Help talk:Editing

Trying to add 2 "reclassified" numbers on a page?

I've been adding to USN ship pages the past few days and in the info boxes I need to add of the same descriptions. It looks like this "|Ship reclassified=". Well the shp in question had been reclassified twice in her life and i've tried adding the last one inbetween the recom and decom dates but it won't show up??? Any clues? This is the coding I have right now:

|Ship commissioned=30 June 1943 |Ship recommissioned= |Ship decommissioned=29 October 1946 |Ship reclassified=CAG-14 January 1952 }} {{Infobox ship career |Hide header=yes |Ship recommissioned=1 November 1955

Ship reclassified=CA-69 May 1968

|Ship decommissioned=5 May 1970

Editing Wars

Why do editors like to war over certain sections of articles and wording? Michuk (talk) 10:21, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

@Michuk When two people disagree on the best way to present information they may continually change a page back to show their preferred versions. This constant changing would be very disruptive, and is termed WP:EDITWARRING. They could both be blocked for behaving like this. Nick Moyes (talk) 09:23, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

Editing tool use

I pulled some stats about which tools people use for editing. Here are the numbers from last month (December 2021). These are only edits from the English Wikipedia, made by non-bot accounts, in all namespaces.

This is based on Special:Tags, so tools/edits that don't add a tag aren't counted. I know that this includes some people's personal AWB copies and wikEd, but I'm not sure what else might be missing. If your favorite tool isn't in this list, it's probably because it's not tagging the edits correctly. Look at phab:T188433 and related tasks to see what needs to be done.

Number of edits by editing tool, December 2021

Tool used	Number of edits	Relative
WikiEditor (2010 wikitext editor)	237,695	1,000
Mobile web	123,990	522
VisualEditor	117,440	494
Twinkle	62,674	264
VisualEditor's wikitext mode (2017 wikitext editor)	31,178	131
Mobile app	21,572	91
DiscussionTools (e.g., Reply tool)	11,244	47
AWB (may be an undercount)	7,210	30
RedWarn	6,747	28
Huggle	2,139	9
ProveIt	1,410	6
PageTriage (Page curation)	1,213	5
editProtectedHelper	721	3
WikiLove	423	2
ContentTranslation	402	2
WPCleaner	358	2
MassMessage	194	1
2003 wikitext editor (no revision tags)	?	?
WikEd (no revision tags)	?	?

I pulled the numbers from this table in Superset (a modification of this query), and realistically, I don't expect to be able to re-generate it. I expect DiscussionTools to be used considerably more in the coming months, as it is ready to deploy default-on here. If you want to have these numbers for another wiki, annual updates for this wiki, etc., then you probably need to make a request from the Data Engineering team via their public mailing list, analytics@lists.wikimedia.org (subscribe, archives).

@Redrose64, can you think of any sensible place to post this (or parts of it), if you think that would be useful? It's not exactly Wikipedia:Wikipedians material, and I don't think it really needs to be on any help page. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:09, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

@Xaosflux, we talked about this at Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive 66#Popularity of editing methods. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:26, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Wonder if this could become a monthly Wikipedia:Database reports? — xaosflux ^Talk 19:49, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

@Xaosflux, it probably could be (it's all public information), but then someone would have to set up and maintain the report, which I understand has been a challenge in the past.

One difficulty: It's very tempting to add up all the numbers, and declare that n% of non-bot edits are made with this or that. This approach should be pretty sound for determining that there are approximately two edits in the 2010WTE for every one edit made in the visual editor, but it is not useful for determining that 35% of all non-bot edits are made in the 2010WTE. Not all tools tag their edits, and Undo doesn't give you a choice of editing environments, so we don't know what the denominator should be. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:17, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Not really. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:26, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Shift key behaving oddly (moving cursor to the left)

Whenever I'm editing a page, for reasons that I have been unable to discern or discover via web searches for others who have my problem, if I press either 'shift' key, the (typing) cursor will suddenly start rocketing to the right, seemingly one word at a time (for Vim or vi users, imagine rapidly pressing 'b' over and over again) when I'm in the visual editor, and will just appear at the start of the line ('0', for vi users) when in the source editor. This issue also appears to be operating system agnostic. This behavior is VERY infuriating, and I've only figured out one way to get around it, but it's finecky at best. In the source editor, if I move the mouse cursor onto a word on the line that I'm currently editing (note that this entire 'message' thing is one line), then for some reason, whatever string of characters that my mouse cursor is currently hovering over top of will appear in a box bellow and to the left of the mouse cursor. As long as that box is showing, the 'shift' key will function normally. The problem, of course, is that now, 2.5 lines of text are being covered by a useless box, and this thing 'resets' every time I move the cursor (which causes the box to disappear). How do I fix this??? LiftedStarfish (talk) 12:20, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

@LiftedStarfish: this is not a help desk, it is the talk page for discussing improvements to the page Help:Editing. You might be better off asking at WP:RD/C. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:51, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Why did the source editor become so horrible?

It's still a measly text field, with no syntax highlights or any extra features. Yet when I paste long wikimedia source text it takes an obscene amount of time to do so. As well as Firefox interrupting the process with a "script is slowing down the browser" message (paraphasing). It ridiculous. It's plaintext, that's not processed in any shape or form, yet I need minutes to paste a large table for example. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dqeswn (talk • contribs) 18:03, 16 April 2022 (UTC)

@Dqeswn: this is the talk page for discussing improvements to the page Help:Editing. You would be better off asking at WP:VPT; but I suspect that it is something to do with m:Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Warn when linking to disambiguation pages. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:23, 16 April 2022 (UTC)

Potentially. But I didn't see any, only a lot of links to internal pages and a lot of references.

And wouldn't it be simpler to show such warnings, when you try to save and it offers you to preview and add a comment (etc)?

(It was this text actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dqeswn/sandbox?veaction=editsource&section=1#Deaths ) Dqeswn (talk) 18:36, 17 April 2022 (UTC)

This article no longer valid, editing cheatsheet is no longer

I now only come to Wikipedia occasionally to make a comment on talk pages, as I've become thoroughly discontent with what wikipedia has become. But even this has been made difficult. The only editing cues I now have access to on Firefox are B,I,A,link,@. There's not even a signature shortcut anymore. When I visit the French wikipedia, there's a super long useful cheatsheet. What is happening? I had to google search how to add a signature to this comment. :( ~~~~ Tallard (talk) 01:25, 27 August 2022 (UTC)