

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54602

Clipped edit notice for Today's Featured Article

The popup window is not high enough. At least the last line of text is clipped. (Caused by my having text size larger than usual? can't say.) Firefox; up to date.

--BenTremblay BenTremblay (talk) 05:46, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

If you mean something like the screenshot to the right, where an edit notice is larger than the window, then this is T54602 that I reported this morning. Thryduulf (talk) 08:30, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

Creating redirects

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T49328

What is the current status with creating/turning pages of content into redirects with VisualEditor? Insulam Simia (talk) 07:34, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

Presently VE doesn't support editing or creating redirects at all. T49328 is where handling redirects is noted as an enhancement request, including converting content pages into redirects. It's marked as a normal priority enhancement, but the only date mentioned was "post July" by James back in mid-April. Hopefully one of the WMF-liasons will be able to give an update, but I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for it. Thryduulf (talk) 08:23, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

As you know many people are away at Wikimania and the next deployment is scheduled for August 15th I think, but I might have mentioned redirects in an email to the team. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:13, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

referencing

Please could you help me? My references will not work- it may be a bug? Daredevil Project (talk) 10:29, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi! Anything that is not covered already at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/User_guide#Editing_references? There may be advanced editing not fully supported yet. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:32, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

It looks like the problem was that they used wikicode, which was <nowiki>ed according to current VE behaviour.[32] Thryduulf (talk) 11:30, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

Plus box in template window

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I find the plus button at the bottom left of the template window very vague in telling what it does. It's also too small to see, which meant I only recognised it's existence today. Insulam Simia (talk) 15:11, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

Do you have any suggestions as to how it could be improved? Thryduulf (talk) 15:45, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

Well it could be replaced with a larger box that has text to tell us what it does (as far as I am aware, does this function allow editors to add content in between templates like {{col-begin}}/{{col-end}}/{{col-2}}?) or more simply a line of text near the icon. Insulam Simia (talk) 15:58, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

As someone who tries to keep the User guide up-to-date, I admit to curiosity about this functionality, whatever it is, since it is not covered by the guide. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:23, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

@Elitre (WMF): - could you possibly confirm what this does? Insulam Simia (talk) 16:54, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

Hey there, I think it might be covered by comment #6 - Krinkle here. Can you check if I'm right? Also, please tell us whether we can add something for you to that bug, thanks! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 17:01, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

I think so. It looks like it's either 1) going to be removed or 2) my suggestions above will be implemented. Therefore you don't need to add anything as it has been mentioned already. Thanks for the quick response. Insulam Simia (talk) 17:43, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

You are welcome. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 17:44, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

Is VE broken?

VE had been working OK for me in Win7 with Firefox 22.x. Now, it will not come-up after clicking on the Edit <beta> tab. Meclee (talk) 17:15, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

I can use it right now, I suspect this depends on the page you are trying to edit. Can you share its title with us? :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 17:32, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

A majority of editors want VE to support basic wikitext, alongside other keyboard shortcuts.

What now? Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 11:50, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

I think that supporting wikitext in VE should be done as an addon rather than a native feature. In other words, default behavior would be to not support wikitext, and to support wikitext addition one needs to invoke a gadget. This would allow independent lifecycles for the VE and "legacy" (hmm, maybe shouldn't use that term in this case?) editing functionality. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 13:02, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

I think that calling Wikitext "legacy" is a good way to start another crusade against VE at this point. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 06:31, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

I'd also comment that decisions on features for VE need input from all wikis, not just en-wiki, as opposed to discussions of the rollout on en-wiki, which is clearly a local issue. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:35, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

Also software development is not ruled by (English) Wikipedia consensus, but by developer consensus. Developers (paid and volunteer) are open to being convinced to the ideas of the community, they are however not under the control of the community. At most, the community might sway the WMF, which might influence the paid developers. However even then WMF does not have full control. (Basically the return of the preference option to disable the Visual editor, is to a large degree based on the insistence of volunteer and even some paid staff that the position of the WMF was un-realistic) —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:29, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Very well to say that, but the developers want people to use VE, right? Listening to what the community wants is an important part of that. The arguments about other wikis' desires are meaningless without evidence the other wikis feel differently; the default assumption, one would think, is that the desire would be consistent. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 11:16, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

I wonder: if the developers weren't listening at all, do you think we would have had things like this, or the changes in the schedule? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:58, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

I never said they weren't listening, I was responding to TheDJ's claim that the developers shouldn't listen to the community. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 02:07, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

While I don't disagree with you at all, Adam, that developers need to work with community to come up with a software that suits users, TheDJ didn't claim that. :) He said, "Developers (paid and volunteer) are open to being convinced to the ideas of the community, they are however not under the control of the community." --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:09, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Comments from a content editor

Someone above (I can't recall who -- perhaps Thryduulf?) wondered what the feedback on VE would be from editors primarily using it to edit content, as opposed to performing Wikignomish tasks. I've been using it on radiocarbon dating for a couple of weeks, and here are my main impressions. For context, I have about 25,000 edits, have been here since 2006, am an IT professional with decades of computer background, and spend a lot of my time here writing featured articles.

The main positives:

• It's much easier to make simple copyedits in VE. (Not quicker, but simpler.) There are times when I have made an edit, spotted something in another section, and fixed that too; couldn't do that before. It also avoids the need to do a preview, which is a reflex for many editors, myself included; that saves a page refresh. If it became faster I would love it; as it is I already find myself preferring VE for these edits.
• References were not intuitive for me in VE initially, but now that I've learned how they work, and what the capabilities and limitations are, I really like the interface. I find it much easier to add a new ref to the references section with wikitext, by copying and editing another reference. Once that's done, though, it's easy to add citations. This is a big deal for me because heavily cited text is a pain to read in wikitext, and leads to lots of page previews.
• Adding a template isn't quite as easy as adding a citation but I still find it preferable to using the wikitext approach, simply because it guides me through the params.

Things that would benefit my editing (in other words, this is not a list of what bugs I think should be fixed next, just a list of what I ran into that I'd personally benefit from):

• Symbol inserts -- em dashes, en dashes, and non-breaking spaces, particularly inside citations; Greek letters and odd symbols such as ‰.
• Superscript and subscript -- not a huge deal since the {{chem}} template handles most of what I need, but it seems likfe a natural thing to put next to the bold and italic buttons.
• Reliability -- once in about every ten or twenty edits I get a token error. This rarely causes lost work since I just copy the text and try again, but it's annoying. If I can reliably reproduce this I will report it here.
• Better drag and drop, or at least copy and paste, for templates; currently it only works if they are within a text string. There are about a million {{chem}} templates in radiocarbon dating, so perhaps this is one of those things most people wouldn't care about.

Things VE can't do that aren't a big deal for my editing patterns:

• Math markup -- there's math in the article but I can handle that separately; it's not an impediment to 90% of my edits.
• Section editing -- I don't care about this except for the speed issue

This is all just one editor's opinion from working with VE for a while; I make no claims to general validity for any of my comments above, but I thought it might be useful feedback. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:13, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

It definitely is, Mike, thanks for posting this. From what I recall (can't retrieve relevant bugs now, sorry for that.) these are all common requests (I think it is practically what I also heard until now from Italian users) and I do hope that at least some of these can be satisfied in the near future. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:19, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Thank you, it was me that was wondering about this and it is very useful. As for your comments: Superscript is covered by T53611, subscript by T53612, symbol insertion by T40029 and dragging and dropping of various things is T51981. There have been several issues about tokens, but they are marked as fixed, so if you can figure out what causes this it would be really useful. Thryduulf (talk) 15:35, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Hello, I've both been using the VisualEditor on my personal wikis for the past month (a personal notebook at home and a lab notebook at work) and to write a Wikipedia article (User:Ruud Koot/Computer science/Lambda calculus) as well as the occasional copy-editing of Wikipedia articles. My overall verdict is that the visual editor is quite usable for the former (small-scale wikis), but not for the latter (Wikipedia). Problems I'm encountered include:

1. The visual editor is unreliable, which forces me to make changes in small increments, saving in between to avoid losing work. In particular:
   1. When performing structural editing tasks (i.e. things which are slight more complex than changing typos or adding a sentence in the middle of an existing paragraph) it is very easy to get the editor into some weird state where it is impossible to get out of other than aborting the edit session and trying again more carefully. This includes things like introducing "bulleted headers" and "bulleted bullets", which cannot possibly be represented as wikitext.
   2. Occasionally, after a medium-sized editing session, the visual editor will silently refuse to save my edits. When clicking the save button the progress bar appears, disappears, and you stay in editing mode, with no new revision appended to the history. Trying again sometimes resolves the problem, sometimes it requires edit operations to be done in a different order or be broken up into smaller increments, saving in-between. Do you keep any statistics on how often an editor presses the save button versus how many times this actually results in a new revision being saved?
   3. Copying and pasting around text and editing pages with tables are fairly reliable methods of triggering the two above mentioned problems.
   4. I've had occasional weird, random and unexplainable corruptions of wikitext on save (e.g., a __NOTOC__ being replaced with a copy of the categories.)
   5. As it is quite hard to predict if the visual editor is going to succeed or fail for a particular edit, either due to one of these reliability issues or due to on of the following "missing features", I finding myself to err on the safe-side more and more and just use source editor.
2. The visual editor is lacking intelligence:
   1. People have come to expect certain things of a WYSIWIG editor: when I input a bulleted list by starting my line with an asterisk (ironically, just as you would in the source editor), the editor should automatically convert this to a proper bulleted list; when I input an enumerated list by stating my lines with numbers followed by a dot, the editor should automatically convert this to a proper enumerated lists; etc. Microsoft Word provides exactly this kind of functionally. For an experienced editor like me, having to using my mouse to click a toolbar button takes more time than inputting this in the source editor. A novice editor, who likely is experienced with Microsoft Work, might expect the editor to be this intelligent and not even recognize the toolbar buttons for what they are.
   2. Related, I'm missing an easy way to insert sub- and superscripts and various special characters (for which I would have used SGML entities in the source editor), in particular en- and em-dashes. How about automatically converting -- and --- into en- and em-dashes, respectively? On the other hand, please don't go overboard with this either: it should perhaps be possible for experience editors to insert more "advanced" forms of formatting like underlining and font colour, but novice editors should not be encouraged to use formatting that would likely violate style-guidelines.
   3. Several heuristics need to be added for generating proper hyperlinks, it currently does not respect the conventions of Wikipedia. When I link a plural word ending in -s, it should be linked to the article in singular without an -s. E.g., when linking dogs, I don't think the suggestion box even gives me dog as an option. It certainly should not generate the wikitext [[dog|dogs]] instead of [[dog]]s; this is quite impolite for people who prefer or are forced to use the source editor. Additionally, I think a good heuristic might be to try and avoid linking through a redirect, as novice editors will not be aware that it's preferable to link dogs directly to dog instead of through the redirect dogs.
   4. The former, combined with the occasional unexpected insertion of a random <nowiki>, and no clear way of fixing this from the visual editor, have forced me already to abort several copy-editing tasks and try again from the source editor. As I lose time and work this way, this made me much more hesitant to use the visual editor even for copy-editing tasks.
   5. There are no automatic edit summaries or even suggestions based on previous summaries. This makes one of the things the visual editor is currently very good at—minor copy-editing—unnecessarily painful.
3. Furthermore, and this distinction is primarily what makes the visual editor usable on my personal wikis, but too painful to use on Wikipedia, is that the visual editor does not handle the complexity of Wikipedia articles sufficiently well yet:
   1. Editing templates, references and categories is currently much, much too painful for experienced editors to be usable. I would conjecture it is too complex for novice editors to figure out the user-interface. (Also, do not underestimate how powerful the technique of learning by-copying-and-pasting is, that the visual editor currently obscures. It does not even allow me to copy-and-paste templates, WYSIWYG-style.)
   2. More "complex" objects like inline mathematics and even quotes cannot be edited at all, requiring one to often and quickly switch between the visual and source editor. I wouldn't consider the visual editor usable for any kind of article writing (as opposed to copy-editing) until I can seemlessly switch between the two without losing intermediate changes. However, "source editor" can be interpreted loosely here: it can also be a variant of the visual editor that used some kind of "underwater mode"—displaying and allowing one to edit parts of the wikitext directly from the WYSIWYS editor—like one could find in WordPerfect or some HTML editors.
   3. Finally, I have the, by now usual complaints, of it being too sluggish on large articles (even on my Core i7, it must be considerably worse for people using an Atom-based netbook), not having real section editing (wouldn't the latter help partially solve the former?), the visual editor not focussing correctly when clicking on a section edit link. This, together with a much greater tendency for the visual editor to even property render the article in edit mode for long and complex articles, makes me wonder if it wouldn’t be smarter to initially limit the beta to shorter and less complex (for appropriate definitions of those two terms) articles, as the user-experience will be much more positive for those articles while quantitative still making up for the largest part of Wikipedia.

While I can image that as a developer you would see many of these problems as minor bugs or low-priority feature requests and are anxious—perhaps too anxious—to release a product you've been developing for several years now, for me, as an experienced editor, these make the difference between an unusable alpha-release and a usable beta. Novice editors are quite likely to be put off if they encounter one of the reliability issues. —Ruud 12:41, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

One additional remark: working with semantic objects like lists and headers in the visual editors sometimes works flawlessly, but sometimes it doens't "feel" quite right. This has traditionally been a weak point of WYSIWYG editors, as you cannot position your cursor as exactly as you can in a source editor: you can't always tell whether your cursor is inside or outside or a particular object, element or tag, or say that should be inside or outside of it. I feel that it is currently not doing as good as a job as, for example, even Microsoft Word does, while given the highly semantically annotated structure of wikitext over an unstructured document, it should be able to do a much better job. It is, however, very difficult to express exactly what doens't always feel quite right about it. If there is one piece of advice or homework exercise to the development team, it would be this:

Take a few dozen featured articles and try to recreate them from scratch using the visual editor, preferably without looking at their original source code.

It think this experience will let you find more bugs and design flaws than any amount of unit testing or user interviewing ever would.

—Ruud 13:26, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your thoughts, Ruud. I need to look for appropriate venues where I can leave them (I noticed that User:Trhyduulf is very good at this, I'd appreciate his help in this as well :) ) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 21:56, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

I've had a look through but quickly realised I need to be more awake than I am now to ensure I fully understand everything. I'll probably get chance tomorrow. Thryduulf (talk) 22:53, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

@Ruud Koot: Going through your issues in order:

• I've reported your issue 1.1 as T54639, it's possible that T53987 isn't unrelated.
• re 1.2, I'm not aware of any such statistics and it's almost certainly not possible for anyone other than the devs to do so. I've reported the issue as T54640, including the question. I'll ping JamesF about it (in another edit to make it easier for him to find), but he's likely busy with Wikimania atm so may not respond quickly.
• 1.3 (see above two bullets)
• 1.4 the specific example ("__NOTOC__ replaced with a copy of the categories") I've reported as T54643. It might be an instance of T50231 but that one is written in technical language that I don't fully understand so I'm not sure.
• 1.5 Unfortunately this is an aspect of it being unfinished software. Beta should be more polished than this behaviour though, which is more like I would expect from an alpha state product. I'm not in the driving seat with this though so there isn't anything I can do, sorry.
• 2.1 Starting bulleted lists as in MS Word is T53408 which is marked as low priority unfortunately, but I've copied your comments there. I've reported the similar request for numbered lists as T54644, but I expect it to be given an identical priority when it is triaged.
• 2.2:
  • Superscript is covered by T53611, subscript by T53612, symbol insertion by T40029 and en/emdashes from sequences of hyphens is lowest-priority T40724. Setting font colour I've reported as T54645.
  • Shortcuts like ctrl+i and ctrl+b work for italic and bold etc.
  • I've reported your idea about discouraging certain formatting by novice editors as T54646, but rather than the tools being unavailable (which might require new classes of editor permissions) I've suggested that instead they should just not be shown by default.
• 2.3 Linking to redirects is a good thing in some situations (e.g. redirects with possibilities), but T52420 asks for editors to be informed if they link to a redirect. The piped link rather than trailing link issue is T50463
• 2.4 See my response to 1.5
• 2.5 This is T50274 which is sadly marked as low priority, despite it being one of my most missed features.
• 3.1 Actually experience has shown that many editors are finding the template editing better than with the source method, but yes copy and paste can be improved. An improved reference editor is one of the most requested features, with almost everybody preferring the reference toolbar used in the source editor. Categories I haven't seen much discussion on, but this seems to generate mixed opinions - some people like it others don't.
• 3.2
  • Maths and quotes are among the features that are coming but have not been written yet as they weren't prioritised as necessary for the beta release. Personally I think that so many missing features is another indication this is alpha rather than beta, but I'm just an editor here not anyone who made those decisions.
  • Switching between editing modes is often requested here and is tracked at T49779.
  • There are many suggestions for ways to edit wikitext from within VE - T45133, T51686 and T53899 are some of them.
• 3.3
  • Performance is a known issue the devs are working hard on.
  • VE does correctly target section links, but only after it has fully loaded and only if you haven't moved the view at all while it was loading. This is a known issue but I can't immediately find the relevant bug, sorry.

Hopefully that's helped you with some of your issues, but I know it's probably not what you were hoping for. Thryduulf (talk) 10:58, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Thryduulf! For the edit section, I think a relevant discussion can be found here. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:08, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

@Jdforrester (WMF): Can you answer to the question asked above, "Do you keep any statistics on how often an editor presses the save button versus how many times this actually results in a new revision being saved?" Thryduulf (talk) 18:40, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

@Thryduulf: Yes, we were collecting this information for the A/B test - however, the data is hugely compromised in this area, and so we don't have anything we can usefully say one way or the other. (Specifically, we don't have confidence in the data collected about WT edits, so can't make a comparison without re-writing this code and running another test; we think some of the data is missing for some users, but we don't know for sure what impact this has on different types of user (logged-out vs. new vs. experienced) and so how to re-weight the data to compensate; and other issues.) I want to spend some time in the near future to re-do our data collection infrastructure so that we can answer this question and similar ones, but right now we don't have anything to share, sorry. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 01:49, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick reply. It's a shame your data collection didn't work, but I understand and agree there is no point releasing meaningless figures. Thryduulf (talk) 02:12, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Empty cells in a table don't work

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I was editing my userpage with VE today, and I noticed that, in the part of a table with an empty cell, VE seemed to move the two pipes inside the cell on the left, and the empty cell didn't show. -- ^t numbermaniac ^c 03:02, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi, I noticed that as well, also the toolbar overlaps everything at the top of the page. Will file this in the relevant place, thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:48, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Added here. Bye, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:27, 8 August 2013 (UTC) PS: I can't reproduce the toolbar issue anymore, that's 52504, in case.

Empty section headers

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Often, when an editor tries to remove (or accidentally removes) a section header, the result in VE is something like this: [33]. This is seldom (if ever) the intention, can VE be coded to simply remove the section header in these cases? Fram (talk) 09:32, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Please read this, and if you want me to add your comments there, just leave them here :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:52, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. Fram (talk) 13:20, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

I added your thoughts there. Thanks.--Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:21, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Reference Section, Wellsville, Ohio page

Can not see entire page so that I know where to add edit FDLeyda (talk) 14:05, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand what FDLeyda is seeing/saying; I can see the entire page (Safari, on Mac OS X). But it's interesting that in the article, Wellsville, Ohio, there are 13 references in read/view mode, yet in VE, in the Reference dialog (click "Use an existing reference"), only ten are listed, and in the main VE editing window, only five references are showing in the References section. I'm guessing that there is some wikitext (code) that is giving VE conniptions, but that's just a guess. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:58, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

I've not got time right now to investigate, but there are several known bugs relating to not all references displaying - T54371, T52474, T54398, T54490 and T54427 at least. Thryduulf (talk) 18:13, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

FDLeyda is referring to this edit. There were five references in the article, and he tried to add a sixth (which wouldn't be possible in this manner, as the other five are inline citations, but this distinction is not very clear when using the visual editor), but it turned into a header instead. —Ruud 19:29, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

@FDLeyda:, thanks for your feedback. :) Do you know what you did when that happened? I get a similar outcome only if I put my cursor on the line where it says "Further reading" and start to type, hitting return when I'm finished. If I put the cursor above that, it comes out normal font. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 18:19, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Top bar shows over toolbar

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54326

In monobook, some elements of the top bar show over the toolbar. This is similar to an earlier problem in which other interface elements showed on top of dialog boxes. See the screenshot on the left. This typically happens after scrolling down and then back up. Monobook, FF 22, Windows 7:Jay8g [V•T•E] 03:56, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

I can confirm this happens on Chrome as well. --WS (talk) 05:57, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, this is known T54326 and from comments there it seems to be universal. Thryduulf (talk) 07:24, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

This has been fixed and is just awaiting deployment, which I believe is scheduled for the 15th. Thryduulf (talk) 13:11, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Any thoughts on optimization?

The interface is unbelievably laggy on older machines. I'm on Chrome, XUbuntu, IBM T60, Core Duo (not Core 2 Duo) 1.83GHz with 2GB of RAM. It takes about two seconds to get my cursor to show up anywhere on the editor and even longer to highlight words and make changes. I like the idea behind this visual editor and I'm sure it runs fine on newer machines, but there's no reason for it not to work well on older computers. I'm definitely switching back to the old editor. BBAmp (talk) 16:10, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

"there's no reason for it not to work well on older computers" that is a bold statement :). I suspect it might work better in the future, but I doubt it will every run satisfactory on those kinds of machines and these people will likely always be tied to text mode. It would be good if we could do some sort of performance based metrics inside the editor and then do a "We note it's taking quite long to load this page: 1: Continue, 2: Edit this page in textual mode, 3: My computer is too slow; disable this editor in my preferences. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:47, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

You might want to weigh in at Wikipedia_talk:VisualEditor#Trade-offs_in_speed_improvements. I'd notice that in these days that I am editing pages discussing VE here (not with VE, this goes without saying), their length is so excessive that it causes my Chrome to freeze for many seconds (not to mention edit conflicts). I don't have anything to switch back to, and my PC is usually ok ;) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 19:07, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

@Elitre (WMF): When you experience problems with Chrome freezing, are you editing entire pages, or just sections of pages? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 04:03, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

I am not sure we should discuss this here, but thanks :) I tend to edit sections, in order to avoid conflicts. And it is really the length the problem, since I don't experience it on smaller pages. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 07:15, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

nowiki instead of | in templates

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54618

Hi, a kind of nowiki I haven't seen yet: all the "|" between the parameters of an infobox replaced by nowiki here.

I really hope WMF will respect the consensus in the RFC so damages to articles are at least reduced... --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 21:12, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi there, please notice that it was this edit, not made with VE, which corrupted the page - VE just "reacted" to what it found later in the code. Anyway I am filing this since something similar was already reported. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 21:30, 7 August 2013 (UTC) PS. There you go. Regards, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 21:43, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 07:08, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor

I really like this idea a lot. It makes editing a lot easier and understandable. The markup of the original editing on this website was hard and it was like another language to learn. VisualEditor offers a cool new way to edit a page. I really like it. Nahkrin (talk) 00:45, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Glad to hear this, Nahkrin. Looks like you are a new editor. Was the previous editing experience standing in the way of (blocking) your contributing? --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 01:06, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Odd: Nahkrin's list of contributions shows *zero* edits using VE prior to posting to this page. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:59, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Nahkrin has said he likes the idea. It may be that he edited but did not save, or he edited and saved by IP. Jacopo Werther ^iγ∂ψ=mψ 07:27, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

e.c. by my folks <3 I don't find it odd, I think his remarks can be applied to VE looks. Since he did edit earlier, he can recognize the difference. His kind of remarks are perfectly compatible with him just testing a bit without actually saving anything. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 07:31, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Loading forever; never completes

Up until very recently, VE was working perfectly fine. However, it has started to load forever (or at least about 15 minutes, when I gave up). The page greys out and the loading bars run, but nothing else ever happens. Perhaps this explains #Is VE broken? above? Windows 7, FF 22, Monobook:Jay8g [V•T•E] 02:45, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi, as I said, knowing the title of the page might help a lot, do you remember any? There have been no deployments for a while and we would have heard more about such a major issue, if it affected many people. (I also use your config to edit and did not experience this.) Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 07:23, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

All pages I tried didn't work. Still broken on my sandbox and United Express, among others:Jay8g [V•T•E] 16:49, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

It's something specific to your configuration, Jay8g: both of those open in a few seconds for me. What browser and machine are you using?—Kww(talk) 17:02, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Can it possibly be related to this? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 17:32, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Although they do have several scripts installed, it doesn't look like HAPPI is one of them (that was my first thought too). It isn't the VE editing surface colour as I use that without any problems. I don't have time at the minute to test the others though. Thryduulf (talk) 18:01, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

He said "Windows 7, FF 22, Monobook" above. I realize that this is likely to be unhelpful, but have you restarted your machine any time recently? Safari was dragging on my Mac a while ago, and it's much happier now that I restarted (and somehow magically found another 10% of diskspace, too, which is probably related). Do you have anything odd about your firewall? Is everything else on the web working normally? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:38, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) It now works without me doing anything. Odd:Jay8g [V•T•E] 18:42, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

If the issue was with one of the scripts you are using, then a fix of that would solve your problem. Thryduulf (talk) 18:55, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

VE and speedy templates?

I'm not sure if I'm going crazy, but when I saw that this edit had triggered filter 29 (removal of speedy template) I was very confused, because it seemed to me like the diff did NOT, in fact, do that. (But the filter log thinks it did.) Perhaps an admin would like to check out the diff, and see if I should, perhaps, send my tired eyes off to bed? (I couldn't reproduce it in my sandbox.) Ignatzmice•talk 03:00, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Not an admin, but I'd also suggest to make sure that the filters are working correctly - at least one of them was reported yesterday at the tech VP as broken and being fixed soon. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 07:33, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Album Art Work

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I tried to upload the album art work for this page but couldn't find the way, please help me thanks. Moth Code (talk) 04:39, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

I've replied on the user's talk page. Thryduulf (talk) 09:01, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Link Dialog

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T50789

The add-link dialog should have a clear "OK" and "Cancel" button. Right now, you have no obvious way to get rid of it and it is not clear what happens when you click somewhere else (the dialog goes away, but did it save the changes or not?) Also, what does the strange back button (<) to the left do? and are the Link-symbol and "Hyperlink" two buttons or a description or what (nothing happens when I click on them)? The trash symbol is good and does what you'd expect it to: remove the link. Mauro Bieg (talk) 11:06, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

The < button closes the dialog, since the wikilink is automatically added when you type/select the word. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:11, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, this is covered at T50789 (and partly T54462). Thryduulf (talk) 11:22, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Templates grouped together for no good reason

On Fresenius (company), when editing with the VE, the three templates (2 stub, 1 navigation) at the end of the article are grouped together for no apparent good reason. WS (talk) 15:17, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

I've cleaned up the article, and removed two templates (the article isn't a stub any more), but yes, there seems be a bug when using VE to edit this older version. Editing in VE, clicking on the first (large) template at the bottom of the page also highlights/selects the other two templates. That shouldn't happen; the templates aren't related to each other. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:12, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Cancel a cancel?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52955

Usability issue: when I hit "Cancel," it gives a dialog box with the options "Cancel" and "OK." (This appears to be a standard JavaScript alert() dialog.) Please make it clear which button actually completes the cancel. (Hint: it's not "Cancel.") Perhaps the options should be "Return to editor" and "Exit without saving."

Note that on this dialog box I'm typing into right now, "Cancel" is on the right; the one I'm discussing has it on the left in MacOS. 64.131.18.26 (talk) 15:30, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

"cancel" to open the dialog box, and "OK" to confirm cancel. It's not obviously wrong, but it is definitely confusing. Ignatzmice•talk 15:41, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Image blown up

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53628

When editing any page containing template:Ontario-struct-stub (e.g. Martyrs' Shrine), the image in the template is shown at gigantic size. --WS (talk) 15:44, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

This is known T53628, caused by the image in the template being specified with an explicit "px" (this is at least the third stub template I've seen it on). I've edited the template so it should now render OK in VE now. Thryduulf (talk) 16:03, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

After creating a link, toolbar doesn't follow down page

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54441

This is my entire screen

When I add a link to any page, the toolbar will not follow when I scroll down. It just stays at the top. Windows 7, FF 22, Monobook:Jay8g [V•T•E] 19:36, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

This is T54441 which is fixed but not yet deployed. The next scheduled deployment unfortunately isn't until the 15th. Thryduulf (talk) 19:53, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Intro notice, etc.

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54667

So, I logged out a bit ago and tried to make an edit using the Visual Editor as an anon. Three things surprised me.

1. The button to use the VE said "edit (beta)". It was to the right of the "edit source" button. I'm concerned that "edit (beta)" doesn't give any indication that it's a more new-editor-friendly (ideally) version. Not sure how to fix this or rephrase it to sound more appealing.
2. The warning/introductory message that I got immediately after clicking that button didn't fit in the dialog; I couldn't scroll down to read it all. Not sure if anyone else has had that issue.
3. The edit never showed up as saved; after about three minutes it said "Error: Unknown error" or something similar. Nevertheless, when I opened up the article in another tab, my edit HAD in fact been saved.

Anyway, after all this time, the editor seems to be working way better than before. Still got a long ways to go, but I am impressed and grateful to the development team which has poured so much time and effort into these improvements. Red Slash 15:51, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Regarding #1, I think that having VE as secondary, marked as "beta", is what we want to do at this point, given the number of problems still existing. Now that this is the secondary link, the more adventuresome - or frustrated - editors will try it, while those who are happy with the wikitext editor won't necessarily bother.

In general, I think it's possible to underestimate the curiosity of Wikipedia editors - at least, of those likely to stick around. Given two different "edit" links, it seems to me that the curious will try them both, and if they like VE, they're more likely to be forgiving (at the moment) preciously because it's marked as beta, and because it isn't being thrust upon them as the preferred link. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 04:14, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

Red Slash, are you talking about the new "this is beta, it may have errors" warning, or the other types of warning notices (like WP:Editnotices)? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:45, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

Whatamidoing, it was the new one specific to VE. It may well just be me that was affected, but I wasn't able to scroll through it to read it all. Red Slash 01:38, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

@Red Slash: I think it is probably another example T54602, and I've left comments there. However it would be useful if you could upload a screenshot (see User:Thryduulf/How to upload screenshots of Wikipedia if you don't know how). To see the beta notice again you need to delete the "ve-beta-welcome-dialog" cookie, in Firefox you can do this by selecting the "Preferences" option in the Edit menu, clicking the Privacy icon at the top, then the "Show cookies" button about two thirds of the way down on the right of the dialog box. In the search box of the new dialog type "ve-beta-welcome-dialog" (without quotes or any following spaces), make sure it is selected and then click the "Remove Cookie" button in the bottom left (the one with the red line, not the "Remove all cookies" with the mop). You can then close both the cookies and preferences dialogs. You will see the dialog again next time you load VE. Thryduulf (talk) 08:51, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the great help, Whatamidoing and Thryduulf. I feel so accomplished after having done this. Red Slash 01:50, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for that screenshot, it shows that this isn't what I was thinking of. It might be a different manifestation of the same bug or it might be a different one. I'm not awake enough to do anything with it right now but I'll look at it in the morning. Thryduulf (talk) 02:09, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

I've reported this separately as T54667 although it might get merged into T54602 or possibly T53755 but that is less likely. Thank you again for the report and the screenshot. Thryduulf (talk) 09:54, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Opening links

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54670

The following discussion is marked as answered. If you have a new comment, place it just below the box.

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Let's say I want to create a link. I find one with the correct name in the dropdown list, and click on it. There is currently no way to open the Wikipedia link inside the edit page. I have to create a new tab and manually check that the page is really what I want to link to. I think this should be implemented for ease of use. DeathOfBalance (talk) 20:18, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

It should be covered here. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:04, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Links to technical or obscure pages sometimes fail to list, for example: on Shaft I highlighted "Handle" and "Tang" which produced lists missing Handle (grip) and Tang (weaponry). There still seems to be a problem opening the link while editing (as above) and sometimes (on saved pages) links made with VisualEditor only seem to open if opened in a (right click) "new tab" - personally I think preview might be more relevant than review changes for testing that links work correctly before saving.

Occasionally (not always) VisualEditor hiccups on opening, which the source editor does not, however I think that is because my browser suppresses info-banners such as donation appeals? Otherwise, useful, especially for new users, although personally I find the source editor much more convenient. Regards, Timpo (talk) 11:30, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Links not opening on left click is desired behaviour as it stops you losing your edits. When opened in a new tab or window (right click or ctrl+click) they don't suffer this problem (although per T50915 they currently don't load the right URL). T52593 is a request for previews in the link dialog along the lines of navigation popups, which should solve the preview issue.

For me, Handle (grip) does appear in the list but quite far down, while Tang (weaponry) doesn't until I add the "(w". I agree this isn't good, so I've reported T54670 suggesting the suggestions list should scroll. Thryduulf (talk) 12:16, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Template:Terminal issue

{{Terminal}}'s info icon crashes. --Rezonansowy (talk • contribs) 12:59, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

• Do you mean the "i" icon in the lower right of the template? In what way do you mean it crashes? I've tried editing this in my sandbox, and while the "i" icon is misaligned I've not experienced anything like a crash (Firefox 22/monobook/linux). Thryduulf (talk) 13:30, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

It might be browser dependant. Works OK for me (Chrome, Vector, Mac OSX). I've added the template data.--Salix (talk): 13:55, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Hmm, it's a bit strange, but it works properly for now. Anyway, Thanks for replies! --Rezonansowy (talk • contribs) 12:58, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Variation on copy/paste bug

The following discussion is marked as answered. If you have a new comment, place it just below the box.

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54271

See this earlier bug report, now tracked as bug 52271. I've finally figured out what it is that is causing the saved text to differ from what you expect. This is almost certainly the same underlying problem as reported in 52271, but it's somewhat more serious because what is saved is not always what you see on screen.

To reproduce in a sandbox:

1. Add a template such as {{chem}}; I used ¹⁴
   C, created by {{chem|14|C}}. Put some text on either side of it so you can copy/paste it with text, since templates won't copy/paste successfully by themselves.
2. Save that page, and edit again.
3. Now copy the template and paste it twice, so you have something like this:

   -- ¹⁴
   C -- -- ¹⁴
   C -- -- ¹⁴
   C --

4. Now edit the first pasted one -- the middle one in the example above -- so that it changes a parameter:

   -- ¹⁴
   C -- -- ¹²
   C -- -- ¹⁴
   C --

5. Paste again; the pasted version will be ¹²
   C, which is bug 52271.

a) I've seen two different behaviours for the next step. One is that you'll now see this:

-- ¹⁴
C -- -- ¹²
C -- -- ¹⁴
C -- -- ¹²
C --

but when you save the third one will be a 12 -- that is, it will have changed what you see on screen to be different in the saved file.

b) The other behaviour I've seen is that after the final paste, all four of the templates show "12", not "14".

-- Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:00, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

• I've added your comments to T54271 as it is the same issue, I've also adjusted the bug title to make it clear that the save differs from what is shown to the editor. Thanks, Thryduulf (talk) 10:22, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Trade-offs in speed improvements

Hi, as I know some of the most busy VE testers don't really hang around other discussions, I'm here to point to this thread Sherry opened to hear from all users about which type of speed-related improvement is most important to them when they're editing in VisualEditor: speed of operation, or speed of starting? Add your comments there! Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:23, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Wikitext error message

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54669

Status	New:
Description	Not sure whether it was covered before. I was editing Yevgeny Urlashov with VE and at some point got a pop-up message that the article contains wikitext. (Apparently, I must have added the wikitext, though I can not recollect doing so). After the message, the "save" button became unclickable, and there was no way I could save my (rather extensive) edits. There was also no hint at what could contain wikitest, so that I at least could erase and recreate this part.--Ymblanter (talk) 11:02, 9 August 2013 (UTC)
To duplicate:
Operating system	Windows 7
Web browser	FF
Site	En-WP
Workaround	Not found, just lost my edits
Skin	Vector
Resolution
Bugzilla

Ymblanter (talk) 11:02, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi, did you dismiss the message by clicking on it? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:05, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes. Before that, it actually physically covered the save button, and I could not click on save anyway.--Ymblanter (talk) 11:06, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

I've reproduced that on Windows 7, Chrome, in the same article. I deliberately added the word [[test]], so that I would know where the markup was. Even after removing it, I could not click on save, either. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 11:13, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Okay, it's really weird that I do not encounter the same problem when I do the same thing on a random article (which happened to be Maundy Gregory). I dismissed the error box, and the "save" page button works, although I aborted prior to saving. Technical people, any clue? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 11:14, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

It does not happen for me. The button is never "greyed up", I might also save with square brackets added. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:22, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

The button didn't grey up for me, either - it looked perfectly normal, but did not respond to being clicked. Did it grey out for you, @Ymblanter:? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 11:25, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

No, it remained as it should be - green?. Never greyed up.--Ymblanter (talk) 11:27, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

I occasionally use VE (I made may be several dozen edits) and never got this pop-up message before.--Ymblanter (talk) 11:30, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

I can't reproduce this at all; the button stays green and responds to being clicked (indeed I managed to save a small edit, although I obviously removed the wikitext before doing so). I tested in both monobook and vector, using Firefox 22/Linux. Are you using Windows Maggie? If so then that's one point of commonality. It would be odd to happen in both Chrome and Firefox on Windows but no other combination though. Thryduulf (talk) 11:37, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

I did reproduce it again on the same article, now deliberaetly inserting [[test]]. After I click on the pop-up message and remove [[test]], whatever I add, I can not say. The save button stays light green.--Ymblanter (talk) 11:45, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Same effect in Sonkovo.--Ymblanter (talk) 11:47, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

I switched to my laptop (Chrome, whatever Mac OS I have there), and it let me save. I tried it again on my desktop and found that if I clicked "save" immediately after dismissing the window, it didn't work. If I persisted, it did after a few seconds. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 11:50, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

And I reproduced that lag on my formerly random Maundy Gregory. Ymblanter, if you persist in trying or wait a few seconds, does it work for you? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 11:51, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

I just meant that the button was green as usual: when you can't click on it (happened to me before, should find that bug again) you notice a slightly lighter green. Can this be similar to [34], although there are no bullets in the article? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:53, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

No, frankly, I do not see any change of color at all.--Ymblanter (talk) 11:56, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

(ec) Yes, it works indeed if I wait for several seconds. Thanks, this hopefully resolves the problem.--Ymblanter (talk) 11:55, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Well, I don't know about that - you lost your edit because you didn't know. That's still a problem - that shouldn't ever happen. It's just a different problem. :) I'll log it. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 12:04, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Great, thanks, Maggie.--Ymblanter (talk) 12:09, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing out the issue. Sorry you lost your work! :( --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 12:12, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Firefox + High contrast = Borken interface

The following discussion is marked as answered. If you have a new comment, place it just below the box.

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54675

Sadness.

Procedure: Using Windows Vista, press Shift + Alt + Print Screen to activate "high contrast" mode. Open VE in Firefox. Weep uncontrollably (see screenshot).

It is worth noting that, when using the high contrast extension for Chrome, the interface is fully visible in every setting. Hooray! --Cryptic C62 · Talk 16:12, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Ouch! I've reported this as T54675 and set the severity to "critical". XFCE doesn't have a high contras mode in the same way so I can't directly test it (it does work in the "high contrast inverse" theme but that's nowhere near as black as the windows one), but that screenshot says it all. Thryduulf (talk) 17:18, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Seems like it is stripping background images. We already had accessibility issues here, but stripping the images makes it more visible to other users I guess :D —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:06, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor accidentally deleting infoboxes

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53043

This is actually not my own experience, but those that I have seen on articles on my watchlist. When someone edits an article, sometimes, for some reason it deletes the whole infobox (and strangely only that, any maintenance tags at the top of the page remain). Sometimes, it even adds a nowiki tag to the article (which is probably related to the long-running bug with nowiki tags), although I can't see any mention of the infobox deletion on any of the current discussions. How can this be solved? Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 23:35, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Could you link to some diffs please. I know that there has been at least one bug relating to VE removing templates, but I can't find it at the moment. Thryduulf (talk) 00:01, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Here here. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 00:29, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Technically, this is not a VisualEditor bug. What happens is that the user backspaces one time too many, and since the entire infobox is "one character" in VisualEditor's mind, it gets deleted. If the user doesn't notice and undo the backspace, then it's gone. But while it's not a "bug", it's a problem, and it's already in Bugzilla so that some sort of fix can be devised. (Perhaps you should have to confirm deletion of a template? If you've got ideas, let me know, or add them to the bug report yourself if you've got an account there.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:56, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

One idea would be to somehow flag the templates where a confirmation step is appropriate, but it'd have to batch up the confirmation if multiple nodes are affected, and maybe have a "Don't show this again" checkbox. Feels unwieldy.--Eloquence* 01:28, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I personally think confirmation each time a person deletes a template with a "do not show this again" checkbox (which is remembered across edits) would be adequate. As you say, a single user action should trigger at most one warning. I don't find this unwieldly. Dcoetzee 02:13, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

An other way would be to do like Word do for images: the first backspace selects the image, a second one deletes the image. The same kind of behavior could be applied to templates: first select the template, then delete it on a second key stroke. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 06:19, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

A confirmation asking for permission each time the error occurs is horrible, and if you click "Don't show this again" it won't protect you, so this solves nothing. Selecting the image on the first backspace is the way to go. Diego Moya (talk) 13:54, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

I posted Nico's suggestion to the bug report. I think it's an idea that should be considered. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:29, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

See for example [35]. I see this a lot with new users. Andrewpmk | Talk 14:17, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

It's gotten worse

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53043

I've just made an edit using VisualEditor. In my edit, I merely wikilinked to a person. I did not use backspace, but once again, the infobox was accidentally deleted. And now, it appears that most of the VisualEditor edits on pages on my watchlist are having the same problem (see this and this). Does this need a new Bugzilla entry or should it continue to be tracked under the old one? (I don't have a Bugzilla account). Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 14:59, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

I'll add to that bug for you, don't worry about this. As for the "getting worst" part, I think this is also related to us having among our watched pages many pages that might suffer from that specific bug. As an example, in the previous days I had to fix some articles on the Italian WP where VE would struggle with an infobox about fictional characters. Each time someone else edited those articles, the "bug" would appear again. Now that we have found a workaround for that and those pages will be ok, I am not going to think "it's gotten better" ;) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:20, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

I'm seeing this as well. [36] It doesn't seem to be hitting every single edit. What is the suggested workaround, besides going back into the old article and restoring it at the end of the editing session? -AngusWOOF (talk) 16:09, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

It's not the same it.wp is experiencing. (We had two main issues, turns up the one that was solved was the infobox not allowing VE to load at all). Hopefully the deleted infobox bug will get some love as soon as devs come back from Wikimania. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:58, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

I'm seeing a lot of infobox removals with VE these days. Just one recent example [37] - an editor removed the infobox while editing a section that does not contain that infobox). Materialscientist (talk) 22:03, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

Every time I make an edit anywhere on that page in VE the infobox gets deleted (I don't save, for obvious reasons). I notice that the infobox there is produced from four templates, which makes me wonder whether what we're seeing is actually T51839 caused by Parsoid seeing 4 incomplete tables rather than one complete one? I've added comments to this effect to T53043 and marked it as critical. Thryduulf (talk) 23:12, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

Sorry folks about this. This is T54488 which has been fixed but not deployed yet. Till this is deployed (after wikimania, in a day or so), on pages where this is a problem, VE can be disabled on those pages by adding Template:Disable_VE_top and Template:Disable_VE_bottom to those pages. If it is possible to deploy this earlier, I'll update that info here. Ssastry (talk) 02:08, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

Locked buttons (Cancel, Save) after wikitext warning

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54669

Maybe related to the above wikitext problem, but i don't want to mix issues. The "Cancel" and "Save" button are not properly handled after the wikitext warning message is displayed. Error can be reproduced.

1. Check the green button, after entering edit mode. The whole area of the button is clickable - OK.
2. Let the wikitext message pop up with some wikitext addition. Now the buttons are "locked", you can hover over the visible parts of them, but they are not clickable - OK.
3. Remove the warning message with a click, no need to change anything else.
4. Hover over the "save" button with your mouse again and check, where it's clickable. Its upper third and the right corner are still "locked" ("Cancel" is also only partially clickable) - not OK, buttons should be fully released.
5. Those partial locks are only released, after you clear your browser cache (stopping VE is not enough) - not OK.

Sorry for the lengthy desciption, but it's a bit difficult to explain that :). Using Windows XP, FF 22, vector.js and a 1280 x 1024 resolution for test. GermanJoe (talk) 12:29, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

PS: The error depends on monitor resolution. Switched to 800 x 600 to test, and the buttons are OK. GermanJoe (talk) 12:35, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

I was able to reproduce this. When I hover over the upper part of each button, the cursor does not change. I'd add that this behavior changes if you zoom in or out (that is, if the buttons get bigger or smaller). Is this something which might be added to the bug above? Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:37, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

They are atleast closely related imo (not necessarily the same). I would add it to the existing one. GermanJoe (talk) 12:44, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Added to T54669. I don't see a change of behaviour after zooming but I do see everything else. FF23/Linux/Monobook. Thryduulf (talk) 13:38, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

Get it off my computer

I don't want this program on my computer. How do I get rid of it? I have tried but it won't go. 74.109.13.108 (talk) 20:03, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Opt-out, there are ways to disable it for IP editors.--Salix (talk): 20:43, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

You'll find out it is not a software, nothing was installed. If you can provide details so that we can understand why it won't work for you and look for solutions, we'd be glad to hear them. Thanks :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:57, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

When editing html comments should be visible

The following discussion is marked as answered. If you have a new comment, place it just below the box.

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T51603

Html comments are an easy way for information to be left for future editors, and anyway they should be shown for backward compatibility. Mark Hurd (talk) 19:13, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

• Indeed. Ignatzmice•talk 19:24, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

Editing existing bulleted lists

The following discussion is marked as answered. If you have a new comment, place it just below the box.

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Status	New:
Description	shifting entries in a bulleted list leads to a whole variety of issues. Removing the last item leaves the last bullet. Adding an item at the beginning generated unbelievable wierdness: double bullet at the beginning of that line, added random header text, etc. The up cursor is also frozen. The only solution was to abort the session and edit in source.
To duplicate:	In Education in the United States#Electives, cut the final bullet line and insert it before the first bullet. If the line cut includes the end-of-line, weirdness results. Since it is invisible to the user whether the selected text does or does not include the end-of-line, this is going to be a problem. (I think the problem has to do with the list directly preceding the header of the next section, and something of the header formatting and even text being included, even though not visibly selected.)
Operating system	Windows 8
Web browser	Mozilla v22
Site
Workaround	source editor
Skin	Vector
Resolution	source editor
Bugzilla

hgilbert (talk) 06:04, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

• I can't reproduce anything of that (Firefox 22/Linux) other than the double bullet. This is because that is how ** is rendered when there is no * on the preceding line. Thryduulf (talk) 09:36, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

I can't reproduce this reliably either, however I have had similar problems with cut and paste losing formatting, and it depends very precisely on the selection region. You might need to specify down to the individual key stroke how to reproduce it. There are a lot of copy and paste bugs T35105 is a tracking bug for some of them and robust behaviour for this is very important.

I have managed to do a cut and paste in this section which does lose all the formatting, but I'm having problems getting it to be reproducible.--Salix (talk): 10:33, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

To reproduce the error reliably:

1. edit any bullet list immediately preceding a section header with the visual editor.
2. Bring the cursor to the beginning of the last bullet.
3. Holding down the CTRL-key, press the down-cursor key, thereby selecting the entire line plus some part of the following header.
4. Still holding down the CTRL-key, press the left-cursor key just until the header letters no longer appear as selected.
5. Cut the selected text and paste it in front of an earlier bullet point (or, probably, anywhere else in the article). Weird results ensue.
6. Incidentally, as soon as the text is cut, the up-cursor button is disabled.

I believe that the following line's header formatting codes are actually selected but the user cannot see this. Microsoft Word has similar buggy behavior. hgilbert (talk) 11:46, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes I can reproduce that. Pasting removes all formatting. I've added this to T35105.--Salix (talk): 20:06, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

I was unable to reproduce this in Safari 6/Mac OS 10.7.5. It may be browser- or OS-specific. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:51, 12 August 2013 (UTC)