Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive 2013 8

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Reference error

I'm continuing to have problems with rendering references. I attempted to include five citations to an article I'm developing on my user page, involving four references and one split citation. For some reason, only the first reference rendered, the second, which I attempted to split, ended up with some rendering error, and the third and fourth never appeared at all. I have no idea what happened, but here is a link to that version of the page, and these are the references I attempted to cite: http://reachrecords.com/about, http://reachrecords.com/artists/show/Lecrae, http://www.allmusic.com/artist/sho-baraka-mn0001000605, http://allhiphop.com/2012/04/08/five-christian-hip-hop-acts-you-should-know/.--¿3family6 _contribs 00:19, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

@3family6:Hello, do you still need help? I've seen that you added many references since your comment TeamGale (talk) 09:20, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

@TeamGale:I added them by editing the source code directly. I think the trouble I had with the references was splitting the second one (the Reach Lecrae biography link).--¿3family6 _contribs 16:33, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

@3family6:Oh! I see! The splitting is not difficult to do it if that was the problem. After you add the reference the first time, it's added on the list. So when you click to add a reference the next time, if you want to re-use a previous one you are just choosing it from the list and click "insert reference". You are not clicking on the "create new source" button. If the list is long and you can't find it easy, you are typing on the "use an existing source" box key words from the previous reference and it filters them for you. :) TeamGale (talk) 17:07, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

@TeamGale:That's what I tried. For some reason, it added <ref name="0" /> to both the first and second instances of the source, instead of just the second. I wanted to open a bug report for this, but I don't know how to do that.--¿3family6 _contribs 17:18, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

@3family6:Hmm...that's weird. The last time I tried it it was working fine for me! :/ I'll try to test it on my sandbox. I don't know how to open bug report neither. When one of the WMF's members is back probably can do it. I know there are reports about the "nowikis" thing but I don't know if that is the same. I'll try that on my sandbox to see if it happens to me too now. TeamGale (talk) 17:27, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

@3family6:Just did it here. It's working fine. I don't know what happened when you were doing it :/ Did you save the difference? TeamGale (talk) 17:33, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

@TeamGale:Yes, I saved the difference. That's what I have linked above.--¿3family6 _contribs 21:38, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

@3family6:, I have no clue what the issue is, but I do know how to open a bug report. :) Are you able to replicate the problem so that it happens again? Can I ask what browser and operating system you are using? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 17:08, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

@Mdennis (WMF): I'm sorry, I don't know how to replicate what happened. I'm using Firefox on Windows 8.--¿3family6 _contribs 17:20, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, @3family6:. I can simply copy your initial report here to Bugzilla, unless you think by some miracle it was a one-off? (There's a term for that - somebody used it here a few days ago - but I can't remember what it is. :/) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 17:56, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

@Mdennis (WMF): It happened again, here. I attempted to split this reference: [1].--¿3family6 _contribs 12:34, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

@Okeyes (WMF): (or anybody else), do you have any insight into what's happening there? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 16:38, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

None; I'll poke the James. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:58, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

@Okeyes (WMF): @Mdennis (WMF): If I understood, what 3family6 is trying to do is to reuse a reference. When she is trying to do it, then VE is replacing the "original" reference with the <ref name="test" /> too instead only the second reference and that destroys the source completely. I tried to do it on my sandbox, but it was not happening to me. If I am wrong, please @3family6: feel free to correct me TeamGale (talk) 19:45, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

@TeamGale: That's exactly it.--¿3family6 _contribs 21:14, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Different but somewhat related error: I'm finding when I split a reference (if it works), the citation appears not on the line where I want it, but at the beginning of that paragraph. Here's an example, fifth paragraph in the History section. This bug occurs much more consistently (like pretty much every time) than my above problem.--¿3family6 _contribs 01:41, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

@3family6: odd! What browser/operating system are you on? @Mdennis (WMF): where is this in bugzilla? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 10:49, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

@Okeyes (WMF): I'm running Firefox 22.0 on Windows 8.--¿3family6 _contribs 13:23, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

That's very strange :(. Can you try to duplicate the problem? (also, can you give us diffs, rather than old revisions? It makes debugging easier :)). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 13:34, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

@Okeyes (WMF): Here we go: Original version, and diff. The citation at the beginning of the paragraph should be at the very end.--¿3family6 _contribs 19:15, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

That's very strange; I inserted citations and it worked fine. Silly question, but: you are remembering to click where you want the citation to go? Sorry to sound like a dunce :/. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:28, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes. At first I thought the same thing, but the last two instances of this glitch (the latest being the test edit), I'm positive that I clicked the correct place. It only happens when I split a ref.--¿3family6 _contribs 23:11, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

That is, reuse an existing reference? Hmn. I've tried that too; no dice :/. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 13:08, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, it did the same for me. Now I'm really confused.--¿3family6 _contribs 13:22, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Infobox post-modification rendering issue

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52801

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53236

It seems that the issue with bug 49854 has resurfaced. Whenever I edit any parameter in an infobox (doesn't matter on which page), some (but not all) piped links and files are displayed as plain wikitext like "[[Capital city|capital]]" instead of "capital". If the infobox contains references, a cite error in red about a missing reflist also appears near the top of the page (as previously discussed at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive_2013_07#Table.2FTemplate and possibly related to bug 50423, but not entirely the same). Is this a known issue or have I missed it? thayts t 16:33, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

The reflist missing bug is supposed to be fixed within the next few minutes. Cross your fingers. :) I can't reproduce the issue with the infobox - are you still having the problem, @Thayts:? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 23:48, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Aww!! I just tried it after seeing your comment Maggie Dennis (WMF) It's working!!! The bug about the references is gone! :) Cross fingers it will be gone for good! Thanks to the people who fixed that! As for the other half "issue"...it's still there...When you make changes on the templates, the piped links appear as a whole and not as they will appear on the final save. TeamGale (talk) 00:50, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Oh, I see. It's a question of displaying incorrectly before save. Thanks. :) I've added it to that bug (and reopened it), and I'm sure they'll help me if I've put it in the wrong place. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 15:05, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

@Mdennis (WMF): Yes, sorry I wasn't too clear about that, it doesn't affect the save indeed and is only a displaying issue. I found the pipe link bug still to be present though, but it's been only one and a half hour after associated bug 50801 was declared fixed and it probably needs some time to back-port. It also seems that the reference bug is not really fixed, but that the error message is simply being suppressed: if you hover over the infobox after editing it or if you click it, an empty bar as wide as the article body will be highlighted at the top of the infobox. Previously, this bar contained the error message. I'm using Firefox 22.0, perhaps you can reproduce it with that. thayts t 17:41, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Aha, I can see that. Throwing in bugzilla now :). Great catch! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 13:16, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you! And just to confirm, the piped links bug seems to have been fixed indeed. thayts t 14:16, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

unusable

The new editor is basically useless. I have been waiting for 10 minutes for it to accept an insertion point. Patrickwooldridge (talk) 04:11, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Most editors have just disabled it. I wouldn't even bother using it. Kumioko (talk) 04:15, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Kumioko, can you please provide a citation for your statement that most editors have disabled it? My data says otherwise, quite strongly.

@Patrickwooldridge: what do you mean by "insertion point"? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 04:22, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Disabled or not, Okeyes, I'm still only seeing about 10% of edits by logged on accounts using it in my watchlist, so uptake isn't particularly high. I turned it back on just so that I could test some of the bug reports. What percentage of editors that have edited since it was turned are using it?—Kww(talk) 04:28, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

This I don't know. I'm actually building dashboards tomorrow to display the proportion of mainspace edits using the VE (I was hoping to work on it tonight, but it's dependent on me getting R's package constructor and git to play ball with each other). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 04:32, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Well first the fact that it has been disabled by several hundred editors (about 700 I think I saw somewhere but at least 500). Most of which are among the most active editors. Second, I have seen multiple statistics that show its usage between 8 and 10% of edits. About half by people testing it and then a large percentage of those show up to complain about it. Yes people are using it to various degrees. But spend a few minutes and do some analysis of those edits to complaints here and in other venues and you'll see the vast majority of the edits are time wasted that could have been better spent building an encyclopedia instead of testing an app that didn't get properly tested before it was released. I know you don't care to hear anything other than how wonderful the tool is, but that just isn't the case. As I said before, I'm keeping my editing to a minimum until this thing gets worked out. I'm not going to invest my time in something that breaks 90% of everything it touches. Kumioko (talk) 04:31, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Where did you see about 700? And where did you see these statistics? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 04:32, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

There all over the place, try looking over at the Village pump (technical) for starters. But just do the math. pull in the transactions for the day and then subtract out the ones tagged for visual editor (of course factoring out the non applicable namespaces). And you have access better access to the data than I do. Depending on how you cook the numbers its as low as 4% and as high as 10%. In any case, just look at the edits being done, then associate the discussions here to the edits. You'll see a lot of correlation and a lot of the same people using VE. Many of which are WMF staffers. How many people do you have on your list that disabled it? I'm guessing its well over 500. It may even be over 1000 by now. Kumioko (talk) 04:41, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

This thread covers some of this. I don't know where the 500 (or 700) disabled is coming from. Dragons flight (talk) 04:40, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Huh! I'll work on the dashboards anyhoo, just so we have consistent (and consistently updated) data, and fling a link out when I'm done. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 04:43, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

If you are dashboarding, you should monitor what percentage of Visual Editor edits are tripping filter 550. That would be an indicator of how many people are struggling with it.—Kww(talk) 05:45, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Yep; thought of that :). (anyone know where the 700 figure is coming from, still? ) Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 06:13, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

@Okeyes (WMF): Wikipedia:Database reports/User preferences#Gadgets, entry "oldeditor", suggests that 607 users enabled the relevant gadget as of 4 July. Probably much higher now. — This, that and the other (talk) 07:03, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure how that report is compiled; is it "count of the number of entries" or "count of the number of entries where the value is 1"? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:57, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

The latter. Dragons flight (talk) 17:01, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

The next scheduled update of that table should be around 23:00, 11 July UTC. Dragons flight (talk) 17:06, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Updated as scheduled: 1018 now. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 09:00, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't see the number of editors who have disabled VE as meaning much of anything, other than that editors familiar with wikitext editing can do most things much or quickly in the old editor than in VE, and, more importantly, can do everything in the old editor, while VE has limits (can't edit tables, other than contents; can't edit blockquoted material, etc.), and also is still producing quasi-random errors.

VE is a beta. It shouldn't matter, now, whether 2% or 20% of edits are done with VE - what should matter is whether the VE team is getting the feedback it needs to see where the bugs are, and how serious those bugs are. Eventually VE will be able to do everything that the wikitext editor can, and there will be minimal bugs; at that point - and only at that point - should we be concerned if VE isn't attractive to experienced editors.

In short, I think anyone at WMF who looks at "percent of edits using VE" as a measure of success is making a mistake. And I think anyone in the Wikipedia community who looks at "percent of edits using VE" as a measure of failure is also making a mistake. The goal as this point - the measure of success - should be to get to a stable, relatively bug-free, fully-featured WYSIWYG editing interface. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:20, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

I generally agree that VE is not for the advanced editors or those who have been here for a while and know how to edit. I personally think VE is a great idea and will be agood tool. My problem is and has aleays been how the WMF did a half assed job of testing it and then threw it out for the every editor to use knowing it had multiple major problems, had virtually no support for references and only supported 2 namespaces. When they released a product that they knew caused unexplainable changes to articles and encouraged editors to not use references, that was a problem. As it is I have been tracking about 15 articles that have problems due to changes done by VE because I want to see if the WMF is really looking at the edits. I can confirm they are not. Kumioko (talk) 17:46, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

We didn't "know" that it would encourage users to use references, and it doesn't encourage users not to use references. And we have never planned to support more than article-editing for the VE proper. We are tracking bugs, but unsurprisingly we don't have the resources to review every VE edit - we're prioritising reviewing this talkpage for issues. If you've identified bugs, bring them to my attention and I'm happy to triage them. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:49, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

I think that's part of what irritates most experienced users who are complaining here: the VE team decided to widely roll out a version of VE knowing it was full of bugs, including some that were damaging articles, but don't even bother to deal with the damages that were done (and are still being done) on encyclopedic articles, rather relying on the good will of the same users that asked several times to postpone this roll out until VE was stable. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 18:26, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Precisely, I was all too happy to help test and identify problems but when the WMF decided that mass problems and broken articles were no big deal because the community would fix them, then they lost my support. I am here to volunteer to help to build an encyclopedia but if the WMF only cares about releasing software on time to make themselves look good and pat each other on the back about the grand job they did, when the community is cleaning up the mess, they can count me out and in fact I probably won't be editing for the next couple weeks at least. Maybe I'll check back in August and see if the mess is fixed. Kumioko (talk) 18:43, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

NicoV has it right, and that's the reason that I think VE needs to be put back on a true trial basis: opt-in only, and certainly not rolled out on a widespread basis or made the default for new editors. Putting a broken tool in the hands of our least experienced contributors on the expectation that the rest of us will cheerfully monitor the problems it causes and correct them for you is irresponsible.—Kww(talk) 19:31, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

"... we don't have the resources to review every VE edit ... - So why in world is VE going to being enabled as the default edit interface for IP editors, on the 15th!!?? That's going to generate lots more VE edits, and - apparently - the resulting increase in errors is going to be the problem of the Wikipedia community, not the VE team. Mind you, these won't be newly-identified types of errors, they'll be already-discovered errors, because IP editors don't come close to doing the varied things that experienced editors do. So there is absolutely no testing or feedback value from this expansion. Yet the VE team continues - with no clear justification other than meeting a looming deadline - to plan this expansion. This is just bizarre. Is someone afraid of losing their job - or their annual bonus - if the team does the right thing and just focuses on the problems that registered editors continue to bring to it, plus the huge list of already identified problems, deferring the IP rollout until VE is in much better shape? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:42, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Could someone from WMF please answer this in their official capacity? There's been a number of messages along these lines in various places, from experienced editors, and ignoring or evading them as you have does you no credit - David Gerard (talk) 22:52, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

We're not ignoring or evading them, David, we've got two staffers working EST and BST respectively, and it's midnight. John, to answer your question in reverse; to my knowledge staffers don't get annual bonuses. I appreciate things are a bit het up, but I'd appreciate if we could keep our concerns in good faith. I say our concerns because, yes, the impact that IP editing will have is something I'm worried about too. We've got quite a few dirty diff bugs, which we need to get fixed, and which I've surfaced as "things we need fixed, pronto". We've got smaller problems technically but bigger problems in practise, like the lack of a notification if a user uses wikimarkup - this, also, I hope will be addressed. But actually there is a lot of value from deploying to IPs: IPs might do less-varied things than experienced editors in wikimarkup mode, but we don't know that the same is true for the VisualEditor. When we release to registered editors, we largely get "the bugs people discover when they're familiar with wikimarkup". Quite a few newly registered users, I have no doubt, haven't experienced wikimarkup editing, but quite a few have, and all experienced users have. A logged-in deployment only gets us those bugs that occur when someone applies their experience to a new interface. What we haven't discovered - and what we desperately need to - is what happens if you apply a group of people who generally-speaking don't have an existing frame to compare the VE to. It's vital that we find this out, because the entire point of the VisualEditor is to make things easier for novices to markup. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 22:59, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

You've already found more bugs than you can fix in the near future. Recall the deployment, fix it, and then redeploy once it's fixed. Don't go searching for another new pile of bugs when you haven't fixed the first pile yet.—Kww(talk) 23:31, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

"What we haven't discovered - and what we desperately need to - is what happens if you apply a group of people who generally-speaking don't have an existing frame to compare the VE to." With all due respect, what you desperately need to do is to fix all the important, known bugs in VE.

"... the entire point of the VisualEditor is to make things easier for novices to markup." Okay, but you're contaminating the test by giving them a version of VE that (a) has significant bugs; (b) lacks documentation; and (c) can't do everything they might want to (copy a citation from one article to another, to name just one thing). There is absolutely no way that you can draw anything resembling defensible inferences if you provide IP editors with VE as it is now. In a month or two, quite possibly. In three to six months, when you've worked with more experienced editors to improve both functionality and the user interface, most definitely.

"A logged-in deployment only gets us those bugs that occur when someone applies their experience to a new interface." Really? Logged-in editors include those with essentially no editing experience (say, less than 25 edits) as well as those with more than 25,000. Moreover, IP editors just want their edits to survive. IP editors don't use complicated templates. IP editors don't do piped links. IP editors don't use "group" types in references. IP editors don't think about creating new tables. In short, experienced editors do everything that IP editors do, and more. And experienced editors understand what should happen; IP editors lacking wikitext editing experience don't have a clue as to whether what happens to them in VE is "normal" (and they just screwed up) or is a software bug. IP editors also lack the incentive to spend much time reporting errors - they don't have a commitment to Wikipedia, unlike experienced editors.

So here's a question for the VE team: If you turn on VE editing for IP editors, and you get essential no reports of new (undiscovered) bugs in, say, the first 48 hours, does than mean you'll turn off the expansion, since it won't have helped with identifying problems? Or will you just leave it on, forcing the Wikipedia community to clean up the additional messes that IP editors create every day as they use a bug-infested beta version of VE? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:23, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Refining David Gerard - Q: Could someone high up like User:Jdforrester, the VE lead, answer the community's questions?--Salix (talk): 01:17, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

@Jdforrester:, same request. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 07:09, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

@John Broughton: (and everyone else),

Sorry if we have been unclear to date; the purpose of encouraging people to use VisualEditor is not primarily to find bugs - it is to make it easier for them to edit.

We are not rolling this code out as some scientific test of what happens when people use it, though data that we collect is valuable (and you can see some of that charted on the public dashboards). There is no concept of "contaminating" the test results here - this is far more important than some metricated experiment, this is about providing actually-useful editing tools for everyone.

Obviously there is tremendous value in experienced editors giving us feedback as to where we have fallen short of our aim to be the easiest, most obvious and natural way to edit. We know that we have not yet met this in many areas, and without the community's assistance, we could never hope to achieve that goal; it would be ludicrous for me to pretend otherwise. But we also know that VisualEditor provides a profoundly-better editing experience for new users in terms of their ability to understand how to edit, and I think it would be inappropriate of me to discount the many thousands of new users who struggle each week and turn away from our community for good because of the difficulties which Wikipedia's editing system provide (though note that the wikitext barrier is not the only one; VisualEditor is not, and never has been, a 'silver bullet').

As we have said a few times now, we will of course turn off VisualEditor, or delay its wider availability, if we are concerned that it is endangering the site - by technological demands, by wide-spread content corruption, or by placing a burden upon the community that it is unable to handle. As you know, I delayed the A/B test, and postponed the release to anonymous uses based on the second item. However, I do not think we are currently encountering significant issues on any of these three criteria. I would be keen to hear of evidence to the contrary - nothing is set in stone.

Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:35, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

I would say that every hit of Filter 550 is evidence to the contrary, Jdforrester.—Kww(talk) 18:48, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

@Kww: I disagree. I see a lot of users mistakenly using wikitext in an inappropriate context, and VisualEditor/Parsoid rescuing those users from themselves to avoid breaking their edits. I don't see any corruptions at all any more - we squashed a number of them over the past two weeks. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:56, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

"Rescuing those users"? Are you serious? Visual Editor is failing to notice that they have inserted markup, and, instead of following the markup, is corrupting the article by inserting spurious nowikis. Every article that filter trips on needs to be fixed, so no "rescue" is occuring, Jdforrester.—Kww(talk) 19:02, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Jdforrester, are you serious ???? I thought the principle of Visual Editor was that inexperienced users could contribute easily without damaging articles unintentionnaly. Filter 550 is just an example of Visual Editor clearly failing in that area, frequently and on many articles. If you just looked at the filter results, you would see that many users triggering this filter have no user page, so a good chance they are inexperienced users. And filter 550 is only a portion of the damages currently done by VE on articles. Many editors here are tired are saying the same thing over and over... --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 19:23, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

While I remember, I will simply note the irony of the reason behind Filter 550 not blocking the faulty edit being that Visual Editor can't display errors generated by the abuse filter.—Kww(talk) 21:06, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

This is actually a fault of AbuseFilter not integrating with MediaWiki in the usual way. It's not really VE's fault at all. — This, that and the other (talk) 01:09, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

@Jdforrester: VisualEditor is triggering filter 550 every minute or two, per Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#What_shall_we_do_about_all_VE.27s_.22nowiki.22_tags.3F. This is due to usability failure in the VE, not the users being foolish or whatever. You may not consider it a problem, but I think it's clear that's actually a wrong opinion and the VE is causing damage to articles that wouldn't be happening without it - David Gerard (talk) 21:04, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't think James meant to imply that the nowiking wasn't a problem - more that not nowikiing would cause bigger snarl-ups at the VisualEditor end. The unintentional damage it's allowing users to cause is certainly an issue, and it's assigned and noted here that we need to have a better way of fixing it (and assigned with a high-priority, I'd note). Hopefully it will be resolved soon. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 13:27, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Text at very bottom of the page

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

This revision[2] contains some junk text "QuickiWiki Look Up QuickiWiki Look Up QuickiWiki Look Up" at the very bottom of the page after the authority control, person data and categories. When you try and edit with VE you cannot actually see the junk text. I've play about in my sandbox and the actual conditions for the text not to appear seem to be quite sensitive, at one point new line character appeared. The text remains after VE finishes the edit.--Salix (talk): 09:06, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Caused by a broken Firefox extension. Abusefilter 345 tries to detect it, but it won't block people from saving. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:46, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) VE displays the text for me in Firefox 22.0. The addition of the text is not related to VE. It's caused by the QuickiWiki option in the Firefox extension WikiTweak. See Wikipedia:Edit filter/Requested#Adding QuickiWiki. Are you sure VE is editing the version with the text when you don't see the text? If you click "Edit" on a diff or in an edit source window of an old revision then VE edits the current page version and not the one you are viewing. By the way, is there a bug for the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs not editing the same version in such cases? PrimeHunter (talk) 09:49, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Checking again now and the text is visable. Maybe they rolled out a bug fix.--Salix (talk): 12:01, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Hopefully the extension will be fixed soon. I wish there was something we could do to compensate for it, but.. :/. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 13:29, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Infobox problem?

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

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53161

Hi - sorry if this is an FAQ or anything but is it normal behaviour in this VE-tagged edit that, afterwards, the infobox worked fine but its layout, if you wanted to see it in the source, was trashed (line feeds stripped, I think?) so you couldn't really read it, and you certainly couldn't compare it with the previous? As I say, apologies if it is covered elsewhere and please feel free to point me in the right direction if so. Cheers DBaK (talk) 21:40, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

@DisillusionedBitterAndKnackered: it's not; looks like bugzilla:51161 :(. Sorry about this. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 10:41, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you! Best wishes DBaK (talk) 07:58, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Problems editing templates

I have just edited my first template: {{cite web}} in a reference. I was able to edit the template successfully but have the following comments:

The dialog is not resizable and the parameter descriptions do not wrap, so I could not read the whole description
There is a long bold parameter heading (such as Translated title) but no indication of the parameter name trans_title in this case). Thus I cannot use the filter to select a parameter unless I already know what its name is, which rather defeats the object of a GUI
I miss a link for each parameter which will enable me to open its value dialog directly: that would be a significant improvement to the user interface
I notice that the template definition is replaced by a canonical form irrespective of the previous formatting of the source. That is I think inevitable, and I realise we are never all going to agree about the "right" source format if any, but I see real disadvantages with the current choice: ...value2|name3 = value3|name4 = ...:
- a parameter value is tightly visually bound to the next parameter name and follows it if the line is wrapped (this might be browser-dependent: I am using Firefox 20.0 on Linux)
- spaces either side of the equals sign mean it appears unpredictably at the beginning or end of a line when being wrapped
- without implying that this is "right", I think a canonical format of ...value2 |name3=value3 |name4=... with spaces before each delimiting solidus and not around the equals would avoid these problems.

--Mirokado (talk) 22:38, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

So, in order:

Is the wrapping problem still appearing? We pushed some patches last night that hopefully resolved it.

Well, you can scroll; the point of the long bold parameter heading is that it's human-readable. You can filter by either the parameter name or the human-readable title. The greater problem here, I think, is bugzilla:50773.
What do you mean by "open its value dialog directly"? Surely that's doable from the left toolbar in the template inspector.
I would argue that actually the form should be ...value2 | name3 = value3 | name4 = ... if we're going to change it at all. So, to go mea culpa for a minute; I explicitly requested that normalisation should normalise with, rather than without, spaces. This is because ultimately normalisation is for the sake of markup-editors; name3=value3 is somewhat hard to read for long templates with lots of values. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 10:40, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

There's going to be a serious conflict here between source editing and visual editing. When source-editing a long complex template such as an infobox, it becomes very difficult unless each parameter is placed on a separate line. But if that is done for every template, it becomes very awkward to work with templates that are inserted in text. One possibility might be to normalize "freestanding" templates (that is, templates that appear as the only element of a line) differently from "inline" templates. (Incidentally, the setup I usually use is ...value1 |name2=value2 |name3=value3 |name4=....) Looie496 (talk) 13:59, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Not really; the situation I'm talking about is, say, efn or sfn, where putting it on one line is commonplace. The one-lining of big infoboxes is a bug, rather than a feature :/. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:01, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the responses. I have looked again, using shift-refresh in Firefox to get, I hope, the latest version. Please see File:VisualEditor template dialog 20130712-0245.png.

Wrapping, scrolling: The description of each unused parameter is still truncated. There is no horizontal scrolling.
Item names: I can though now see light grey buttons to the right of the entry for each unused parameter. They show the parameter name. Light grey is bad for accessibility, see below about active/inactive.
Filter: If I type "author" the list contains every entry with "author" in the long name, description or parameter name button, seems correct behaviour.
- If I type "author name" I get an entry saying "unknown parameter". A bug.
- If I now hit enter, the value box opens for this unknown parameter: presumably another bug.
- There is no cancel function which will take me from the value dialog to the parameter list dialog. I can only close the whole template editor dialog with the "X" or "Apply changes" buttons. Missing functionality.
- Opening the template dialog again, I now type "authorlink" into the filter. Three related items are displayed, "last name", "first name" and "author link": I can see why, but "author" is in this case already defined... However the highlighted entry is "last name" and even if I hit enter with the focus in the text entry box I am taken to the wrong parameter in the value dialog. Another bug.
"Open its value directly": These parameter name buttons are light grey which normally means inactive. I would expect them to be active and cause the value dialog to open. At present nothing I do activates them. Yes I can open the value dialog for an already-present parameter from the left-hand pane by clicking on it but the right-hand pane is not implemented in the same way. Inconsistent functionality.
- If I click on one of the items, such as authorlink in the linked image, it is highlighted in blue as shown, but nothing further happens even if I click again or double click. I discovered today that if I click on an unused item and then hit enter, the value dialog opens. Thus there is a way to use the dialog but it is not obvious to someone who normally uses the mouse with a GUI. Missing functionality.

I can upload more screenshots if anything above is not sufficiently clear... --Mirokado (talk) 01:50, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

That's really helpful :). So is "author name" a recognised alias for a parameter, then? We have to have the 'unknown parameter' option until all of the templates have TemplateData, really; it's unfortunate, but necessary behaviour :(. I agree the interface, as it is, is pretty counterintuitive; there is a "remove parameter" button, that does it, or you can go back to the 'parameters' list by clicking on the cite web icon - but really you shouldn't have to. It shouldn't send you off to a parameter until you've included all of those you want to. Great minds think alike on double-clicking; bug 51143 :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 13:44, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

unknown parameter: author link is not a valid parameter in {{cite web}}, it gives a nice red error message: Unknown parameter |author link= ignored.

as long as direct human source input is possible, it will be necessary to handle templates without the necessary json definitions (or with incomplete definitions). Thus the handling of such parameters is not a short-term issue. The real problem here is:

Filtering on the full parameter title (as displayed in bold) does not correctly identify the corresponding parameter. That I think needs to be fixed.

I have to agree with bug 51143: I never did find that button! --Mirokado (talk) 22:15, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Help links for dialogs

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53237

I would like to suggest that all of the editing dialog boxes should have help page links (probably via an embedded icon) that open a new window with help information appropriate for that dialog. Dragons flight (talk) 02:04, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, certainly. A more standard approach would be to allow the user to activate context-help by pressing some "Help" key with the mouse over a UI element. F1 is commonly used in applications, but I don't know if that would be viable in a browser. Looie496 (talk) 03:17, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

I think this would work pretty well for enwiki, but I'm not sure how well it would work for other projects; we can translate blurbs easily, but not so much entire pages. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 10:13, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Maybe just have a way to configure help page names in VE (or using MediaWiki:... messages to get the page names), so that each wiki can create its own help pages ? --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 07:34, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

That makes sense. Added to bugzilla :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 13:51, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Author parameter for web refs

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What happened to the "author" parameter for the cite-web template? Online journalists often use pseudonyms, and the author parameter works better in this case then first or last name.--¿3family6 _contribs 14:05, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

It just looks like aliases haven't been added to the templatedata for cite web. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:10, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, some "lazy" person only wrote TemplateData for 64 of the approximately 100 supported parameters and didn't include all of the additional 130 aliases. Have I mentioned lately that we might want a better way of handling references than the blinding wall of template options, most of which won't be used in most cases. Dragons flight (talk) 17:48, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Incidentally, being able to include links in a TemplateData description, for example to a documentation page, could be quite helpful. Such links should probably be set to open in a new window by default. Dragons flight (talk) 17:55, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm sorry if I came off as implying laziness; trust me, as probably the first person to look at fixing up cite web with templatedata, I boggled and went "....screw this". The source of that data has my admiration. I agree links would be useful; it's a requested enhancement. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:38, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Oliver, that "lazy" was sarcasm. It certainly wasn't directed at you. I wrote large portions of the modern citation system, and probably understand it better than nearly anyone, and I still haven't been able to muster up the resolve to try working on the TemplateData for it. Dragons flight (talk) 19:19, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Ahh :). If you know anyone who might be good for template-editing, please do drop me a list so I can get in touch with them; the more experienced template writers we have using TD, the better! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 13:52, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

save changes

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52058

Your save changes popup is so tiny I have to blow up the page 5 times to see what I type. Then I have to do the reverse afterwards. I hate this. Please leave such things alone. It has worked for years. If it aint broke, dont fix it! Torturella (talk) 17:17, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

When you edit this page, there is a big box at the top explaining how to avoid or disable the Visual Editor, if you want to. (The "save changes" popup is a temporary expedient, and will be replaced by something better.) Looie496 (talk) 17:35, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, actually the bigger problem is that I imagine Torturella is using Monobook. This is a known bug, and one that will be patched. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:18, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Save changes/review changes dialogs are not intuitive.

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The Save Page bubble/box/dialog thing is really annoying. I wanted to review my changes (as I'm not sure how the visual editor does things yet). I had no idea how to do this, so I clicked "Save page". And then I found the preview changes button...

Even so, this leaves me with an overlay of the diff with the darkened background of the page I was editing. In most content display styled like this, clicking in the darkened area closes what you were doing in the foreground and re-focuses on the main page. This is not the case with the visual editor. This then prompted me to look for "x"s in the top right corners of boxes. As no x's exist, I had to stop completely and look at the entire UI.

It's also not immediately clear that the arrows across the top of the changes preview dialog and save changes dialog exist, nor clear what they do. Commonly "exit dialog" is reflected with an "x" in the top right corner. This is instead, an up arrow.

I understand that this isn't at all confusing once you get used to it. It's a new thing and humans don't like new things. However, my brain is trained to look and act on specific cues on how computers tend to work. Clicking on an unfocused area should focus it. x's close things. Neither currently holds true for the visual editor. -- SnoFox^(t|c) 17:25, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Yep; these are knowns :(. I'm sorry they're causing a problem - it should be fixed soon, re defocusing, and we're hopefully rearranging the save dialogue to some degree. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:19, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

User-unfriendly terms.

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52354

I've been around Wikipedia. I make small edits -- correcting notes that should be a template, moving things to talk pages, fixing typos and stray characters. I know what a transclusion is as I sit and read things about Wikipedia. However, I have never once said "transclusion" in conversation when talking about Wikis. I use the word "template". Everyone I know uses the word "template". It's a simple word and everyone knows what it means.

When mousing over all of the new toolbar icons, the context menus told me what they are. I hovered over all of them and then thought, "Okay now where's the template button?" A few moments later, "Oh, derp. Transclusions."

A new editor or inexperienced editor will never make that association, and will likely (if ever) find out how to add a Citation Needed template by simple trial and error - clicking all the buttons until he get what he wants. -- SnoFox^(t|c) 17:42, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

~~That said, I still have yet successfully add a citation needed template, so I'm going to keep working in that.~~-- SnoFox^(t|c) 17:44, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

See: Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Replace the term .22transclusion.22 in the Visual_Editor for an ongoing discussion of the "transclusion" issue. Looie496 (talk) 17:47, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree it's unfriendly :/. It's one of the tweaks requested at bugzilla:50354. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:26, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Syntax error in JSON

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Can someone help explain to me what I did wrong in this template data that I'm getting this error, "Syntax error in JSON"? I've gone over it 10 times and can't seem to find the problem. (I had to add nowiki tags or else it wouldn't let me save the page. Also, though this is in my sandbox, it gives me the same error when I try to copy and paste it into Template:Infobox attraction. Can someone help me please? Thanks!--Dom497 (talk) 22:47, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

@Dom497: Sure. The problem are the double quotes that are present in several descriptions - either replace them with HTML entities or change them to single quotes. What might also be of use is the website jsonlint. Jsonlint can be used to validate JSON for syntactical errors - just remember to paste it without Wikipedia specific tags since those aren't valid in a "standard "JSON definition. It will report any errors it finds along with a short description of the error, and the line number where the error occurs. Excirial^{(Contact me,Contribs)} 22:55, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

~~Thanks a lot!--Dom497 (talk) 00:07, 12 July 2013 (UTC)~~

@Excirial: Wait, its still giving me an error.--Dom497 (talk) 00:19, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

JSON is a subset of JavaScript. In JavaScript it is fine to use single quotes to demarcate strings. However, this is not permitted in JSON. Only double quotes may be used for this in pure JSON. You will need to "escape" the double quotes within the string with backslashes (\") or just use single quotes within the string. — This, that and the other (talk) 00:54, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

@This, that and the other: I don't really understand what that means. Can you go to my sandbox and fix one line as an example for me?--Dom497 (talk) 01:10, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

I actually just fixed your sandbox, before looking at the latest messages here -- you can look at what I did. Looie496 (talk) 01:47, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

@Dom497: Sorry if I got a bit technical there - I assumed you were JavaScript-savvy. Excirial might like to read my reply as well. — This, that and the other (talk) 07:03, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Writing replies to technical questions right before dozing off again proves to be a bad idea. The above change was precisely what I meant to relay, but i should have emphasized that the "Quotes in the description" actually meant the quotes around words inside the descriptions text, and not the quotes around the description "object" itself. Excirial^{(Contact me,Contribs)} 07:19, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank-you everyone!--Dom497 (talk) 12:12, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Inserting Infoboxs Is Way Too Slow

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52354

I've been playing around with VE and when it comes to putting infoboxs in an article, it takes way too long. You have to click on the puzzle piece, search the template, click a parameter, fill in the parameter, go back, click another parameter, fill it in, repeat. It is way faster to just search for the template on wiki, copy and past the syntax (or code; whatever it is called) and fill in each parameter quickly. All in all, my point is that inserting infoboxs using VE is extremely inefficient and should be addressed.--Dom497 (talk) 00:12, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

This problem has been extensively discussed. It's clear that major improvements are needed. Looie496 (talk) 02:05, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Indeed; see bugzilla:50354. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:27, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

TemplateData problems

When editing a template:

I want to add a parameter.
I see a list of recommended parameters.
I click on one that I want to use. Nothing happens.
I double- and triple-click. Nothing happens.

I would expect either the parameter to be selected, or at least filled in for me.

I enter the full parameter name and click enter. It is selected.
I notice that the description for that parameter is not shown above the dialog box. It was shown when choosing the parameter.

Also, initial capitalization of the parameter names seems to act strangely. -- Ypnypn (talk) 02:50, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

I find your first points confusing, too, User:Ypnypn. :) There's a request in to enable addition via double-clicking (T53143). It's been marked high priority and looks targeted to deploy late next week. It might be a good idea to enter your second point (2) in that bug, or in T53188, which is about general improvement of template workflow. (Happy to help with that, once I clarify the following. :)) Can you identify what the issue is that you're encountered with initial capitalization of the parameter names? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 19:56, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

A simple table gets doubled after an unrelated edit of plain text

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I edited All-Ireland Senior Camogie Championship 1992 to fix a simple typo, and VE duplicated a simple table way down the page. I saved it to demonstrate the bug, then undid the edit. Chris the speller ^yack 04:05, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the report. Part of the problem is that the table in question has content (the entire MATCH RULES and the list that follows) that is moved out of the table leaving the table empty (this is true for the existing output as well -- take a look at the source HTML for that page in your browser). So, when the page is saved, Parsoid sees that foster-parented content ("foster parenting" is a technical term) as new content and duplicates it. We implement lots of tricks to detect bad wikitext like this and gracefully recover from it without introducing dirty diffs while keeping it editable, but obviously that didn't quite work here. We'll use this as a test case for fixing this, but for now, a simple fix would be to simply remove the table around MATCH RULES and the list since it does nothing useful there (creates an invisible empty table in the browser). If you make that fix to the source and re-edit the page in VE, you shouldn't see the problem. Feel free to ask for any clarifications. Hope this helps. Ssastry (talk) 04:29, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

"Mr. McKittrick, after very careful consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks." - General Beringer, WarGames. I think it's clear that Visual Editor is not ready.--Paul McDonald (talk) 13:26, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Was Someone Simply Bored?

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What is the point of this "new" tool again? Or is there actually no real reason for it other than the fact that someone created a "tool" with the hope that it would be used because they had nothing else to do that day, and there was nothing on TV and the "new" video game they were awaiting had not been released yet. Otherwise, aren't "new" technology tools supposed to offer some advantage to their old counterparts - not reduce functionality or reduce the capacity for productivity. Why was this rolled out? Isn't there some means or process of Quality Assurance for application development on Wikipedia? Stevenmitchell (talk) 10:16, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

There is a collapsed-by-default "Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)" on top of this page which I think answers the questions you raised here. Excirial^{(Contact me,Contribs)} 10:24, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

visual editor -- don't like it

Doesn't seem to have an obvious way to sign or leave a note about what you've changed. Celia Kozlowski (talk) 10:51, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

@Celiakozlowski: The visualeditor is and will only be enabled in the article namespace, and you wouldn't want to leave any signatures or comments inside these pages in any case. You can still add an edit summary detailing the edit when you save the page though. Talk pages use the old source editor that contains the sign button, though in the future the editor on talk pages will likely be replaced by WP:FLOW Excirial^{(Contact me,Contribs)} 11:02, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor is enabled in both articles and userspcace. I see you haven't saved an edit yet with VisualEditor. After clicking Save page you get an option to write an edit summary before clicking Save page a second time (this system has been criticised). PrimeHunter (talk) 11:16, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Make it say [edit | source] all the time?

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Is there a script or a setting to make it say [edit | source] instead of [edit | edit source], and show it all the time instead of only on hover? Sometimes I click "edit" by instinct, before the "edit source" button is displayed, so it would be nice if both buttons are displayed to avoid confusion. It would be even better if the order could be changed to [edit | visual], because sometimes I click "edit source" accidentally when I want to use the Visual Editor, and vice versa.

The placement of the edit summary box is not very intuitive. I looked for it for some time before checking the documentation and reading that I should click "Save page" to see the box, and click "Save page" again to actually save my changes. It would be nice if the edit summary box is always shown; if the purpose of hiding it under "Save page" is to make people write summaries more often, then maybe a red box could be added around an always-visible unfilled box, or a dialogue box could ask editors to confirm if they were sure about leaving a blank summary.

The time it takes to load the editor and save changes for long pages is way too long. Maybe this is because it loads the whole page for editing when I want to edit just a section. I hope that this will also be fixed.

--Joshua Issac (talk) 10:55, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

There is no gadget that I am aware of to show both edit and edit source links without hovering, but there is a bugzilla request - see bugzilla:50540. I think there is a bug about the edit summary box issue as well, but I can't immediately find it, bugzilla:42138 is related though. Section editing is something that is apparently complex, it will happen but not soon (I think the team are prioritising getting whole-page editing working first). Load times are a well-known issue that is being worked on - but it is still very slow. Thryduulf (talk) 14:19, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

This page explains how you can remove the animation on the section links. Dragons flight (talk) 15:53, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

That's very useful, thanks. Thryduulf (talk) 16:28, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Feedback

Just used it for the first time today, on Apixaban. It seems intuitive enough but I had a problem when I tried to fix a wiki-link that I thought I inserted wrongly after looking at my edit. When I tried to remove the wiki link, it deleted a whole section. I tried it a couple of times, cancelling to avoid saving changes each time it went wrong. After about the fifth attempt, it seemed to reload and show my original wiki-link was okay. I'm assuming it's just a small bug that will be fixed in time, but it's a bit confusing. Red Fiona (talk) 13:52, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Edit to add Fram has removed a no-wiki mark up which might have been the root cause of the problem.

Thank you, Redfiona99. I've put a note at your talk page with a more complete explanation, but basically this is a known issue that occurs when people use wiki markup in edits. I believe they're working out a way to make this work smoothly to avoid confusing people. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 19:00, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Templates not aligned

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53252

Visual editor, Firefox 22

Editing Gol Transportes Aéreos Flight 1907#Criminal proceedings I added two cleanup templates, {{update}} and {{prose}}. In the visual editor the two templates were differently left-aligned and different lengths, despite saving and displaying correctly. Reopening the page in the visual editor, the templates appear at their correct size and alignment, but do appear with an apparent blank line between them. Thryduulf (talk) 14:04, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Interesting. Seems to be Firefox specific - I could replicate it on that but not Chrome. Glad you specified your browser. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 18:40, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Not as many things to do

This new version is really confusing and it has barely half the functions of the old editing capability. I'm not able to make a table, and many other things. J. A. Zwierzcowski (talk) 14:11, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you, J.A., for your feedback. It really can be difficult to transition between the two, and it certainly can't do everything the other system can yet. It's functions are being expanded and issues corrected by developers, based in part on feedback we receive here. You may have noticed that you can use the old editor at any point, by choosing "edit source." You can also hide the VisualEditor, using a gadget that is not supported by the Wikimedia Foundation in the gadgets tab of your preferences. You can access it in the section marked "Editing" and enable it by ticking the box labeled "Remove VisualEditor from the user interface", then scroll to the bottom and click "Save". You can reactivate VE access at any time by unticking that box. (Please note that this gadget can break and has broken in the past, but it will probably be reenabled swiftly if it does.) I hope you will not disable it, though, but keep helping us figure out how to make it better. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 14:44, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

All the older VisualEditor tags have vanished

Please read: Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#VisualEditor tag not working correctly

It appears that that "Tag: VisualEditor" label on revisions made with Visual Editor has been (accidentally?) deleted from all older edits. As a result, we presently have no way of tracking most of the VisualEditor edits made during the first week of deployment. Dragons flight (talk) 17:23, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Further discussion is at WP:VPT#Revision tags not working correctly. This seems to be a quite technical problem that affects non-VE tags as well, so I suggest that further discussion continue at that other page. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:49, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Problem with italics and Apostrophe

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T51926

I wrote the phrase In 1962 the ''[[Elizabethan Express|Elizabethan]]'''s six-hour schedule between London and Edinburgh.... If you open this in Visual editor then everything from the 's is in bold.

I experimented further and tried writing the sentence in VE. Changing to italics and then linking gave

In 1962 the [[Elizabethan Express|''Elizabethan'']]'s six-hour schedule between London and Edinburgh...

Linking before changing to italics gave

In 1962 the ''[[Elizabethan Express|Elizabethan]]''<nowiki>'s six-hour schedule between London and Edinburgh...</nowiki>

(See User:Edgepedia/VE/Bold for sandbox) Edgepedia (talk) 19:11, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

This is a known problem that appears to be being worked on, see Bugzilla:49926. Thanks for reporting it. Thryduulf (talk) 20:41, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Slow to scroll, even on a pretty good computer with a fast internet connection.

I'm on a relatively good computer (the one I use for all my Feature Pictures work) with a good internet connection (BT Broadband).

I thought I'd see if VisualEditor had improved at all. Just scrolling down a largish page was jumpy, awkward, and laggy, even now, after supposed improvements.

Jumpy, awkward, and laggy are just going to put users off. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 23:36, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Are you in "edit" mode? The size of the VE stuff loaded on all articles has decreased substantially, so it shouldn't affect normal reading. If you get this without clicking "edit", I'd guess it's ULS (Universal Language Selector). πr² (t • c) 03:45, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

"wikitable sortable"

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How can an editor insert a sortable wikitable in the new VisualEditor format? Bullmoosebell (talk) 01:14, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

At present, you can't. While one can edit the contents of tables, adding new tables or changing their layout is not yet supported. You'll have to use the "edit source" button for that right now. Dragons flight (talk) 01:35, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Add a link to template documentation page

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53311

Some templates are really rather complex. I'm trying to write the template data for {{Infobox World Heritage Site}} and parts are just too complex to explain in the short json format. Really a it would be good to have a link to the full template documentation. Maybe a "Documentation" field could be added to json and that interpreted as a clickable link in the dialogue.--Salix (talk): 10:52, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

OH and the parset for template data has a rather uninformative error message. All you get is "Syntax error in JSON" lets guess where in the 100+ lines the error is!--Salix (talk): 11:16, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, there's a bug for that. Drop the JSON on my talkpage? I'll try to debug. Can you give an example of something too complex to explain? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 11:19, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

OK some wierd buggy jason there. As to complicated documentation {{Infobox World Heritage Site}} as parameters which should take {{coord}} which is a lot to explain, it also has a "locmapin" map parameter which is passed to Template:Location map which has complex instructions as to the name of the map to use which involve looking at Template:Location map/List. Links to those pages would be nice.--Salix (talk): 12:07, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, linking would be good :). So, Krinkle's approach with TemplateData was to deliberately build something barebones. This was because he didn't know precisely how it would be used in practise, and thought it would be better to build a system that can be expanded in line with how people need it to work (for example - linking, a dropdown box or something) rather than building features and hoping people use them. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 13:19, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

I've now made a enhancement request on bugzilla T53311.--Salix (talk): 05:41, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Drag-and-drop appears to work, sort of, but doesn't

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52643

Drag-and-drop appears to work, but there are oddities about what seems to happen, and in the end the transfer doesn't actually happen.

Demonstration: start with this test page. We will attempt to drag and drop to the bottom of the page the line "L3 header" and the line below it. Strange things happen which I have called "Oddity" rather than "Bug", because I am not sure whether this is supposed to be working yet; if not, it is confusing that it appears to.

1. Select the first L3 header and the line below it by placing the cursor to the left of "L3 header" and dragging down to the left of "Another L3 header" (so as not to leave an unwanted blank line).

2. Place cursor on highlighted area and depress mouse button to "grab". (Oddity 1: cursor does not change shape until you start to drag)

3. Drag selection down to bottom of page. (Oddity 2: the "Another L3 header" line, which was not selected, ceases to be a header)

(Oddity 3: an image of the selection moves, but apart from the line the cursor is on, it is almost invisibly faint)

4. Release the mouse button: the selection appears at the bottom of the page, with formatting correct. (Oddity 4: but it is displaced one indent's worth to the right, and it is not possible to move it left. I think this one may be connected with Bugzilla:50353, inability to put the cursor below the last line of a page.)

5. Try to save the change. {Oddity 5: though it appears to have happened, it hasn't. The "Save page" button is greyed out and inoperative. If you make another change and then undo it, the "Save page" button becomes operative but "Review your changes" produces "Could not start the review because your revision matches the latest version of this page". If you actually make another change, that change happens but the drag-and-drop does not.)

JohnCD (talk) 17:29, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm with you through the ghostly text, but it never appears to move to me. Either I'm not doing it 100% right or, obviously, there's something different in my setup. :) I'm using Chrome on Windows 7. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 19:16, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, I should have said: FF22.0/Win7. If nothing moves, when do you see the ghostly text? What happens for me at step 2 when I depress the mouse button to "grab" is, nothing. Only when I start to drag the pointer does it change (to an arrow pointing up at 11 o'clock out of a box) and the ghostly text appears moving with it. JohnCD (talk) 20:00, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

I think that the "Cannot save page" is reported as Bugzilla:50643. Excirial^{(Contact me,Contribs)} 20:53, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, that's right. I have updated the bug to say that it happens only with drag-drop, VE will allow saving text moves done with Ctr-X, CtrV or Right-click/Cut, Right-click/Paste. JohnCD (talk) 22:26, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

(@JohnCD:, apologies for my unclear language. :) What I meant was that the ghostly image trails my cursor, but the original content remains in place, and when I release my mouse button the ghostly image disappears, leaving the original unmoved. I see this is tracked and updated, but I just wanted to clarify! --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 14:52, 12 July 2013 (UTC))

@Mdennis (WMF): I understand. With Firefox, when the button is released the content appears to have moved. I gather from the response to the bug that it's only with Firefox, and the fix is to prevent that appearance until drag-and-drop is actually implemented. JohnCD (talk) 11:13, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Terrible

This is just terrible. Way to complicate things and make me never want to edit. FogDevil 16:52, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, that's certainly not its intention. :/ I assume you didn't save your change, because I don't see that you've actually used it on any edits, so I don't know what specific issues you've encountered, but it can be challenging especially for people who are familiar with wikimarkup, when so much of what we're used to doesn't function the way we expect. There are also some things that it just can't do yet, or can't do as well as the existing process, but work is underway to improve it. I hope that it will serve you better going forward. In the meantime, you can always use "edit source" to edit the way you're accustomed to and can follow the directions in the FAQ at the top of this page for hiding the VisualEditor altogether if you need. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 16:57, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm sure that wasn't its intention, but that is what it is doing. And this is why it needs to be reversed immediately.--Paul McDonald (talk) 03:38, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Issues with images

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53287

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53288

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53290

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53291

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53292

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53293

I was playing around with adding an image to an article in my sandbox. I note seven issues:

When selecting an image to be inserted, the selected thumbnail has a black box around it. The lines of the box are so fine as to make them almost invisible. A much better feedback would be if, when a thumbnail is selected, it turns blue in exactly the same way as when an image in an article is selected. (A blue coloring behavior - not the same as within an article, though - does happen for some images, though not most. For example, if one searches for "Sandbox", four of the first twelve thumbnails do add some blue if selected, though in one case just a sliver.)
The "Insert media" button, in the pop-up box, is not in a good place, from UX perspective. It should be in the top right of the box, not the bottom right. It would be even more clear to editors what the button did if (a) it was greyed out until a thumbnail is selected; (b) it had a "Cancel" button to its left; and (maybe) (c) it was labeled "Save image". [The cancel button duplicates the "X" for closing the box, of course, but this is actually good UX design - giving users multiple choices for performing the same action, as long as that doesn't clutter things up.)
It's not a high priority, but still, a suggestion: the default search text, for an image search, is the complete page name. So, for example, if someone is editing a draft article, at User:WhateverEditorName/Article name, the default search text is "WhateverEditorName/Article name". It would be better if the default ignored the final slash and all text to the left of it; in this case, it would mean the default search would be "Article name".
For search boxes, the magnifying glass icon (to initiate the search) is normally at the far right of the search box, not (as is now the case) to the left, in the image selection dialog/popup box. For example, see the search boxes in the Vector skin, and with the Chrome browser.
VE allows the image to be dropped into the middle of a word. I moved the test image perhaps a dozen times, and this happened twice - that shouldn't be possible, yes? [The words that were split were "addition" and "Israel"; when I moved the image again, the words remained split (with an end-of-line inserted).]
Inserted images are formatted as right-aligned, and they can't be move to the left side of the page. Similarly, existing images that are left-aligned can't be moved to the right side of the page. I think a bug to fix this already exists, I mention it for only the sake of completeness.
Wikipedia:VisualEditor/User guide states "To add a caption, click on the 'Media' icon that appears on the image, or the one in the toolbar." But that isn't true - after the image is selected, clicking on the Media icon in the toolbar pops up a new dialog box for selecting an image, not for adding a caption. I can see good arguments for why the existing functionality is preferable, so I'm not saying this is necessarily a bug - just that the User Guide and how VE actually works do not match.

-- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:40, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you, John. I'll look and see if I can find an existing bug to put your thoughts into. If not, I'll open one. Either way, I'll track it once I have. Regarding the User Guide, please feel free to change anything you see that is wrong or outdated. The community change team has largely been putting together the User Guide, and I at least have based my parts on simply using the software and writing how it worked. If you don't want to change it, just let me know, and I'll see what I can figure out. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:31, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Tracked as T53287, T53288, T53290, T53291, T53292 and T53293. The last one may be a duplicate of something, but I couldn't find it, if so. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:50, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Maggie - thanks. I've changed the User Guide to match how the software actually works. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:18, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Template display error: Template:Discogs master

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53280

When I edit the External links section of Bossalinis & Fooliyones, the {{Discogs master|523614}} template vanishes from view. It's still there and I could even get VE to edit that template, but it's not displayed. Huon (talk) 00:02, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Confirmed in Firefox 22 on Linux - but oddly only on this one article. I've looked at all of the first 20 in the template's whatlinkshere list that use it outside references and it displays in every single one of them. Often when a problem exists on only one article the cause is broken wikisyntax somewhere on that article, I've had a look but nothing is leaping out at me.

A couple of questions though, have you seen this on other articles/with other templates? Which browser are you using? This should help the devs figure out what's causing the problem. Thryduulf (talk) 01:04, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

This edit fixed the local problem. The underlying bug is apparently somehow related to having an ampersand (&) in the page name. Dragons flight (talk) 01:21, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Reported the problem —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:31, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Table editting

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I am unable to edit tables and the background colors used in it. Saha.rj (talk) 05:24, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

That's correct, the Visual Editor does not have full support for tables yet so you can only change the contents of existing cells. Full table support will come in a future release. Thryduulf (talk) 07:43, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Thoughts about UI improvements

I spent a little time tweaking a screenshot of VE using GIMP, to show some thoughts about the direction the UI might go in. I'm adding a picture at right. This is not a product of deep thought, more an attempt to provoke some sort of planned design process rather than the haphazard evolution that seems to be taking place. In particular, I expect there might be a need for additional "Edit" and "Tools" menus. Experienced editors will recognize that I've placed the CharInsert gadget on the second line. That gadget wouldn't be usable directly (even if gadgets could be used in VE), because it includes markup functionality, but its UI seems to me very similar to what is needed for inserting special characters. Looie496 (talk) 03:18, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

I find your suggestion really useful. We need more tools on VisualEditor UI. Jacopo Werther ^iγ∂ψ=mψ 11:00, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Character insert is T40029 which may reuses the char insert from WikiEditor. You might need to venture into bugzilla for the developers to take note, as few read this page.--Salix (talk): 12:50, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Sure, but I think it's best to start a discussion here -- there are certainly members of the WMF team who watch this page. Anyway I've added a comment at that bug report -- not clear how much it will accomplish. Looie496 (talk) 14:23, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

I do, at least :). I really like the idea of integrating the special characters tool, but it doesn't really scale; if you check out some of the more, ah, extensive, options in that menu, you'll find it would pretty much make the interface explode with buttons. I think we need a way of doing this, but a better way than the existing tool. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:29, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

It's certainly not exactly the right thing, but I think it's close enough to the right thing to be a good starting point. Looie496 (talk) 15:21, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

I've added a link to your image to the enhancement request at T52296. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:17, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Follifoot

The village of Follifoot is approximately 4 miles from Harrogate not 2 miles as stated in the article. My attempts to edit and save the alteration have been unsuccessful. Perhaps someone with more knowledge could correct the article for me. Janebly (talk) 11:44, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

I have made the change for you. As the distance is included as part of the conversion template (that automatically calculates the distance in km) the change needs to be made in the template editor. Where you able to figure this out and get to the template editor, or was your problem in understanding the editor itself? (this is one of the most complicated templates on the encyclopaedia and so human-readable descriptions for the editor interface have not been written yet, so don't feel bad about it!). If you can let us know what you did and didn't manage to do then it will help improve it for the future. Thryduulf (talk) 13:04, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Showing a nutshell overview of template parameters: In general, trying to remind users of the various parameters, and their basic options, can be a challenge to display in a nutshell overview, as a condensed box of parameters and their format. Currently, for the Wikitext editor ("Edit source"), a person can insert a {Convert} unit-code parameter as "help" and the template will display the condensed parameter nutshell help-box, as formatted by Template:Convert/help. Perhaps the VisualEditor could display that nutshell help-box in a pop-up window or such. -Wikid77 (talk) 18:57, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
T51772, which asks for links to the full documentation, is another suggestion to address the difficulty of providing detailed documentation in a nutshell. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:47, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

How do I preview adding ^{[dead link]}?

FlashSheridan (talk) 16:30, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not completely sure what you are asking here, but all edits can be previewed by clicking on "Save this page" and then "Review changes" (this is not a great design I know, but there are open requests for improvement). Thryduulf (talk) 07:51, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

If you're using VisualEditor, then it ought to be displaying automatically and instantly. If you're adding it into the main part of the page, then you should see it as soon as you add it (with the puzzle icon/template tool). If you're adding it inside a <ref> tag, then it should display in the "Reference content" part of the reference tool. It should also be visible immediately in the <references /> at the end of the page. I just did it, and that's what happened. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:54, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Quotes in template data

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53311

For the template data for Infobox species Template:Taxobox/doc I want to indicate in a parameter description that two single quotes should be used around an argument e.g. ''H. sapiens'' however I can't distinguish this from double quotes e.g. "H. sapiens" when looking at the produced template data.

An infobox for plants, animals and other biological taxa

Template parameters
Parameter		Description	Type	Status
Species	`species`	Species taxonomic rank. Should be given in abbreviated forms and in italics, e.g. ''H. sapiens''.	String	optional
Bad Species	`badspecies`	Species taxonomic rank. Should be given in abbreviated forms and in italics, e.g. "H. sapiens".	String	optional

When displayed its impossible to distinguish this from a double quote in the wiki doc page. In the VE dialogue box its also impossible to distinguish the two.--Salix (talk): 16:47, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

My gut feeling is that this is most likely to be a font issue. On my screen I use the DejaVu Sans font and there is a small, but noticeable, distinction between '' and ". Looking at it in Links, which uses DejaVu Sans Mono (as that's what I use in my terminals), the difference between the two is immediately clear. I'm not sure there is any way around this? Thryduulf (talk) 18:04, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Use <code> font to show multiple apostrophes: The typical style for showing users the use of multiple apostrophes is to display the text in monospaced font by using code-tags, as in: "<code>''italic''</code>". With the switch to HTML5, the code-tag is still being supported ("forever") in wikitext, but I am unsure how the VisualEditor could recommend the use of code-tag font in these cases. -Wikid77 (talk) 20:12, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
At present, TemplateData does not allow for the inclusion of any markup. In addition, the dialog boxes live in their own iframe beyond the reach of community controlled CSS, so there is essentially nothing we can do without developer intervention. My personal recommendation would be to allow wikimarkup in TemplateData descriptions so we can have more control of the content displayed. Dragons flight (talk) 20:16, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
I've added this request to the related bugzilla:51311 requesting links in TD documentation. See #Add a link to template documentation page further up this page. Thryduulf (talk) 07:47, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Edit session expired though the editing was done quickly

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53302

I was reading an article yesterday, saw errors in it, but it was late, so I waited until today to fix them. Today I hit 'Edit', made the changes quickly, but when I tried to save, got a message that the edit session had expired. I suspect that what expired was not whatever got set up when I clicked 'Edit', but something that got saved yesterday when I loaded the article for viewing. It struck me as user-hostile behavior. This appears to be different from bug 50424, but what do I know? This should be easy to recreate, if you don't mind waiting about 15 hours before you begin editing. Chris the speller ^yack 20:08, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Confirmed. By chance I have a user page open in another tab, where I've been meaning to do something with it for weeks. It's been 625 minutes (10.4 hours) since my firefox last crashed, and I got the same error. Editing it with the source editor the edit worked perfectly. Thryduulf (talk) 23:00, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
- I've tracked this as bugzilla:51302, someone there will merge it if this is another facet to 50424. Thryduulf (talk) 23:19, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
It was indeed marked as a duplicate of bugzilla:50424, but James commented that they hope to deploy the fix on Monday. Thryduulf (talk) 07:52, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

New edit mode too slow. How to disable?

I want to go back to the old way, please. I don't see this option in my account settings (under "editing"). Startswithj (talk) 05:32, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

@Startswithj: See the FAQ box at the top of this page, just above the table of contents. Ignatz mice•talk 05:42, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Maggie and the WMF crew have just spent half of their working week politely explaining to the world and his neighbour how you disable this beta test. I think that is proof enough that this is a priority bug- disabling needs to prominent and obvious. There are two places that are intuitive and impossible to miss.

On the top-bar of the visual editor next to the help icon, just add a further icon in red with the word 'Disable', Hover would display the message 'Thank you for taking part in this beta-test, to disabling the visual Editor will take you back to the Classic Editor' or just 'get me out of here!"
Change the Edit|Edit source into Edit|Classic editor|Remove visual editor. I don't think anyone would need further help on that one

I have posted this not because I need a recursive reply- but so you can pass the comment directly to the dev team for immediate implementation.

If you are not at the London or Oxford Wikimeet- you are all most welcome to come and share a bottle of wine with me beyond wifi range in the garden. -- Clem Rutter (talk) 08:29, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

There is actually a proper off switch for VE. It was chosen to disable the off switch for en:wp, and instead have a half-hidden option that the VE breaks every now and then. Enabling the off switch is apparently an "enhancement". The patch is awaiting deployment. Anyone from WMF have an idea if/when this change will go through? - David Gerard (talk) 08:54, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Dear Wikipedians:

I wasn't aware I was consenting to a public post on this page when I clicked the "leave feedback" button, thus I was not aware of the FAQ at the top of this page (@Ignatzmice:). If the nature of this feedback method could be made more transparent, I think that would be more appropriate.
Thank you for your responses. I eventually discovered after searching the web that the beta editor can be disabled in the "gadgets" section of my user settings. I would suggest moving this setting to the "editing" section, or else turn it off by default (it seems gadgets would be things I would opt into).
I also have come to realize that the "edit source" button is sometime available as a hover option, however when the system is unresponsive, hover-reveals don't always work (@David Gerard:). I would suggest showing two links without hovers, more clearly titled as "beta editor" and "classic editor" or "visual editor" and "code editor." That, or having the choice of editing methods appear after clicking "edit," rather than defaulting to the choice of beta (@ClemRutter:).
My tech specs (if helpful): Downstream 20 Mb/s; Safari 6.0.5; Mac OS 10.8.4; 2.7 GHz Intel Core i7 (64-bit); 8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3; Flash 11.8.800.94; Java 1.6.0_51. Very occasional WP contributor.

Cheers, Startswithj (talk) 17:47, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

- Regarding the section edit links, see bugzilla:50540 for the request to developers about it. I'll add your comments to that bug in a moment. Meanwhile, this section on the Village Pump explains how you can get both permanently displayed. Thryduulf (talk) 20:10, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Page won't save

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52424

I've spent 3 hours editing a page and adding citations but now it wont save saying: Error: invalid error code. So disheartening. Makes me not want to bother spending so much time trying to improving things... Fieldstones (talk) 07:11, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

This is a known problem, unfortunately - see Bugzilla:50424. The good news is that James (the VE program manager) commented "happily, we have code fixing this mostly done and we hope to have it deployed on Monday." when marking a related bug I reported as a duplicate. Thryduulf (talk) 07:39, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

VE deletes syntax from an incomplete table

At User:Thryduulf/Hierarchy of content decisions I have an incomplete table (it's part of an unfinished user essay) with the table opened, some headers and rows defined but no closing syntax.

When making an unrelated edit, VE deleted all the table syntax apart from the the opening line [3] e.g. changing !Level!!Process!!Appeal process!!Notes to LevelProcessAppeal processNotes.

I know VE doesn't deal with tables properly yet, and this is an unusual use case, but there is no reason for it to be deleting syntax. As in the example above deleting the exclamation marks (and pipes on other rows) doesn't even result in cleaned up plain text (replacing them with space instead might do). Thryduulf (talk) 08:05, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Dealing with malformatted tables seems to be a nightmare for the devs, but my suggestion is that you file the bug report, just so they know that it happens. In theory, this shouldn't be a problem for the mainspace, and equally in theory, it should become even less likely to happen once VE provides decent support for creating and editing tables, but... Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:04, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Lost comment

Anish7 (talk) 11:02, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Did this get lost? —

Llywelyn II

11:40, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Most likely it's the issue noted at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive 2013 07#The easiest way for a new editor to ask anything about wikipedia is this page. Thryduulf (talk) 12:08, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor back.

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Despite having hid VE, I've just discovered that it's back. The whole "Edit" and "Edit source" nonsense is back. When I was editing the Iván Hindy article it even automatically chose VE for me. Why? Is the opt-out malfunctioning? Manxruler (talk) 12:52, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes; see the section above this one. Sorry about this :(. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 12:53, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

How glorious. I've (I hope, at least) gotten rid of it again now. Why on earth did this thing include the "Remove VisualEditor from the user interface" box on my gadget list somehow being unchecked? Manxruler (talk) 19:36, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

It shouldn't have unchecked itself. It's just that none of the gadgets were working properly for a while today due an external denial of service attack on Wikipedia. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:07, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Worst thing I've ever seen

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Why would you change Wikipedia like this? Do you think that users are going to bother trying to learn a whole new system of editing. This is clunky and I don't understand it. I will stop editing this site if this is not changed. Kuzwa (talk) 14:56, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

@Kuzwa: You can still use the old editor by pressing "Edit Source" instead of "Edit this page" on an article page - the same applies to section links. Additionally you can disable the visual editor under your user preferences, first item in the editing section though that option is a tad bugged at the time id the post above your still apply. Excirial^{(Contact me,Contribs)} 17:54, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree with Kuzwa, it's really awful. Luckily you can turn it off. --Pajicz (talk) 18:46, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Doubleclick

In case of Doubleclick on the template, should show a Transluction dialog. Rezonansowy (talk) 20:00, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

This has been suggested before. I think bugzilla:51176 is the relevant request to the developers to add this. Thryduulf (talk) 20:24, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
I like this idea. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:13, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

What the hell

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I go away for a month and I no longer know how to edit!? J04n(talk page) 00:11, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Welcome back, J04n. If you want to use the old editing environment, then just click "Edit source" instead of "Edit". Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:15, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Or you can disable it completely in "Preferences->Gadgets" and then select "Remove VisualEditor from the user interface". This is something that apparently "they" don't like to tell you. Why, I have no idea.--Paul McDonald (talk) 00:33, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Icons are incomprehensible

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53372

I'm finding the icons on the little buttons to do various things (add wikilinks, add references, add a template) are not clear or intuitive, the only exception being perhaps the add-an-image icon. I think some of them simply have obscure design that could be improved, but that can only go so far to make things clearer. A mouseover of any of these buttons should display a brief text explanation for what that button does, and/or the VE should have an option to toggle the views of its tools between icon, icon w/text, or just text, just like browsers do. postdlf (talk) 17:27, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

You are not the first to say this. See for example Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive 2013 07#Mystery meat navigation, which was seemingly archived without resolution. Thryduulf (talk) 17:40, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

I figured it was brought up at some point. Interesting that those other commenters found even mouseover text inadequate, but at least that would be more than what we have. I have no clue what the icon for inserting a reference is even supposed to look like (a bar graph? wtf?), nor do I know what a puzzle piece has to do with templates. And the three books icon between them doesn't even have a discernible function after you click on it. I also don't know why anyone would expect to find categories under "page settings". I could go on...

This whole VE venture is really the most perplexing and seemingly insane development in the nearly ten years I've been editing here. The insistence of the WMF that it be foisted on everyone when it is clearly not ready for prime time really makes me question their judgment and basic competence. postdlf (talk) 17:55, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

The reference editing icon is pretty counterintuitive to me, too, and it's in bugzilla as a thing that needs to be worked on. I'm not sure how the linking icon is confusing, mind; it's a chain link, and matches the linking icon in the existing editing toolbar (and gmail, and wordpress, and...probably other services I'm not familiar with). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:02, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

It was less obscure, in that I was able to figure out what it probably meant before actually experimenting on it. I've never seen that particular icon before (I don't use gmail or any of those other services), and I have to assume that a new user will find it even more confusing than me if they're faced with just that little picture. And if it's used in other services, it would have to be for web links, correct? So a user familiar with that icon would then presume it's for inserting external links, rather than wikilinks to other articles. postdlf (talk) 19:41, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

The buttons do have mouse-over text. Or at least I see it, do you not? Or is the complaint that the existing mouse-over text isn't very good, which I more or less agree with. Dragons flight (talk) 18:24, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

No, I don't see any mouse-over text. Firefox v. 22.0. postdlf (talk) 19:41, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

I just tried Firefox 22 and I did get the mouse-over text on the main icons. It seemed a little sluggish for some reason, but it did work. Does anyone else find that the mouse-over text isn't working? Dragons flight (talk) 02:15, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Firefox 22 here, mouseover works fine. Postdlf, what OS? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 11:15, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Windows 7. I even tried letting the mouse-over hover for awhile after Dragons flight's comment that it was "sluggish," but ten seconds and nothing for any of the buttons. postdlf (talk) 13:22, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

This is puzzling. :/ I have Firefox 22 on Windows 7, and the mouse-over text works for me. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 16:50, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Postdlf, do you see the mouse over text in other parts of the interface. For example, most (though not quite all) of the interface links at the left and top of the page have mouse over text. How about on pages that don't use VE? Also, are you using the Vector skin or something else? Dragons flight (talk) 16:55, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Monobook. And no, I don't see mouseover text in the other interface links (I assume you mean the links under "interaction" or "toolbox", for example, or the tabs like "history" or "edit this page" along the top). I have navigation popups enabled, if that might make a difference. postdlf (talk) 17:27, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Well the good news is that it doesn't appear to be a VisualEditor problem, but rather some more general issue. I'd suggest you start by temporarily blanking User:Postdlf/monobook.js then clear your cache and see if you can see the mouse-over text then. If that works, then it is some issue specific to the scripts you have installed rather than a Mediawiki issue. Dragons flight (talk) 17:45, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

I've made a mockup of one idea, at File:VisualEditor - Toolbar - Reference-edit1.png - That image includes the original, and two adaptations that use a snippet of grey text and a blue superscripted number [1]. The grey text could be made into abstract letterforms (rather than the letters REF) in order to make it usable by all languages. Or could use a grey + sign and the blue number. (Only problem is RightToLeft languages. Not sure how to solve that.) Just a thought. –Quiddity (talk) 05:49, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

@Mdennis (WMF) and Okeyes (WMF): Is there an existing bugzilla entry for this (improving the icons)? I tried searching for a few keyword combinations, but could not find it. If there isn't one, I can add it. (I've got a list of the previous threads it was mentioned in.) Ta :) –Quiddity (talk) 18:15, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

@Quiddity: No, I talked to the development team and they said icons are not carved in stone but requested that people suggest changes. I asked for ideas, but don't think I got any. (If I did, I missed it!) As you've got a suggestion, this would be a great time to add it in. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:24, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Maggie. I've created bugzilla:51372 with my own suggestion, and a list of the previous comments.

Anyone else who has a specific suggestion should make a comment there explaining their suggested design, or link-to/attach an image of a sketch. HTH. –Quiddity (talk) 16:54, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Add a preference option to opt out of nowiki tags

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

For a new editor who, in theory, will never touch the "edit source" button it makes sense to wrap nowiki tags around double brackets, etc. But for editors used to typing in wikitext, the nowiki tags are unnecessary and a cause errors. Can there be a opt-in preference somewhere to suppress VE from "helping" by adding nowiki tags to text entries? VQuakr (talk) 03:30, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

While this is a good idea, the related bugzilla:49686 to automatically convert wikitext into VE elements was closed as "wontfix" so I don't foresee this happening. Thryduulf (talk) 07:22, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Even for new editors, they seem to trigger the nowiki tags by inserting double brackets (as you can see in Filter 550, many users making edits resulting in nowiki tags don't have a user page). --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 13:40, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

We are working on a partial solution to this problem - see bugzilla:49820. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:31, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

A warning is really a different solution than a selectable preference. This interface is complex enough that is surely merits a dedicated preferences screen anyways, why force editors used to Wiki markup to slow down and click buttons if they wish to opt out of the nowiki tags? VQuakr (talk) 21:32, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Typing Control+K or ⌘ Command+K to enter VisualEditor's link tool shouldn't really be slower than typing double square brackets. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:21, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

For a new editor who is unaccustomed to doing either, probably true. But you are missing the point. VQuakr (talk) 04:00, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

+1 Ignatz mice•talk 04:09, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Anyone who wants to use wikitext only needs to hit "edit source". Brackets will function as expected there. It would be great if we could have the option to use both forms of editing at one time, but I don't know if that's possible. :) -Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 22:12, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Fucking hate it

I think this is the first goddamn time I've said fuck on Wikipedia. It's a great idea for quick ce edits and like a goddamn fucking idiot I just keep trying to make it work only ending up, as often as not, spending twice or more time on an edit. One time I reviewed an entire article with ce edits and more complicated reorganization of material only to find, when I was all done, that nothing had actually been processed. I never did that again, but I still, like an idiot, keep using it--that's how it goes when one is the eternal optimist. If you can't fix this goddamned thing please admit it and throw it out. Please accept my profanity in the same lighthearted spirit in which it was used, but for christ's sake, this is just plain nuts. Gandydancer (talk) 18:32, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Here's an example: At the BP article I used VE to change " sustained cellular damage resulting organ damage" to read "sustained cellular changes resulting in organ damage" and it did not work. So I instead used the regular method and to my great surprise I found that the "fix" appeared then when I went to do my edit even though it had not yet appeared in the article. Gandydancer (talk) 20:57, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Don't feel bad. I had my first "R-Rated" entry myself at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive 2013 07#Beta for new edits because of this. It is infuriating, and what's worse the people behind it don't seem to care one bit.--Paul McDonald (talk) 03:42, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi Gandydancer,

Thanks for your note. I'm sorry you lost that complicated edit. I lost a rather minor one yesterday (I think VisualEditor objected to a couple of hours elapsing between when I started the edit and when I finished it), and just dealing with a couple of sentences was irritating enough.

Your example in the second paragraph is about this edit. I just wanted to make sure that I understood correctly: as far as you could tell, did it not seem to close VisualEditor, or did it apparently save just fine, but when you were reading the page, it was the previous, un-edited version of the article? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:34, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

About the "complicated edit", yes I was going through an article to get it ready for a GA so I was being very fussy. I had done 2 edits and was about 2/3 done and was just amazed to find that without any sort of warning none of them had registered. I was also having some sort of other problem--I don't remember what--and I came here and found that another editor was having the same problem and was advised to change something in "preferences", which I did and that seemed to clear it up. But then I started to get an 'error' sign of some sort at times and one time, to my amazement, when I when to do it the "old" way, my changes appeared on their own--though looking at it now I see that it is tagged VE, so I guess it worked even though I got an 'error' signal. I do know that once after getting an 'error' I hit it again and that time it worked. I don't know if I'm making this very clear... The next time I have a problem I will be more careful to note what happened so that I can report it correctly. Gandydancer (talk) 00:20, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, to be candid, I'd like your next report to say something like "VisualEditor has completely stopped misbehaving for me". I am just mystified about the error-but-saved-anyway thing. I'll see if I can find something in Bugzilla that's similar. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:30, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

It looks to me like T53319 is a match for this problem. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:11, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Problem Adding web link

I seem to be having difficult in addin a web link so going back to normal editor Glh54 (talk) 08:40, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm sorry to hear that it wasn't intuitive for you. I think it's probably a little more difficult for those of us who know the old way to adjust to than those who've never edited before. :/ If you decide to try it again, the user guide might help. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:25, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

The user guide for VisualEditor doesn't include external links (last I looked). However, it works the same as adding a wikilink: Type the label you want to display (e.g., "Official website"). Select that, then use the link tool (click the chain-link icon, or use the shortcuts Control+K or ⌘ Command+K) to add a link. Instead of typing the name of some Wikipedia article into the box, paste in the URL. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:41, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

<blink> A new entry on my to-do list today. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:36, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Oh, phew. :) It must have been updated since you last looked. :D --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:38, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Reference numbering

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

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52474

When the first reference is in an Infobox it is correctly numbered and shown as 1. However, the first reference in the text is also shown as 1 in the text but numbered as 2 in the reflist. See East Toowoomba, Queensland for an example. Downsize43 (talk) 10:24, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

This is a known issue with referencing inside of templates. :/ Thanks for reporting your experience, and I hope they'll be able to fix that one soon. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:17, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Classic "marked as answered" means "hope they'll be able to fix that one soon" -- really? That's what we have now for the "default editor" that is "so great" ?--Paul McDonald (talk) 03:44, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
- There is nothing more that Maggie or anyone else here can do. The devs know the problem exists and it's in their queue of things to fix, so the report here has been answered, even if the response isn't ideal.
  As for whether the VE is "so great", not yet it isn't but many of these bugs would not have been found without the wide testing being employed currently (e.g. the one lower down this page which requires leaving a page open for many hours before editing it), so this is a necessary step. Personally, I would have waited until it was more feature complete and all the critical bugs found during opt-in testing had been fixed, but that doesn't change that this report has been answered. Thryduulf (talk) 07:31, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
  - Yes there is something else to be done. Shut it off.--Paul McDonald (talk) 14:53, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
    - I generally view more things as critical than the devs seem to (based on bugzilla importance ratings) but even I can see that this bug is not in danger of damaging the wiki so disabling VE as a reaction to this bug is way over the top. I don't know who has the ultimate decision about whether VE should be disabled or not (user:Jdforrester (WMF) perhaps?) but its not something that will be taken lightly. You can choose not to use it - click edit source rather than edit, or disable it for your account - see the FAQ at the top of the page. There is also the related bugzilla:50929 that you may be interested in. Thryduulf (talk) 06:27, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
      - I've already chosen not to use it. My concern is the other editors that are run off and will never return because of it. This makes the encyclopedia much weaker and not stronger. The decision to turn it on was clearly made lightly because the blamed thing isn't ready yet. I feel like I'm talking to Nancy Pelosi here... "you gotta turn on the Visual Editor to find out what's in it" and now we're stuck. That is the wrong way to run a volunteer-user-driven system.--Paul McDonald (talk) 14:28, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Confusing and erratic

This is all very confusing and counter-intuitive, and it doesn't even seem to work the same way twice. I can't help but think that something isn't working correctly! There doesn't seem to be a way to add new references, for example. Yes, there's a "create new reference" tab, but all it does is create a blank reference that can't be edited - presumably it isn't meant to do this!

Templates sometimes let you add new parameters, and sometimes don't, and the ones I've tried to use (convert and cite journal, so far) either output gooblidigook or nothing at all. It doesn't even behave the same way with the same template on repeated attempts. Obviously, I haven't saved any of the edits I've produced so far with VisEd, because nothing I've tried to write with it was functional.

Something is clearly screwy (and possibly at my end, not yours), but I can't figure out what. I get that wikimarkup isn't intuitive for new users, but I can't help thinking that neither is this.

At the very least, the instructions on the Help page need to be greatly improved. Half the time, I can't figure out what they mean. "Add parameters", for instance, isn't really sufficient as the entire description of a particular step. Add parameters how, exactly? Anaxial (talk) 17:03, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Does the 'create new reference' tab not pop up a window in which to type text? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 00:21, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Clicking on the "Insert reference" icon and then "create new source", and finally "insert reference", does get to a dialog/pop-up box where a new source can be added, but the UX is poor. The shadow text in the search box should be "Search for an existing source"; "Create a new source for the reference" [the "a" should be added, as well as "for the reference"] and "Use an existing source for the reference:" [the colon should be added] are parallel options and should be in the same font (the second is now bolded, the first is not); the list of existing sources should be indented, so it's clear that they fall under the second option, rather than being options in their own right. The "insert reference" button should be on the upper right, not the lower right

Anyway, after those three steps, sometimes the "Reference" dialog box does not come up to specify what the new source should be. I didn't see that behavior initially. But after opening and closing it a number of times (without action; I was working on understanding the process), and similarly with the "Insert Reference" dialog box, I do indeed see the same thing as Anaxial - the clicking "Insert reference" no longer produces the "Reference" dialog box; the software simply inserts a reference that has no content. And then it gives errors after the save occurs: "Cite error: The opening <ref> tag is malformed or has a bad name (see the help page)." That's because it inserted <ref/> (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:John_Broughton/sandbox&diff=564179205&oldid=564134153 this edit).

And no, I can't get figure out how to get VE to do that again. But I'll add two another problems that appear to be related:

During the edit session, at the place where VE had inserted two adjacent blank citations, the text looked like this "[1][2]". But looking at the diff, there was only a single instance of actual wikitext that had been added: <ref/>. And when I went back to to edit the page in VE, it now only displayed this "[1]".

In that edit session, and in a following edit session for the same article, if I (a) make a change to the article - say, just a bit of text, right after the problem footnote; (b) go to the edit summary box, put in some text there; (c) return to the article [and maybe add some text - not sure if that is needed], and (d) return to the edit summary box - then I can't backspace over existing text - I can only go forward (continue to type text).

I really didn't think that VE was unstable, but I'm beginning to have my doubts. Also, for Anaxial's question, "Add parameters how, exactly?", I had the same puzzlement, and I'll comment separately about that. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 04:51, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

John has pretty much covered it there. In short, yes, sometimes it brings up a pop-up box, and sometimes it doesn't. There doesn't seem to be any pattern to this that I can discern. Anaxial (talk) 07:44, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

This is weird; I've tried it 10 or 15 times in a row and it always comes up (although I did discover an unrelated, and kooky, bug by doing so). John, how many times did you have to click? What browsers/OS are you on? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 06:57, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Without TemplateData

Hello, dear colleagues!

Add the parameters form template to see all the options. For example, you can add a button to "All parameters", then he is not with regards to TemplateData, or not come to all the template parameters (in brackets {{{}}}). I still need to add the ability to edit the template TemplateData, once in this form with the words: "This parameter has no description ',' This template has no description ',' This parameter is not specified "required", "Please, add them", ... . --Xusinboy Bekchanov (talk) 04:38, 14 July 2013 (UTC).

Which template? The code to specify/document all the parameter needs to be added to the individual template documentation page. Work is in progress to document the most important template Wikipedia:VisualEditor/TemplateData. If there is a specific template you need it might be possible to speed thing up. However there is about a day delay before the documentation can be used in the visual editor.--Salix (talk): 11:07, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

If not <TemplateData>, the program itself can not determine the parameters?

Well, then, we are using a bot will add <TemplateData> </ TemplateData> for each template.

Inside <TemplateData> impossible to use interwiki? https://uz.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andoza%3ABilgiquti_aholi_punkti%2Fdoc&diff=1576912&oldid=1576911 --Xusinboy Bekchanov (talk) 17:22, 15 July 2013 (UTC).

No links or other markup are currently permitted in TemplateData. See Bugzilla:51311 for a request to alter this. Thryduulf (talk) 18:27, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Error: Invalid error code

Attempted to make this fairly simple edit, the VE spent ages trying to save and came back with "Error: Invalid error code". I pressed the second "save" button again, it came back with the same. Gave up and did it in wikitext - David Gerard (talk) 09:06, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

It is known that this error is generated when your session times out (see bugzilla:50424), with the session starting when you open the page for reading. Is it possible this happened here? Thryduulf (talk) 09:30, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Pretty plausible, it's a cite-heavy and hence complex page. Wonder if there's room for optimisation there - David Gerard (talk) 10:28, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

James commented that they hope to have the fix for that bug finished and deployed tomorrow, so hopefully that will at least help. There probably is scope for optimisation when dealing with cite templates given the plethora of bugs surrounding citations and the UI for adding them. Bugzilla:50475 seems potentially relevant as well. Thryduulf (talk) 10:37, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

I have had the same experience several times. The last time it happened my edit was saved when I again hit the edit button. Gandydancer (talk) 11:00, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Hmm. I don't know if this is related, but I've just opened brand new bug T53319. I got that message when trying to test the bug reported in the section immediately below this one and realized that even though VE hung up at the save stage, it actually did save. Since yours did not save, David, perhaps these are not the same issue? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:16, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Possibly this is related to the server issues I've just discovered we're currently having. I understand they aren't related to VE, but will certainly impact it. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:30, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

I also attempted a simple edit (this) which failed. I proceeded to copy the source text to my sandbox, then edit using VE, save & copy the source back to the target article. Just wanted to let you know that this actually worked. Perhaps the problem is due to the size of the original article (seeing as the sandbox edit did work). CRC43 (talk) 11:48, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Oi. :/ On the plus side, I was able to edit that page with VE, so it does work at least sometimes. :) What happened when you tried? Did you get the same message? Can you check to see if it happens if you try a similar edit again? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 22:29, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Your java is buggy

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

You already know this, but I'll repeat this every few days until you fix it: get the opt-out out of "gadgets" and make turning on VE involve javascript. Being off should involve nothing. Right now, your code is repeatedly turning on VE despite very very very clear instructions in my preferences for it to go bugger off. — $Llywelyn II$ 11:43, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

It's volunteer-written JS, not staff-written JS. I'm investigating the problem with it now, having just noticed myself. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 12:25, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Problem identified. It's nothing to do with the javascript being buggy; parsoid is DoSing the API cluster, which has implications for gadgets functioning. Mark Bergsma is looking into it now. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 12:30, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Damn, it is still coming up. Please remove it. Hawkeye7 (talk) 12:49, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Hawkeye, the developers are working fast but technical bugs are not fixed automatically. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 12:58, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Unfortunately, we are having problems with the servers right now that are being worked on. These may affect the performance of any and all gadgets (and non-gadgets) and is not directly related to VisualEditor. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:29, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Should now be fixed :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 07:04, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Visual Editor exhumes itself and forces itself on me

Moments ago, while I was editing an article using the editing tool that works properly, the properly-disabled mess misnamed Visual Editor restored itself as my default editing tool. It seems to have been returned to its well-deserved grave after I resaved my "gadget" preferences, but why should any editor have to watch out for this dysfunction to recur? Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 12:59, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

This also happened to me this morning. I do not like the Visual Editor for adding or changing categories but prefer to use "HotCat". I used HotCat to update several articles and then that option disappeared and VE was back. I have changed my preferences in the Gadgets tab several times (which I would never have found except for a mention in a previous feedback talk), but VE keeps coming back and HotCat is still not available. VE takes MUCH longer to edit categories compared to HotCat. Jllm06 (talk) 13:10, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

See two sections above this one. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 13:13, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

It just did it again. Waist Deep in the Big Muddy. Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 13:19, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Unfortunately, we are having problems with the servers right now that are being worked on. These may affect the performance of any and all gadgets (and non-gadgets) and is not directly related to VisualEditor. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:28, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

And when "Gadgets" came back, "Remove VisualEditor from the user interface" had been unchecked"! That's certainly a VE-specific error. Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 13:46, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

It's not a VE-specific error unless VE is causing the problem. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:47, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

So if the lousy kludge that supposedly turns off VE doesn't work, that's not a VE-specific error? What next,will you argue about what the meaning of "is" is? Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 15:16, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

The argument is about the meaning of "specific". If all gadgets are affected by the same error then the error isn't specific to one of the gadgets. An analogy: If your city loses power and your toaster stops running then the power loss isn't a toaster-specific problem. It can still be annoying if you wanted toast. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:45, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

And when the only one of my "gadgets" whose marking is changed is the one that relates to VE, that isn't VE-specific? You folks are really in denial. Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 16:54, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

If its needed again the following css can hide the visual editor.

div#p-views > ul  > li#ca-edit:not(.istalk):nth-last-child(4) { display: none; }
.mw-editsection-link-primary { display: none; }
.mw-editsection-link-secondary { visibility: visible !important; content: "source"; }
.mw-editsection-bracket { visibility: hidden !important; }

It's supplied with no warranty, expect it to mess up on some namespaces and hide normal edit links as well, kill section 0 edit links. It may also break if you have any custom css js or gadgets or if any software changes.--Salix (talk): 17:23, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, Hullaballo, we're in denial. Because of the hundreds of opt-out users, you are literally the only one reporting this problem persisting beyond the gadgets issue.Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 07:05, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Won't let me copy

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This new system won't let me copy from one edit to another Jørgen88 (talk) 13:22, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Correct, VE doesn't allow you paste in wikitext (say, from a diff, or from text that you can see when using the old editor). Or, perhaps to put it better, you can copy wikitext, but anything other than plain text is likely to be surrounded by nowiki tags, by VE, making templates and citations and image links and such non-functional.

VE also doesn't allow you, if you have a page open in (VE) edit mode, to copy/paste footnotes or templates or images from that page into another VE editing window (or, for that matter, into the same VE editing window). -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:22, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Indeed; the devs are working on that. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 07:09, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Citation system unclear

There are now two sets of apparent endnotes in this article, created by different forms in the WYSIWYG editor. Please update the help to make it clear whether to use Transclusion for citations. Thank you. Mragsdale (talk) 16:04, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

@Mragsdale: What is the name of the article with two sets of apparent endnotes? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:42, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

His only edit in the 30 days prior to this message was here, and there is no problem with the endnote formatting, so it must be an article that he didn't edit. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:10, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

@John Broughton: I was working on Burning of Washington. I was confused because some of the endnotes are transclusions and others are citations, and I was uncertain which to use.

It looks like it is using WP:REFGROUPs to separate out the explanatory footnote from the bibliographic citations, and {{sfn}} for the Help:Shortened footnotes. It's an uncommon style on Wikipedia. If those pages don't help, then you can find people at either WT:CITE or at WP:Help desk who will be able to explain it all. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:45, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Duplicate parameters in a template

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53406

I don't believe there is any situation where it's acceptable to have two identically-named parameters within a template ("url=", "url=", for example). But VE doesn't prevent that from happening. It should. -- John Broughton (♫♫)

There does not seem to be any checking of parameter. Setting the "required" field to true in the templatedata means the parameter is is automatically added to the list in the lhs of the dialog box, but it does not force any checks than the value is actually set. This might be desirable behaviour as many templates have some default if no parameters are set. Required could be taken to mean "should" rather than "must".--Salix (talk): 20:46, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

If, for example, in the {{cite web}} template, the title parameter is left blank, then the template generates an error message into the wikitext, "Missing or empty |title= ". That's what I mean by "required" fields - the template fails if any required field is not completed.

It's possibly a good idea to have three categories of fields - required, suggested, and optional, but if so, someone should start a separate thread. This thread is really about multiple, identically-named template parameters, and I'm going to stick by my claim that VE should prevent that from happening, until someone presents a counter-example. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:16, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

There is a bug for ensuring required field are fill in. T52747--Salix (talk): 21:37, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Can you give an example of a template with multiple identical parameters? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 07:11, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

@Okeyes (WMF): There is no such template possible, what he means is that the Dialog lets you create a template call which has two identical parameter calls which breaks the template or ad least renders one of the values useless so it should not allow you to do that.

Aha. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:13, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

People do it accidentally in the old editing environment. I'd be happy to have a technological solution that would prevent this, or at least flag it for review before saving. If no one has started a bug report, then please let me know. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:48, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

I didn't find one, so I opened one. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 22:38, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Edit transluction button

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

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52854

The Edit transluction button should follow with window frame. For example: if I showing a second half of any infobox, the popup button should appear on the current visible place of the infobox, not stay on the header. Rezonansowy (talk) 20:51, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

You mean the puzzle-piece icon? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 08:17, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Yep, that's it. --Rezonansowy (talk) 13:21, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

I'll stick it in bugzilla; not sure if there's a way to do it in a non-annoying fashion, but we can find out :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:51, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Interaction with Flow

I just wanted to point this discussion on MediaWiki which would indicate that we will, once again, be unable to disable VisualEditor once Flow arrives to replace our current talk pages.—Kww(talk) 21:46, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Sad :-( Good way to make some active editors find something else to do. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 22:04, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

This message needs straightening out without delay. @Jdforrester:, is Brandon's statement there accurate? The claim all along has been that the visual editor will not be made mandatory - if this has changed, when and why was it changed? - David Gerard (talk) 22:24, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

We'll (always, I believe) be able to use regular markup on articles. They're going to be forcing us to use Flow (i.e. VisEd) on talk pages—user talk pages for a while, but eventually all talk pages, I believe. Which sucks. Just for the record. Ignatz mice•talk 22:48, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

So new users using AfC will be using Flow to create article drafts? How entertaining. --j⚛e decker ^talk 00:34, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

This comment (from the person leading the Flow project at the moment) is particularly interesting: "Parsoid does not do well with templates. Ergo, we are designing with the assumption that we can't use templates." And for performance reasons, consideration is being given to not storing talk pages as a set of edits (diffs). I'm not sure how all this will impact bots and automated tools like WikiEd, but I do know that those are used a lot outside of articlespace. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:07, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

I can't speak for the Flow team, and I don't think James can either. His job is to build the VE itself, and deploy it as the mainspace editor. Our statements there remain true; wikimarkup will remain available. What is happening with Flow is outside of our remit - we simply build the code and make it work. Other teams who use it are doing so at their own recognizance, under their own parameters. Having said that, I suspect the wikimarkup/VE/stripped-down-VE/whatever question is going to come up internally, and is going to be informed by what users have said about it so far. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 06:17, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

All we need is a commitment that Flow will not be rolled out if there isn't a "source" or "Wikimarkup" editor available for "messages", or if templates aren't available. I realize neither the Flow team nor the VE team can make such a commitment, but it needs to be made. I also realize that this isn't the correct forum, but comments to that effect in the correct forum are being ignored. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 06:30, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Yeah; I can't make that commitment myself, but I agree the need for it is something that should be surfaced. I'm going to be in the office for 3 weeks from Thursday (visiting for personal business, actually) and I'm going to chase it up when I'm there if it hasn't been sorted. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 07:12, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Insert icons stop working

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53340

(1) Click the "transclusion" icon

(2) In the lower left of the resulting dialog box, hover over the "+" sign until the bracket pair ("[ ]") is visible; click on that.

(3) Click on "[ ] Content"

(4) Click on "Apply changes"

Now none of the "insert" icons work, and a number of other icons on the tool bar also don't work. (The user guide is silent as to what these brackets are supposed to do.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:33, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

I can reproduce that issue, and i cannot find any other bugreport dealing with the same problem. Reported as bug 51340. Excirial^{(Contact me,Contribs)} 06:29, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, John and Excirial both :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 07:14, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Issues with the template dialog process

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52354

The process of adding information (parameters) to a template, in the dialog box (popup window) has a number of issues that make editing significantly more confusing:

After selecting a template and clicking "Add template", the left side of the box should read (in descending order): (1) Dialog box name (which should be "New template", not "Transclusion"); (2) the name of the new template [done now, but this should not be clickable - see (6)]; (3) A title, "Required parameters" [new], (4) a list of the required parameters [done now; done now], (5) a title, "Added parameters" [new], (6) A button, "Add a parameter", which when clicked, changes the right side of the box to the "Add parameter" dialog; and (7) a list of added parameters [done now; may be blank]. The button should be greyed out if the editor cannot add any new parameters (the only allowed parameters are required; all possible added parameters have been added)

After clicking "Add template", the left side of the dialog box highlights the template name, and always shows, on the right side, the "Add parameter" dialog. This is wrong if there are any required parameters. What should be highlighted on the left is the first required parameter. Editors should be completing the required parameters first, then turning to adding optional parameters.

When a editor clicks, on the left side, on a parameter, the right side shows an input box. It isn't clear, after the editor has added the desired information, what to do. Pressing [Enter] (or [Return]) just puts a newline character into the box (starts a new line). Clicking on "Apply changes", which seems like a possible solution, actually saves the template and exits the dialog box - that's frustrating. There should be a "Done" button that closes the edit window, and moves the left-side focus to (a) the top-most required parameter without information, or (b) the "Add a parameter" button/option.

When a parameter listed in the left side of the box gets its information added by the editor, the visible format of the parameter does not change. This is a particular problem if there are a lot of mandatory parameters, and the editor is not adding information linearly. It would be helpful if the text of the name of the parameter were to turn green once the parameter has been filled out; that's also positive feedback to an editor looking at anything with more than a few required parameters.

How to add a parameter is not obvious, as indicated by the frustration voiced by an editor previously. It looks like an editor can click on a parameter in the list, and then click the boxed parameter name towards the right side of the areas that has turned blue (that is, to click on what appears to be a button with the parameter name within it). But clicking on that "button" does nothing. Nor does clicking on a parameter result in the name of that parameter being put into the search box. The secret of adding a parameter [I guess; I've not been able to figure out anything else] is to ignore the fact that parameter names can be selected by clicking on them, instead (a) typing the parameter name into the search box, and (b) pressing [Enter]. I admit to being baffled by the rationale here: why make (the parameter name) clickable, yet have the click do absolutely nothing useful? Clicking on a small button within the parameter description, or double-clicking (or best, either way) is much more what editors would expect. [I also note that the user guide is not helpful, saying in its entirety, on this issue: "You can add parameters or edit those already listed."]

What makes the "type in the parameter name and press enter" approach particularly problematical is that if you misspell the name of an optional parameter, you get no feedback that you have done so. That's because VE assumes you're adding a parameter that's not covered by templatedata, but still is valid. That's a necessary assumption now, but clicking to add a parameter, rather than typing to add one, would remove the potential for this problem.

When adding a parameter, the list of parameters includes a description (e.g., "Full date when the source was published; if unknown, use accessdate ..."). It would be extremely useful if this description was also visible when the enter enters information for that parameter. (Bug exists for this, I believe.)

VE should prevent an editor from adding a template to the page text unless information has been entered for all required parameters. This could be done by greying out the final button (currently "Apply changes"), or by an appropriate error message if that button were clicked while a required parameter was still blank. If the first approach is taken, then it's particularly important to show the editor his/her progress in filling out parameters (the fourth suggestion, above), perhaps even turning red the required parameters that still require information.

The final step, for a different process, adding images, is to click a button labeled "Insert media". Similarly, the final step for the template process should be a button labeled "Insert template", rather than "Apply changes". -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:38, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
Great suggestions all. I've stuck them in the pertinent bug, and also suggested to James and Philippe that I be given some time (read: ordered ;p) to produce a single doc basically outlining all the concerns and proposals we have from all users in one place - and then sit down with whichever devs are responsible for template editing and talk through it with them when I'm in town. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 07:47, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Allow wikicodes to work instead of assuming nowiki

Let be honest, it's pretty rare that the nowiki tags are used. The Visual Editor should allow the contributor to use wikicodes. In my opinion, the more simple would to have a tick box where one can tick it on or off if he wants the Visual Editor to assume "nowiki" for its contributions or to allow wikicodes (i.e. mainly [[ ]] or {{ }}) to work for its contributions. Thanks, Amqui (talk) 03:20, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

That might make the most sense, but then again it might not. The relevant bug has been "resolved"—as of tomorrow, there'll be a little warning if someone does enter wikitext (defined as two or more square brackets, two or more curvy brackets, two or more single quotemarks, or three or more tildes in a row; two or more equals signs, one or more asterisks, or one or more hashtags on a new line.) Ignatz mice•talk 03:37, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Having the nowiki tags is very deliberate, and it's not because we assume users who type wikimarkup in want it to be rendered as rich-text - it's because typing markup into a rich-text editor and having it render can cause all sorts of breakage. I think it would generally be a Bad Thing (tm) for us to go back on that. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 05:51, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

If the purpose of the excessive nowiki tags it to protect VE from its own bugs, does that mean it is temporary? It seems pretty obvious that the vast majority of the time an editor types "[[" or "{{" into VE, they do not want it nowiki'd. VQuakr (talk) 06:07, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

To my knowledge it's not to protect against bugs, it's because markup going into the VE causes bugs - it's a design decision, and a perfectly sensible one. Building a rich-text editor is....an incredibly difficult problem: building a single surface that could handle rich-text and markup editing is harder. Having said that, it's possible I'm misunderstanding, and I'll poke people to work that out. But I wouldn't describe it as a temporary band-aid for bugs, because it's neither temporary nor to cope with existing bugs; it copes with the bugs not-having-it would introduce. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 06:09, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

I can see it potentially as being sensible, particularly given the WYSIWYG concept. However, it seems reasonable for there to be a tool within VE to change entered raw Wikicode to a properly formatted VE display (with an error message if it's not properly formatted, or if VE can't handle it). The code is there in VE, as VE can read articles not generated by VE. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 06:39, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

That sounds workable, certainly; my one concern would be that the development work could distract. By that I mean, obviously we have a fixed number of hours developers can put into a large number of bugs, and so we have to prioritise. One of the long-term suggestions is to have it made easy to switch between VE and markup mode, with changes brought across. I'd worry that fixes like this, which are an interim solution, will slow down the fixing of other bugs or the development of a replacement tool. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 07:50, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

@Arthur Rubin:: You can already do this: add a transclusion, but instead of adding a template, click the "add content" button in the lower-left corner. See if that makes you happier. — This, that and the other (talk) 11:03, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

This suggestion has been made before, and it's reasonable, but what needs to be understood is that it would be very difficult to implement. It isn't even clear how a visual editor ought to handle it. How should the editor react if the user has entered [[ but not yet the closing brackets? Should the next stretch of article be shown as a link? There are probably ways of handling such issues, but no solution that wouldn't consume huge amounts of developer time, which is a very constrained resource. Looie496 (talk) 15:04, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
- Perhaps what is needed is a specific module or something that can be called (clicked on or with a keyboard shortcut) that tells VE to treat everything that follows as wikitext until the user closes or otherwise concludes the module (clicking the icon again or repeating the shortcut). VE would not attempt to render anything in that module (with the possible exception of syntax highlighting) until it is concluded. At which point the code would be parsed and either rendered or give an error.
  From a power user point of view though, the absolute best would be for VE to just have a setting for how it deals with wikitext. In mode 1 it would do as now and assume the user wanted to enter the literal string. In mode 2 it would parse it as wikitext when saving or previewing (assuming a wysiwyg preview). At no time in either mode would the editor display it as anything other than the literal text entered until the time of saving - no on-the-fly rendering or anything like that - if a user wants to see it as wysiwyg they use the wysiwyg tools. The mode switch needs to be configurable per edit, with a wiki-wide default overrideable by user preference. Thryduulf (talk) 15:40, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
  And then we'd have people doing wikimarkup for half and edit but not for the other half. I think you'd need something that you can toggle as you go, like ctrl-foo and I type in wikimarkup for a while; ctrl-bar and I'm back to VisualEditor mode. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:57, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
  - Do you mean on-the-fly switching between editors while preserving the in-progress edit? If so then that would be good. Thryduulf (talk) 21:11, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
    I was thinking of something simpler (at least, I think it'd be simpler), which is to stay in VE but to let people type wikicode for a minute, without having to have everything in that edit be treated as wikicode.
    Switching between editing environments (while preserving in-progress edit) has been proposed. It's supposed to be very difficult, but a one-time, one-way switch from VE to the old editor didn't seem to make the devs as nervous as the infinitely-back-and-forth idea did. So perhaps we will someday see something like this. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:28, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
    Ah right. I suppose a simple way would be something like a <wiki> tag that told VE to treat everything between it and </wiki> as wikitext (i.e. do the exact opposite of <nowiki>). Thryduulf (talk) 22:41, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

The way I imagined it being coded is that the non-default "power user" mode would behave exactly the same as existing, except that after the user clicked "save changes" the program would remove any nowiki tags from the change before saving. Since this behavior would only be for users that requested it, there would be no need for changes to the on-the-fly rendering. Intentional use of nowiki is pretty uncommon; a "power user" that wanted to add them could use the "edit source" or temporarily change their preference settings. VQuakr (talk) 22:56, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Template data for coord and other templates using overloading

The {{coord}} templates makes heavy use of Function overloading with a variety of different syntaxes:

{{Coord | 57 | 18 | 22 | N | 4 | 27 | 32 | W | display=inline}} 57°18′22″N 4°27′32″W / 57.30611°N 4.45889°W / 57.30611; -4.45889
{{Coord | 44.112 | -87.913 | display=inline}} 44°06′43″N 87°54′47″W / 44.112°N 87.913°W / 44.112; -87.913

the format depends on the arity of the unnamed parameters. The template data for this is quite awkward but simplest to have the 2nd, 3rd and 4th parameters as optional and the 5th parameter for longitude degrees. There is a T51743 for this but its been closed as WONTFIX with a suggestion that we split coord up into a number a separate templates with a different syntax for each. Argh.--Salix (talk): 07:21, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Yeah :/. That article notes "If a method is designed with an excessive number of overloads, it may be difficult for developers to discern which overload is being called simply by reading the code." This is evidently true for code, as well as devs. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 07:33, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, and {{convert}} is arguably worse. The underlying issue is that the VE developers want each parameter to have a fixed meaning and the community clearly hasn't been enforcing that. Prior to TemplateData, it was relatively easy to give multiple examples of different input styles on a doc page, and it seems most people were okay with that. Now, the restrictive TemplateData format doesn't allow for that and there doesn't appear to be any easy solution. Dragons flight (talk) 07:39, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Difficult to add template at top of article - layout problems, VE not WYSIWYG

I added {{unref}} to PRITV: while in VE, it sent the content of the article right to the bottom below the infobox and the existing {{uncat-stub}} template. Looked ridiculous. I saved it with appropriate edit summary - and on saving the page the result was poor but not as bad: the "unref" template was appearing level with the top of the infobox, so centred within a narrower area rather than across top of whole article, but much better than it had appeard while editing in VE. So two different problems:

VE is not being WYSIWYG: the effect of adding the template looked a total mess while editing, though it was not as bad when I had saved the page
But it is difficult/impossible to add a template at very top of an article, above the infobox, when this is the appropriate place.

PamD 07:43, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Hmn; I'm looking at the article now and it renders fine. Odd :/. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 07:52, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Well it would - I went back into the article and cleaned it up in Edit Source, as ~~usual~~ often! PamD 09:06, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Aha! Okie-dokes, I'll investigate more thoroughly. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 09:06, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

So, it works for me. I added it to the whitespace at the very top of the article; how did you do it? Having said that, it really shouldn't be placing it on the same line as the infobox. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 09:18, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Any progress on making Hidden Comments visible to all editors in VE?

I've looked at T51603 but that seems to be inconclusive discussion which hasn't been added to since 17 June. Is there any progress anywhere on this vital facility: the ability to leave messages in an article, as Hidden Comments, which will be seen automatically by every editor who goes to edit that article, or that small section of that article (so, no, an edit notice popping up for the whole page does not do the trick)? This seems to me to be a very important feature we mustn't lose, but the discussion at that bug seems extremely relaxed about it. Is there another bug I'm missing? Is it regarded as a priority? Is it likely to get fixed anytime soon? PamD 08:06, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Not that I can see; I'm going to chase it when the SF people wake up. I surfaced this to James and the people making the go/no-go as something that needs resolving before the IP rollout, which makes me hope it's in the Monday deployment, but I'm not sure. I'll find out. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 08:08, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

I've figured out how we could add templates to Wikipedia pages that would only be visible during VE's edit mode. That could be applied to accomplish the same purpose as hidden comments, but it would mean an entirely new system for adding hidden comments. So possible, but probably not desirable. Better to have the devs figure out how to show the current hidden comments, if at all possible. However, if there is an urgent need for a solution at some page, we can discuss the hack I have in mind. Dragons flight (talk) 08:18, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

I think it's a general fix we need - really, the use case for hidden comments ("do not touch this bit!") is widespread - Kashmir, BrEng versus AmEng, Jerusalem... Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 08:20, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

There are two separate requirements: (a) Templates like {{Use dmy dates}}, which are standard notes for the eyes of editors, and (b) freehand Hidden Comments like "Please do not make significant changes to the lead without discussing them first on the article's talk page." in London. We need a solution for both categories. PamD 10:26, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Yep, bugzilla:49806. Also reported as an important/critical thing. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 10:39, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) A way to combine them would be to make a template, perhaps called something like "Note to editors" that took an unnamed parameter as a freehand note (e.g. {{note to editors|Do not change this to KBE, see [[Knight Bachelor]]}}) or a named parameter for a standard message, e.g. perhaps {{note to editors|msg=Use British English|date=July 2013}}. VE could be configured to display this template in editing mode, maybe: Note to editors: Do not change this to KBE, see Knight Bachelor.

Alternatively it might be better to have a defined class of templates display in VE mode only. This would allow more than one template and would probably be much easier for internationalisation purposes. So the {{Use British English}} and similar templates would just need this class applied. Is that something that TemplateData could do (I don't know much about TD)?. User:Thryduulf 10:54, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, hidden text is still not showing in VE - which means that lots of instructions to (new) editors who are using VE are invisible. For example, personal sandboxes contain this instruction:  I hope that was not an important instruction, because it's likely to be overwritten, a lot.

Overall, this is, well, frustrating. It really wouldn't have taken a lot of programming for Parsoid to find invisible text, make it visible (as with the example above), and either prevent it from being edited in VE, though still deletable (easiest) or allow editing, with zero length text strings resulting in deletion by Parsoid. Instead, we've got the potential for a lot of stealth damage to occur to articles (either violating instructions, inadvertently, or just inadvertently deleting them. Then the choices are (assuming recent changes patrollers find these edits), either lots of reverts of otherwise fine edits, or lots of manual, tailored edits to put back the hidden comments but keep the rest of an otherwise good edit. Very frustrating. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 04:10, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Any progress on ability to see the article while adding template/category?

It's nothing like as important as the hidden comments issue, but it was annoying on day one of VE and is still b****y irritating for a regular wikignoming editor:

Open stub in VE (Prelude to a Million Years)
Open transclusion dialog box, remove {{stub}}
Start to add {{novel-stub}}, then remember that there are decade divisions
Think "No, I can't remember which year the article says the book was published", and can't see the article because the dialog box totally obscures it
Swear at VE
Close transclusion dialog box
Read the publication date, 1933
Re-open transclusion box
Re-delete {{stub}}
Add {{1930s-novel-stub}}
Continue, finish edit, save page.

Is it un-reasonable to ask to be able to see the content of a page while choosing stub templates or other transclusions, or while choosing categories (eg Category:1937 births or Category:Villages in Żyrardów County)? T51969 isn't showing much/any progress. PamD 09:18, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Not unreasonable to me; I've left a comment asking for an update. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 09:54, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

new editing!

Superb! Much better and easier and visual. Super48paul (talk) 11:37, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Great to hear! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 12:33, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Word of encouragement

VE was working as expected in Safari on an iTouch, despite it not being a supported browser yet. (Until Safari decided to crash, that is. But I am using an iOS 7 beta.) Ignatz mice•talk 12:29, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Yay :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 12:33, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

New parameter didn't show up in {cite web}

While making this edit, the added parameter (website=[[iOS 7]]) showed up, once I'd changed it in the transclusion-editor, in the ref-editor. However, clicking "Apply changes" in the ref-editor did not make it appear in the WISYWIG displayed text; I thought I'd have to go into source and add it. It did show up once I'd saved the page, though! (Note: I could not reproduce the problem with these edits to my sandbox—the new parameters did appear after applying changes.) Ignatz mice•talk 12:58, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Hum. That's very strange :/. Let me know if it repeats? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 13:16, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Color picker

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

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53409

When the user edits for example, a {{Legend}} template, color picker may be very useful. We should also think about adding there a table of basic colors. --Rezonansowy (talk) 13:32, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

I believe that something like this has been suggested before, but I couldn't find a bug report/enhancement request for it just now. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:09, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Still can't add text to an external link

See edit. Is there a way as yet to add text to an external link, rather than dropping a bare link into an article? I couldn't find one in the interface - David Gerard (talk) 13:51, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

The workflow, as I understand it, is:

Add the text you want displayed
Select that text
Hit the add link button
Enter the URL you want for that text
Hit Enter.

Dragons flight (talk) 14:00, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

That's ridiculously undiscoverable - David Gerard (talk) 16:34, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Agree. JustAnswer uses a similar workflow, but it has it noted in the FAQ. (Twice, or more.) — Arthur Rubin (talk) 17:17, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

It's the same process as adding an internal link, and this fact is noted in the documentation at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/User guide#Editing links. It needs to be at WP:External links#How to link as well. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:15, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Wormshill

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

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53369

Wormshill:a FA : correctly detected a spurious */blockquote* line 83- then mangled the markup on the last lines. On watchlist- not edited the evidence -- Clem Rutter (talk) 14:53, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. Reporting. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:59, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

edit summary?

where do i write my edit summary? Kingturtle = (talk) 15:23, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

You can find the "edit summary" when you click on "save page". A dialogue opens where you can also see your changes. TeamGale (talk) 15:30, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

excited and concerned

Good luck with the visual editor... the users I support have been hoping for this or years! I just hope this doesn't hide things like using templates and other more advanced functionality too deep. But I like that the regular edit is still there. Tenbergen (talk) 19:17, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you, Tenbergen. :) There's still obviously a lot of room for improvement, but I think that the community is coming up with some great suggestions for better workflows, in addition to finding bugs that need to be repaired. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 23:18, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Template:Coord

In adding geocoordinates to Brooklyn Preparatory School I failed for half an hour to understand how to do it with VE, and finally fell back on Edit Source and did it the old way as outlined in MOS:COORD. Will someone add the links from there to whatever page tells how to do it with VE? Jim.henderson (talk) 19:41, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Based on #Template data for coord and other templates using overloading, it sounds like the geocoodinates templates will have to be re-written before they will get along with VE.

Have you tried adding any other templates? I found it easier to figure out the process when I was working with a very simple one, like a {{fact}} tag. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:19, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes sorry for that. I wrote the doc for that template only the other day and was not sure how it would work. There is a delay between writing the documentation and it being live in the VE system. Looks like its just gone live and does not work. Currently the only way to get it to work is to specify every parameter so you would have to use the degrees minutes and seconds for both latitude and longitude. I've created a new template {{coordDec}} which lets you use signed decimal degrees and works with the visual editor.--Salix (talk): 22:34, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Review your changes at article creation doesn't wrap

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Hi, I created a new user page with VE. Upon Save I clicked [Review your changes]. But the review presents a plain <pre> tag, so the wiki source extends way off to the right. VE could apply a named style to this pre tag that sets its wrap style to something more useful, like white-space: pre-wrap;. This is T52180, although it sounds like behavior changed since June when that was filed. Thanks for VE! -- S Page (WMF) (talk) 21:09, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, Sage. :) Appreciate your updating that bug. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 23:14, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Blanking of last section on page results in ===<nowiki/>=== tag

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52100

Not sure if this has been reported already. Noted on an IP's edit[4] Risker (talk) 00:57, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Hmm. I think it's this one: [5]. Thanks, Risker. PEarley (WMF) (talk) 01:31, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

How did it go to Vedit mode?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53456

After saving an V-edit on Shiva, I saved the page. From contents, I clicked on a section. Instead of going to the section, it went in Vedit mode. --Redtigerxyz ^Talk 09:48, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Although I found another bug when testing this, @Redtigerxyz:, I could not replicate it. :) Can you edit something and see if it happens again? If so, can you let me know what browser and operating system you are working on? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:18, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

using Chrome. I could not replicate it either by simple testing. I removed and reorganized/copy-paste sections in the previous edits. May be it led to the behaviour? Didn't test that again. --Redtigerxyz ^Talk 13:53, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

@Mdes nni(WMF): Replicated on Narayana Gosain Temple, copy-paste and reorg of sections caused same effect. --Redtigerxyz ^Talk 18:27, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi User:Redtigerxyz, I also tried to replicate this, and couldn't. It's a very odd behavior. Can you tell us your web browser and operating system information? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:39, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): Chrome Version 28.0.1500.72 m and Windows 7 Home edition. It happens only when I remove/reorganize sections. Redtigerxyz ^Talk 15:30, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

That's about as different from me as you can get, since I'm using Safari or Firefox on a Mac. I'll go search through Bugzilla to see whether anyone else has reported this, and if not, then I'll add a bug for it. Thank you for telling us about this. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:20, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Dustbin icon not intuitive for "unlink"

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53464

The dustbin/trashcan icon doesn't seem intuitive for "unlink". An icon of a breaking link (on the lines of the one here) would be more natural. The dustbin seems as if the linked word or phrase might be deleted completely. I remember seeing someone complaining about this, and Maggie asking for ideas for a better icon, a while back, but can't find it in Bugzilla so not sure if it went any further. Sorry to be vague. PamD 17:59, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Pam, another editor did bring this up recently. His/her feeling also was that a "broken chain" icon was more self-explanatory than the trashbin. Anyone else have preferences on this? PEarley (WMF) (talk) 18:15, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree with Pam on this, a dustbin suggests binning the whole thing rather than binning just the link. Thryduulf (talk) 18:24, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

A broken chain is also used in other visual editors to mean breaking a link - David Gerard (talk) 19:14, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

What about this icon with the link icon in the background? TeamGale (talk) 20:06, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Ooh, that could be nice. And how about the rollover? "Unlink" instead of "Remove"? PEarley (WMF) (talk) 20:15, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

"Unlink" is perfect for me. Kind of makes more sense. If others agree it's a "go" for me :D TeamGale (talk) 20:20, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

"Unlink" gets my support too. Thryduulf (talk) 20:41, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

"unlink" is the right text - David Gerard (talk) 20:43, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Okay, looks like it's leaning in the direction of either broken link/crossed-out link as the icon, and "unlink" as the rollover text. I'll wait a day or so before making the request to let anyone else weigh in. PEarley (WMF) (talk) 20:52, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

*weighs in* I totally support the modification as proposed above. Theopolisme (talk) 21:03, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Always nice to see everyone agree. Entirely support this change. Excirial^{(Contact me,Contribs)} 22:46, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the weighing in and such, folks. I've made a request for this change. PEarley (WMF) (talk) 19:22, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Ugh! Turn it back!

What is going on? How come I can't see the markup on this page? Please, turn it back to the simple system that previously existed. I've made thousands of edits and I don't know what to do here. The old way was so user-friendly.

Please do not make this the default editing system. I really enjoyed working on Wikipedia and would rather not quit. 69.125.134.86 (talk) 21:50, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi User:69.125.134.86,

The old system is still there. Just look for "Edit source", right next to the "Edit" button. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:55, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

If you log in, you can set a preference to disable the new visual editor for all your edits. The FAQ at the top of this page gives the details about how. At present I don't think there is a way that you can do that without an account. Thryduulf (talk) 22:47, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Did WMF actually turn this thing on for all IP editors on schedule despite the amount of opposition that plan has received?—Kww(talk) 23:18, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Why did I ask? A quick peek at Filter 550 shows the answer.—Kww(talk) 23:23, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

100 hits in 8 hours and it's allegedly perfectly safe and doesn't harm the wiki. This is obviously some strange usage of the word safe that I wasn't previously aware of. Thryduulf (talk) 23:53, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

34 of those are in the last two hours, when they seem to have turned it on for anons, roughly a 50% rate increase. I'd like to make filter 550 block until the storm passes: see Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Filter 550 should disallow.—Kww(talk) 00:00, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

34 in two hours? Let's put this in perspective; we get a good 200 bot and automated reversions alone per hour, not to mention the hundreds of manual ones. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:05, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Disappointed

This sucks, change it back! GGib (talk) 21:56, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi GGib,

Thanks for your note. It is a very different system and takes some getting used to. If you want to use the old system, all you have to do is choose "Edit source" rather than "Edit". If you want the edit buttons covered up, then see the directions in the /FAQ or in the box that appeared at the top of the page when you edit it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:06, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

I strongly agree that this sucks and should be changed back. I thought I was following the discussion closely enough, but I had never understood that this was going to be forced on us; as I had understood it, this was simply to be available as an opt-in for those too lazy to bother with wikitext (which takes a lot of laziness, but whatever). I damn near threw my computer against the wall before finding the blessed relief of the Gadgets section. Impose this on newbies if you must, but there is no conceivable justification for making this the default for established editors. -- Visviva (talk) 03:19, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm really sorry to hear that this was so frustrating for you. :( Because the gadget has broken in the past, please do keep in mind that if it stops working you can still use the familiar system simply by pressing "Edit source" instead of "Edit." The choice of which editor to use is yours every time you edit. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 10:11, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

This editor does not exist

So, I'd like to be able to figure out whether I like VE - but I can't, because I've never seen it, and I don't know why. I've still got a single "edit" button, which still leads to the wikitext editor. I don't have the gadget to suppress it checked off in prefs. I'm using a browser that, according to the FAQ, should be supported (Firefox 22). Anybody have any ideas why this editor doesn't exist for me? (I suspect, based on the description, that I wouldn't like it, but it'd be nice to be able to confirm that). Nikkimaria (talk) 01:35, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I guess it just doesn't like you, Nikki. ;) Are you using a strange skin? PEarley (WMF) (talk) 01:40, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Happening for me too. There is no VE option anymore. No special skins or weird settings, nor have I turned VE off with the Gadget. I just get the normal editing interface and no "edit/edit source" option. Has the WMF decided to silently turn VE off while it responds to all the bug reports? Witty lama 02:20, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

If they did, nobody told me. Mine's still here. This is Odd ... PEarley (WMF) (talk) 02:23, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Did you disable Javascript, perhaps? Dragons flight (talk) 02:25, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Odd... I just tried to edit on my iPad and the VE was there. Back on the desktop and it's gone. I'm using a university (shared) desktop right now, so that might be something in their settings - but Javascript is on/working. I don't know what I'm looking for in terms of diagnosing this problem. Please advise what you'd like me to test to make this replicable. Witty lama 02:30, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Does http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example?veaction=edit start it for you? PrimeHunter (talk) 02:30, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

No. This shows the traditional editor. I'm using Firefox 10 by the way. Witty lama 02:32, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Try purging the cache on a page load and see if you get it then? Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 02:34, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Just cleared the cache of the whole browser. No change. Witty lama 02:41, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Firefox 10 would be the issue for you, Wittylama. It's not supported unfortunately ( see browser matrix. Nikkimaria, on the other hand, is using a supported browser. PEarley (WMF) (talk) 02:43, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Ah! Sorry for the confusion. I'd simply assumed that the browser installed at the university would be up to date. But, knowing universities, I should have assumed the opposite :-) Witty lama 02:47, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Demand a tuition refund. PEarley (WMF) (talk) 02:51, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I think they'd prefer me to be listening to the lecture I'm in rather than testing the VE... What would you like to know about The Designs Act (2003) of Australia[6]? Witty lama 02:55, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Generally they run about 12 months behind. The uni's tend to use old browsers, as updating pools during semester is a Very Bad Idea, and the testing process is protracted because of the problems of killing computers relied upon by students just before assignments are due. :) I found it funny that the pools I work with finally were upgraded to Windows 7 last week. - Bilby (talk) 02:57, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Javascript is enabled and working for me AFAICT, and PrimeHunter's link above still shows a single edit button leading to the wikitext editor. I'm using Modern skin, if that matters. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:10, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Looks like VE only supports Vector, Apex, and Monobook. (And no, I don't know what Apex is.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:48, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Modern isn't supported. My link was supposed to start an edit with the VisualEditor but only in supported skins. Try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example?useskin=vector&veaction=edit instead. Or change skin in preferences. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:34, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

get rid of it.

It was a nice attempt, but please get rid of it, also, if you are going to have a public beta, don't make it the default edit option as it is now. Sephiroth storm (talk) 04:15, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi, Sephiroth storm. Nobody is required to use VisualEditor who doesn't want to. You have the option of simply choosing "edit source" to use the old system at any time. If you want to hide the VisualEditor, there is a gadget that is not supported by the Wikimedia Foundation in the gadgets tab of your preferences. You can access it in the section marked "Editing" and enable it by ticking the box labeled "Remove VisualEditor from the user interface", then scroll to the bottom and click "Save". You can reactivate VE access at any time by unticking that box. Please note that this gadget can break and has broken in the past, but you should always have the "edit source" option available to you. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 10:40, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Wikitext warning probably won't be seen by most editors

In VE, adding wikitext (let's say, for example, an asterisk at the beginning of a paragraph) results in a warning popping up. That's preferable to no warning at all, but:

The warning appears in a box in the upper right corner of the entire window. If the editor has scrolled down a bit before the wikitext is entered, or if he/she is editing two or more sections below the lead section, the warning is totally invisible. And the "Save page" button is not obscured by the warning, so that an editor can click on that button without ever having seen the warning.

The warning should pop up over wherever the cursor/focus is, or, if that's too difficult, in the middle of the screen, similar to the positioning of the "Add media" or "Add template" dialog boxes, but smaller, of course.

Even if an article is so short that scrolling won't push the warning out of sight, if an editor is focused on what he/she is typing, it's quite easy to not notice the pop-up as it appears. When it eventually is noticed, the editor may well have difficulty figuring out what triggered the warning.

Obviously fixing the positioning of the warning is critical, but there are other ways that the warning could be improved; I'll list those for the sake of completeness:

The warning is in black text (no color), which makes it harder to detect.

>> The warning should have a graphic (the standard warning icon is, what, an exclamation point?) and a light yellow background.

There should be an "[okay]" button for the editor to click to confirm he/she has seen the warning.

>>Right now, clicking anywhere in the warning box results in it disappearing.

The message should say "You are using VisualEditor: wikitext, such as squared brackets for links, is not used here. Click "Edit source", instead of "Edit", to edit the page in wikitext mode. (Unsaved changes will be lost.)

>> Proposed changes are bolded: (1) an example is provided; (2) the "instead of" addition gives the editor some context as to why he/she is in VisualEditor rather than the more familiar wikitext editor; (3) the parenthetical "unsaved changes will be lost" is better separated from the rest of the message.

Linking "wikitext" to Help:Wiki markup is unnecessary if an example is given, as in the proposed text. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 04:49, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I brought up a much less in-depth concern at bugzilla:49820; I'd suggest linking there to this section. Ignatz mice•talk 04:55, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Agreed, I'm reopening that bug as it seems to be the best place to track it. We definitely want to make sure that everyone sees it. Jalexander--WMF 05:07, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

This may be a bold idea, but why can't it just turn Wikitext into Visual displays of what the Wikitext would look like? With, perhaps, a button you can toggle to turn off that functionality, in case you want '' to show. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 09:42, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

go away

burn the visual editor, dont want to click edit source every time Cake (talk) 06:11, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

While I hope you give it a chance as it gets better If you go to your gadget preferences there is a gadget (at the top of Editing) which will hide the visual editor buttons. Jalexander--WMF 06:45, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Tables are dodgy - can't scroll far right

md_5 (talk) 08:23, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi there, can you please tell me where this happens? Thanks! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:40, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Observation - Template Editor behavior improved

I've noticed changes in the behavior of the Template Editor. Now, required parameters are already selected for value addition. This helps quite a lot. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 09:32, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Glad you like it; this is an example of feature that was implemented based on the feedback and suggestions of users, so if you have other ideas to improve the template editor (or other parts of VisualEditor), please do let us know. guillom 10:00, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Now that you mention it - a link to the selected template's documentation page would be of great help, as well as a selection of the most common templates, and maybe a link to Wikipedia:Template messages#Article-related namespace. Diego (talk) 12:35, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi Diego, where should such links appear? Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:44, 16 July 2013 (UTC) PS: I am assuming you mean, "in the template editor after I selected a template". But what about the selection of templates and the other link?

The idea is to have a way to explore the templates documentation space.

When creating a new template the Transclusion dialog appears empty with no hints of what it does of how to fill it. Near the "New template" title, a link to WP:Template messages will allow a new editor to find out what kind of templates exist. The current interface assumes the reader already knows what "transclusion" means, and knows the template she wants to use by name.
Templates already have a description text in the interface, but it only appears after you have selected a template from the search results. That doesn't help the user to select the right one. Simply provide the same text at the New template dialog along each template in the list.
When editing an existing template, a link to the selected template's main page will allow the user to learn more about how the template is used by reading the whole documentation. Diego (talk) 12:58, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Also, the results list at the template search box should contain the template's first paragraph of documentation, just like the parameter's list contains each parameter description. Diego (talk) 12:49, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I believe that some of these things are superseded by Wikipedia:VisualEditor/TemplateData. When a template has TD, it works like a charm and there isn't even any need for people to look for the documentation. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:05, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

You said it - some of these things, but not all :-) Template pages contain much more information than what is available at TemplateData. A link to the template page will allow users to find out that additional information for the cases where TemplateData is not enough. Think of this as a fallback mechanism, just like Edit source, for those use cases that are not supported by the Visual Editor (for documentation in this case). Diego (talk) 13:10, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

My understanding is that if TD is there, there should be nothing else you'd want to know in order for the template to work properly: you know which parameters are compulsory and what to write. I can certainly verify if something like this was requested before at Bugzilla. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:19, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Links in TemplateData descriptions have certainly been requested. See Bugzilla:51311 and Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive 2013 1#Add a link to template documentation page. In a nutshell, for some templates there just isn't enough space (or the formatting available) to give a full understanding of all the things a template cab do, what is required for each parameter, how it should be formatted, etc. Look at Template:Taxobox#Parameters for example. Thryduulf (talk) 14:18, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, thanks for the links, it might also address some related concerns at itwp. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:23, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Another one that might be nice to know: Some templates have a range of values they accept that aren't entirely logical on first sight (Eg: Numbers 1 to 5 are allowed as parameters, while those numbers actually represent different settings) T52760. There is also a fair share of templates that are complex (or complicated) to a degree where a manual page is preferable over a short template data description. Excirial^{(Contact me,Contribs)} 14:31, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

See bugzilla:49772, "Transclusion dialogs panes should include a link to the template's definition page (for further documentation)". Vote/CC: or comment there. :) –Quiddity (talk) 18:05, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

And I've added Bugzilla:51436 to request the template's description at the search results. Diego (talk) 14:36, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Possible Conspiracy Theory: Why haven't the results of the A/B test been released yet?

Do any of them make VisualEditor look bad?

I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if some of them did, and, honestly, if so, it's probably not because of anything inherent in VE, but because it was extremely, extremely buggy at the time of the A/B test. I still can't scroll the screen using VE without it lagging, and that's after some speedup-bugfixes.

The results are apparently known. I know they won't be written up yet, but I think we have a right to know: Does VE actually look good in them?

If it doesn't, I do think we should continue work to debug it; it's reasonable to presume it *will* be better in future. But, given the results were meant to be released before the deployment to IPs, I have to ask: Where are the results? Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 09:39, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Firstly, a big thanks to you Adam for having the patience and perseverance to research and write such a clear summary of this misguided launch. The results of this A/B test are vital. I would hope that the WMF team and the dev team have already devised a strategy on how to use the results. The omens however are not good. Perhaps they could publish the management document that describes how they intend to reverse the roll-out if the study points that way. -- Clem Rutter (talk) 10:09, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

In all honesty, I think the study was fundamentally flawed by two things:

It had very little time. A few days is not long enough to get anything like long-term data, and the subsequent launch of VE ruined any attempt at followup. Particularly as short-term survival rate was defined as percent of editors editing in their second week: According to [7], the first good data was the 25th, and the test was abandoned when VE launched at the start of the 1st. That's not a week of data, likely ruining one outcome. They should have either come up with an alternative metric - before data analysis, to be rigorous - or delayed VE's launch so they'd actually have data to back it up.
VE was so incredibly buggy at the time that I'd be shocked if they got positive results for it.

There's a bit of screwiness in that they count edit time from when the page fully loads, which gives a bit of an advantage for VE, since it has a very long load time, but that may be justified if they think they can get the load time under a second or two in the near future. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 10:51, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

If results were to be posted, they presumably would be at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/A/B test. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:47, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Adam, I want you to go away, and come back and ask this question when you've both (a) read any of the threads that relate to the A/B test (which you clearly haven't, because if you had, you'd have seen my message a day ago that said I was chasing the results up) and (b) demonstrated you're capable of assuming good faith. I don't know why I haven't been allowed to release the results yet, but if I had to pick an answer, it would probably be "because everyone is busy and the emails have got buried". It wouldn't be "because vast conspiracy". Your recent statements undermine the work of those people trying to keep the VE team honest, and that's not a good thing. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 15:53, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I was aware of that. And I called it a conspiracy theory - a.k.a. was poking fun o f myself for even asking. However, this should be influencing future rollouts, but now one new rollout (to IPs) has happened without the data: that rollout should not have been allowed to go forwards without the data first. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 17:19, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Testing

Does leave feedback work anonymously? 63.255.24.6 (talk) 12:57, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi there. If you are talking about the option to leave feedback for articles, please see Wikipedia:Article feedback, it is not related to VisualEditor. If you were wondering if you can leave feedback about VE without logging in, well, of course you can :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:02, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

wouldn't Link To A Section of a different wikipedia page

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

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52881

editing Tricyclic_antidepressant (general overview) page, near the end of Overdose section, paragraph on treatment:
tried to edit initial text "Treatment" to "Treatment of TCA overdose" then link that to the #Treatment section of Tricyclic_antidepressant_overdose (dedicated) page - would only allow link to page, not section-within-page!
(at least that's what the visualeditor gui 's popup said, & appeared to be the literal case too... standard firefox 22.0, xp64, all scripts/ads/cookies allowed...)
ymmv, but until that part works for me, i'll stick to edit source :P
gui , user guide & searching feedback archives didn't help me on this at the time, shame 'coz otherwise excellent editor
-203.194.42.58 (talk) 15:24, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for your feedback! Linking to page sections is something we hope to have supported very soon, there is a bug filed and assigned for it. I'm glad that the rest of VisualEditor looked appealing to you. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 15:39, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Relevant discussion, perhaps, at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive 2013 07#Wikilinking to a section of an article?. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:40, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Indeed, thanks for the link, good sir. Resolving the bug should clear up the issues in the GUI to make section linking as intuitive as page linking. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 16:18, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

@Keegan (WMF) and 203.194.42.58: - It is possible to link to a section of an article. The trick is, after you enter the section information, you have to click on the area ABOVE the input box, the area containing the word "Hyperlink". Hitting Return/Enter or the close icon, or just clicking elsewhere on page, will result in VE removing the section information that has been typed in. I've updated bug 50881 to be clearer on this, and I'm going to update the VE User guide to document the current process. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:24, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

@Keegan: - sorry, didn't see your posting before I posted the above. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:25, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

:D Keegan (WMF) (talk) 16:37, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Crashing

Every time I click edit, it's crashing my computer, crashing the internet browser (Firefox) or simply doing nothing. Not a fan of this at all. 217.42.46.111 (talk) 15:33, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm sorry to hear that. :/ I've tested, and "edit" is working fine for me with Firefox. What operating system are you using? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 15:36, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

And what version of Firefox? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:41, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Oh, good question. Thanks, John. I forget that software has versions. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 15:43, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I understand, as you are obviously unaware what 'beta' means. ;) Insulam Simia (^talk/_contribs) 16:44, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Good thing you added an emoticon, or I might have just thought you were being impolite. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 16:49, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Edit of some protected pages

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52284

Hi,

I just tried to edit a page on mediawiki.org, and the behavior of VE was really strange. I don't know if it's relevant because mediawiki.org is probably different, and I don't even know if they use the same version of VE.

Try editing mw:Help:TemplateData/fr :

With the classic editor, you end up with on a "View source" page, which seems normal.
With VE, you can edit the page without any notification, and when you try to save, nothing happens (no message, ...)

--NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 17:57, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

That page is supposed to be edited with the translation tools. I'll check to see whether there's a bug for this. It probably shouldn't let you open the page in VisualEditor at all. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:04, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

nowiki tags without wiki markup

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53462

In this edit, <nowiki>...</nowiki> has been added without even wiki markup... --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 18:36, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

This one also... Please stop that! --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 18:37, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Eek! Reporting, both through bugzilla and by shouting at people. Thanks :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:05, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

The first one appears to be the leading-space problem. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:06, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Another instance of this. Insulam Simia (^talk/_contribs) 19:09, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

glycolysis oxidoreductase step

In the figure, the original carbons are numbered, but not the products. It would help to number the product carbons. The text reports 3 negative charges at both ends, but plainly shows only 2 negative charges at each end. Lrunge (talk) 20:15, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Is that a bug with the software? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:21, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

My guess is that its misplaced feedback about an article, but I don't know which one. glycolysis oxidoreductase step and glycolysis oxidoreductase don't exist, oxidoreductase does but contains no diagrams. glycolysis contains several diagrams, and one does mention oxidoreductase but not carbon afaict. I don't speak chemistry though so I might be barking up completely the wrong tree! Thryduulf (talk) 20:32, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Inconsistent Use of "Edit" and "Edit source"

I'm going to keep this short, mostly because I assume someone else has already brought this up. (I didn't read through the archives or the 70+ entries in the Contents.) As a programmer and Vim user, I personally don't plan on ever using the VisualEditor. Still, I've ran into a problem. Talk pages, Wikipedia policy pages and similar pages have an "Edit" tab where other pages use "Edit source". This is inconsistent. If I don't pay close attention and accidentally hit "Edit" where "Edit source" exists, I'm entering a world of pain. Not only do I not get what I want, but the VisualEditor is so slooow... even when editing a section I need to waiiit, and when it's finally done, I still need to go back to select the correct tab. Yeah, it's all new and I'll get used to it I'm sure, but it's inconsistent - which it shouldn't be. --82.170.113.123 (talk) 23:20, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, the inconsistency in what "edit" means has been reported as Bugzilla:50402. The slowness is very annoying and the devs are working on improving that, but I can't find the specific bug report at the moment. Thryduulf (talk) 23:51, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Backspace for edit comment not working in Firefox on Ubuntu.

Also, the delete button and arrow keys had no effect. It was still possible to add characters though. Tommy (talk) 23:20, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I had exactly the same briefly. Chrome on a mac. I reloaded the page and it worked fine.--Salix (talk): 23:53, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Another general comment: First, do no harm

May I suggest that if VE recognizes it cannot understand an edit, it shouldn't save it. The < nowiki> examples above are among the best examples, but some of the quasi-math HTML errors could also be corrected that way. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 01:21, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

What do you mean by "an edit it can't understand"? As far as I can see, those things that aren't understood by VE can't be edited at all. — This, that and the other (talk) 02:25, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Examples seen to include malformed tables and ''x''<sub>''i''0</sub>. A proper implementation would fail, rather than modify it something just wrong. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 04:09, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Need to display a tab even when you don't have permission to edit page. Need view Visual source

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53547

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53549

When viewing an article you have permission to edit, you see two tabs at the top - "Edit" and "Edit source". When viewing an article you don't have permission to edit, you see only one - "view source".

This is not good UI design There needs to always be the same number of tabs displayed. Ideally there should be a view-source equivalent so that people can see the page as if the could edit it. It should allow them to interrogate things like template, so they can find out which template is producing what they see and how it does that. When VE can cope with copy+paste, then this will also allow them to copy and paste the relevant image/template/whatever to whatever article they are working on.

If the read-only editor is not possible (and given the workload of critical bugs it will likely be a while) then that tab needs to pop up a message saying that editing is restricted currently/until xx:xx for <log entry> and that they can view the wikitext source if they want (linked to an explanation what that means). Thryduulf (talk) 02:38, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I've tracked this as Bugzilla:51547 for the visual source viewer and Bugzilla:51549 for the number of tabs UI issue.

"Happy to announce"?

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

"Wikipedia is happy to announce the live Beta of VisualEditor"? What announcement? Might I suggest an unambiguous notification in the new "edit this page" process that points out the new "edit source" tab for the old system? The first notice I got about VisualEditor (which I'd never heard of) was actually editing a page like always, only to find a visual editor (didn't see the name or a link to info) which wouldn't let me add and preview a citation, my most common WP work besides copyediting. I only found Wikipedia:VisualEditor by clicking on the mysterious "BETA" that appeared at the top of the page. ("BETA" what?) Yes, I eventually found "edit source", but given WP's recent proclivity for adding and moving around top-page tabs, I didn't notice it initially. Even without using VE yet, from my quick look, I suspect VisualEditor will be a tremendous help for all editors. But dropping it on everyone by default without warning is bad practice. (If there was a warning, I didn't notice it, which suggests it wasn't a very effective "notice".) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:27, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

There's been an opt-in beta since December 2012, and we sent out a centralnotice, but it looks like a cookie problem meant it didn't go to some users :(. The opt-out is pretty prominently displayed on the VE portal, which is both where the banner drops you and a single click away from where the current popup in the VE drops you; hopefully this will help. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 09:07, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

I said the same thing, Jeff. --Paul McDonald (talk) 00:39, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

I appreciate the info, Okeyes, but an opt-out buried in a topic unknown to the entire affected audience is a catch-22 and isn't adequate. (Indeed, that's the kind of practice that gets companies excoriated, like putting a license agreement inside a box whose opening binds you to the license.) But I see that we've got a main-page banner now, so that addresses my concern. Shame it didn't show up a few days earlier. ☺ ~ Jeff Q (talk) 07:27, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

This issue is not answered. It has been ignored.--Paul McDonald (talk) 15:26, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

To quote Douglas Adams:

"But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."
"Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."
"But the plans were on display ..."
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That's the display department."
"With a flashlight."
"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."

Hairy Dude (talk) 00:16, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

The issue was answered. Until 2-3 days ago we had a centralnotice up; clicking on it sent you directly to the page that contained the big notice. "unknown to the entire affected audience" is a misnomer. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 13:11, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Not a very good answer. What's missing is why wasn't it handled correctly in the first place?--Paul McDonald (talk) 15:18, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Because we thought the FAQ entry would, for an opt-out, suffice. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 12:44, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Let me get this straight: the reason that the rollout wasn't handled correctly in the first place was because you thought an FAQ entry would suffice?--Paul McDonald (talk) 03:34, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

No, Oliver did not say that a single FAQ entry was enough. Oliver presumably hoped that messages to forty or fifty high-traffic pages, three separate watchlist notices, two or three CentralNotices (that's a sitenotice with extra bells and whistles for scheduling), bi-weekly updates at VPT, face-to-face sessions at the Hackathon, stories in The Signpost, announcements at many of the help pages that need to be updated, and announcements at all of the new-user help forums, not to mention months of people casually mentioning it, might suffice.

If you've got ideas about what else to add to that list, then please do let us know. For example, if you think that people would have tolerated a bot spamming every single user talk page, which I've always assumed would be too disruptive, then please say so. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:54, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Notifying every individual registered user was clearly the right way to go from the beginning for a major site-wide change such as this. I've said that for some time now. It's not "spam" to inform the user base that the software has a major change coming up--it's the right thing to do. Further, it's not "spam" for the foundation to post anything on "my" user talk page because it isn't "my" talk page but theirs. Perhaps you should go read your user agreement and come back. Oh, and Okeyes did post "Because we thought the FAQ entry would, for an opt-out, suffice." I just cut-n-pasted it.--Paul McDonald (talk) 00:18, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

In your mind, is filling my personal watchlist with 300 bot-delivered messages to user talk pages the only acceptable way to put a message in front of every individual registered user? Do you think that if I started an RFC about adding any message, no matter how self-evidently important, to 47,274,963 user talk pages, that the proposal would actually be supported by the community? That's how many "individual registered users" there are at the English Wikipedia. Because if you think that would have been acceptable, then I'm willing to start the RFC to get documented community consensus for the next time any major software change is planned. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:15, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes I do. Go for it. By the way, it's not "your personal watchlist" it's Wikipedia's watchlist and they grant you access. "Banner ads" are totally unacceptable ways to notify users of major software changes. The only way to notify 47,274,963 users is to ... wait for it... notify 47,274,963 users.--Paul McDonald (talk) 21:13, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

The last thread above makes me think it would be useful to add a class of Echo notification which produces a highlighted banner (similar to what happens when your user talkpage is edited). While the effect for each user would be the same, their talkpages would not be updated (just a single "notify all" page of messages would be updated) so there wouldn't be 19 million page edits, RC/watchlist updates, &c. Most sitebanners are less personal than this and might not trigger such a notice. But "message everyone personally the next time they log on" messages -- such as major interface changes, major licensing changes, a sea of fire, &c -- could be handled this way. – SJ + 07:33, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I like this idea. I've cross-posted it to WT:Notifications so that people involved in that project will be more likely to see it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:14, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

While we're on the subject of banners .... there's an "opt-out of fundraising banners" gadget; I don't know if that opts you out of all centralnotice banners? It seems like we need to work on banner-triggering code. I too like the idea of an echo notification, though. -- phoebe / (talk to me) 21:55, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Sitenotice would have been a better idea: Sitenotice persists until the user chooses to dismiss it; centralnotice cannot be remoed until it's scheduled to end, at which point it disappears. Further, Centralnotice can take up to four seconds before it gets added to the page (on my computer, not a particularly old one) Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 20:35, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

One click disable

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52540

It's realy slow and annoying. Just like every new introduced feature, there should be an easy way to disable it, for example on click on the information box above the page that shows enabling this tool. Qtguy00 (talk) 14:17, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't believe that one click disabling is in the plan at this point, although you can hide the feature. To quote a few points from the FAQ

Why does no standard user preference to disable VisualEditor exist?

VisualEditor is the new default experience for all users. We recognize that it still in beta and has issues, including lack of support for some aspects of wikitext. Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. Developing VisualEditor into a tool that can meet the needs of all our users will take time. Therefore, we encourage all users (including power users) to regularly check in VisualEditor's progress, and we're running VisualEditor in parallel to the traditional Wikitext editor.

Power users will find ways to disable VisualEditor completely, e.g. by means of user scripts and gadgets. However, to encourage continued testing of VisualEditor as it develops, completely hiding it from the user experience will remain a non-trivial task.

The current experience is designed to be minimally intrusive for users who want to continue to use wikitext indefinitely. Both at the page and section-level, editing as wikitext should require no additional action other than selecting the "edit source" option. We would rather make VisualEditor's availability through the UI interfere less with the experience of power users rather than introduce a new preference: For example, resolving bug 50542 could make the integration of VisualEditor less noticeable. Please let us know about similar issues.

We hope to hear from users who could never imagine using VisualEditor as their default editing environment. Fixing bugs aside, we want VisualEditor to be as efficient and powerful as wikitext while being discoverable and easy to use, and we highly appreciate your feedback on what improvements could make it so.

and

How do I disable VisualEditor?

To continue to edit the wikitext directly, simply click the "Edit source" button instead of "Edit". On section edit links, you can open the classic wikitext editor for that section by clicking "edit source" instead of the regular "edit" link. If you would like to remove VisualEditor from the user interface, then you can go to the Gadgets tab of your Preferences page, check the option "Remove VisualEditor from the user interface" in the "Editing" section, and click the Save button near the bottom of the page. (Note that gadgets are community-developed and not supported by the Wikimedia Foundation.)

I hope that these will help you. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 14:25, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, but I am not talking about myself only. I am talking about giving editors easy way to choose the way they want to edit wikipedia. What prevents Wikimedia from adding a simple shortcut on the info panel to disable visual editor at least temporarily? I should mention that creating better content is the main goal of wikipedia, and creating useful visual editor is not the main goal, so let's not compromise the main goal of having better articles for having a visualy compelling editor that is bloated, slow and counter productive. And yes, Linus' law works, but he is talking about volunteers, nobody is forced to edit, compile and debug Linux kernel by default when using an Android phone. --Qtguy00 (talk) 11:33, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

Nobody is forced to assist with testing. The easy way to choose the way they want to edit is simply to pick which button to click (although labeling might be more clear on those - there's a feature request for that. :)) The goal is to have a VisualEditor that is not bloated, slow or counter productive, and having yesterday had the opportunity to talk to developers, I am very aware that they are reading bug reports and feature requests in order to refine VE into the tool that the community wants. This is the way our collaborative process works. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 12:44, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

If nobody was forced to assist with testing, why were we forced by default to use the VE utility to test it? Why is it the default setting now?--Paul McDonald (talk) 15:21, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

The default is that both editing environments are equally available to all users. You are not being forced to use either of them. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:56, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Qtguy00 wrote: "I am talking about giving editors easy way to choose the way they want to edit wikipedia." This is a common request. This is one solution: bugzilla:50540: VisualEditor: Display both "edit" and "edit source" links for sections without hover. --Timeshifter (talk) 04:15, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

Put an "edit source" link on the help box, or lose copy editing of short sections of long articles from occasional users. These users expect to fix a comma or awkward wording in a short section by clicking on "edit" and finding an edit box right there after a page load. They don't expect to have to wait for "edit source" to appear after hover. They don't expect to find very sluggish scrolling and failure to reach the bottom of page in one try and failure of the "End" keyboard key and absence of an edit box at the bottom of page. They might keep trying long enough to find the help box. At least, the help box should mention the fact that "edit source" will appear after hover, and at least, that "edit source" should be linked to edit the section in an edit box. — Pifvyubjwm (talk) 21:03, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

We're working on a static 'edit source' link on sections. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 12:45, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

no, the common sense solution is to have edit source as the default, leaving the VE for editors who CHOOSE to use it. when I signed in for the first time in months to edit an article, I wasnt presented with a choice, I clicked edit and had to use VE. Now it only took 5-10 seconds to see the other button and try it, but there was no guidance, and it shouldnt be the primary for editing. Sephiroth storm (talk) 04:20, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Why shouldn't the "easy" one be the first option? Imagine that you're a new user, rather than someone who's been around since 2007 and has already made thousands of edits, and therefore has preconceived ideas about how this website "should" work. Which one would you expect to see first if you were a brand-new user? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:17, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I'd like to say a genuine thank you to whoever put the yellow box at the top telling me I can enable a gadget to disable VE. However, I'd also like to say that editors shouldn't have to rely on an unsupported third-party extension to do this - instead, there should be a check box in the Editing tab in Special:Preferences (which is where I first looked, and is the obvious place) which if CHECKED means that VE is turned on and if UNCHECKED means that VE is turned off and inaccessible just as if we turn this gadget on. I don't mind whether the default is on or off - but ticking a box to disable a feature is counterintuitive, as is having to go to an "experiments" page to do so. ~ Keiji (iNVERTED) (Talk) 18:38, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Follow-up: Two things. One, I've just noticed and read the "Why does no standard user preference to disable VisualEditor exist?" box and it doesn't really answer its own question! It just goes on about how Wikipedia wants to please people who like VE... erm, well, how does putting a checkbox in Special:Preferences that defaults to enabling VE harm that cause? Secondly, while going to write this comment, I middle clicked the [edit] link to try and open in a new tab, lo and behold because it's badly JS'd it insisted on replacing the current tab. The author of the gadget probably overlooked this and this is ANOTHER reason why there shouldn't be a third party gadget to disable such functionality. ~ Keiji (iNVERTED) (Talk) 18:46, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Pretty much everyone except for the WMF agrees with this. See Wikipedia:VPT#.22Opt_out.22_of_VE_needed_under_preferences for unanimity. See User_talk:Eloquence#I_need_a_way_to_turn_off_VisualEditor_globally._Please_give_us_a_way. for the WMF's reaction. They honestly don't want anyone to be able to turn it off. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 19:56, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Option to use normal editing

Hi. I don't see an option to go back to normal editing mode. I just want to make a quick change and prefer not to deal with a visual/WYSIWYG-ish mode. An option to use the "bare-metal" original syntax would be nice. My original edit would take 30-45 seconds this way. That's a good thing. It is a wiki, after all. Wantnot (talk) 10:30, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

You can always go back to the normal mode by clicking "edit source" instead of "edit", either at the top of the page tabs or in section edit links. You can also disable the visual editor in your preferences - see the FAQ at the top of this page for details. Thryduulf (talk) 10:41, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Another option is to disable the software completely. In "Preferences->Gadgets" click "Remove VisualEditor from the user interface" and save. Editors who make requests like this should be given the WHOLE information and not just a little bit.--Paul McDonald (talk) 00:24, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, I thought that pointing to where the full information can be found - in the FAQ at the top of the page - was giving all the information. Thryduulf (talk) 09:27, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Agreed. Paul, I'm not sure why you got the impression Thryduulf wasn't explaining all the solutions. "You can also disable the visual editor in your preferences - see the FAQ at the top of this page for details" is very clear, to me. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 09:53, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Because Thryduulf is giving a direct answer to one option and then burying the answer to another. Essentially this user is told you can turn it off, but you have to go someplace else to figure out how. It's clear bias.--Paul McDonald (talk) 14:31, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Someplace else. You mean: the top of the page you have to be on to read his reply in the first place. It's just as likely, if not more, that Thryduulf couldn't see the value in typing out "click preferences, and then go to gadgets, and then tick this box, under that heading, and hit save, and clear your cache" when all of that information was readily accessible on the page the conversation was happening at. Paul, please don't assume bad faith of your fellow editors. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:47, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Okeyes has it spot on. I don't have any agenda here, I don't work for the WMF in any capacity. I've expressed plenty of both good and bad points about both the VE and its rollout. It seems likely to my reading of the original message that the user is after an option to make some edits in the classic editor and some in the visual editor, but I've given a simple answer to a simple question that allows for me being right or wrong about this. Linking to the FAQ allows my reply not to be seen as a complicated wall of text (I have not interacted with Wantnot before and have no knowledge about their technical ability - something that looks complicated will put some people off even if it isn't actually complicated), makes them aware that the FAQ exists so they can find the answer to their question (and others they might have) there. Thryduulf (talk) 15:49, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

That's not how it's coming across to me.--Paul McDonald (talk) 21:16, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Well I apologise for that, but I really don't understand why explicitly pointing to a different part of the page, that is clearly labelled, is hiding information, and I really don't why it was necessary not to assume good faith. Thryduulf (talk) 22:37, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

"I apologise, but..." is not an apology. It comes across very insincere. That's just one of many examples why it seems you are not coming across in good faith.--Paul McDonald (talk) 17:21, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

If you refuse to accept an apology and refuse to explain your views when asked, then there is not much more that I can say. I will leave it at just registering my disappointment at your lack of good faith. Thryduulf (talk) 18:32, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

If you'd make a real apology instead of an accusation, we'd be in business.--Paul McDonald (talk) 11:24, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Preview edits

How does a user preview their edits before submitting them, like with the old standard for editing? I made a edit, but there should be a way to preview edits for QAQC / PCC-PCI purposes. Bullmoosebell (talk) 01:01, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Hey Bullmoosebell. The idea with the visual editor is that your changes are visible as you make them - if you add an image, you see it as it will be displayed, same with text, links, and so on. If something is screwball, you should be able to see it in the VE window. (the exception being some of the more troublesome bugs you see above) Does this answer the question? PEarley (WMF) (talk) 01:39, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, PEarley (WMF). I'm just used to editing with the codes, but I did find the Edit Source link. As long as Wiki doesn't get rid of the Edit Source link, I'll be alright. VE is new and innovative, and will take some getting used to, but I'm not seeing the benefits yet. Thanks for your help with this change, I see a lot of users are poopy-faced about having to use VE and you (and all the all the supporters) are quite professional and patient. Keep up the great work! Bullmoosebell (talk) 01:52, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Cheers, Bullmoosebell. We appreciate you giving it a try. PEarley (WMF) (talk) 01:58, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Ditto. :) And there is an option to "review your changes" after you hit save page, if you want to just double-check your edits. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 10:15, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

@bullmoosebell It's mildly confusing because you can back out after that step -- i.e. hit save page, then hit review your changes gives you basically what "preview" does. Personally I liked it better when the review button was up next to the save button, was more intuitive. -- phoebe / (talk to me) 22:07, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I prefer that organization, too. I thought there was a request to put that on the main page in bugzilla, but now I can't find one. :/ --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 12:14, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Leading spaces

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

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53528

This may have been reported, but it seems that leading spaces are rendered differently in VE than on the Wiki page. With the Wiki page they cause the text to have that dotted box around it, and to appear as single line. In VE it displays just as a leading space, with no indication of problems. I saw some IPs having issues with the difference between the two. - Bilby (talk) 02:04, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I thought this rung a bell, but I can't seem to find anything on Bugzilla. Bilby, I know it may be hard to find now, but do you have a dif of the edit? PEarley (WMF) (talk) 02:21, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I'll see if I can dig one up. It seems that the problem isn't quite what I thought, though, and may turn up under other bugs already covered. The diffs I saw were of editors removing leading whitespace and it didn't work, so the edit summary said something along the line of "trying to remove box", but they only removed one space and the box remained. So I tried it and it was clear that VE doesn't show the effect of leading whitespace. But in attempting to recreate it I encountered a different problem, so I'm not sure which is the actual issue. Specifically

Added leading whitespace to paragraph in VE. Text appears fine in VE, with leading whitespace as an indentation.
Saved. VE adds nowiki tags before the whitespace and after the first few words. Text displays without indent.
Tried removing the whitespace in VE.
VE won't allow the whitespace to be removed, but instead will only permit the first few words to be deleted.

This is with Chrome 28 + Windows 7. I'll see if I can work out the conditions that would have created the first problem. - Bilby (talk) 02:37, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

This is interesting. I'm not quite sure how to report this yet.

Added whitespace to the lead of an article, and it nowikied. [8]
It turned the first word into an uneditable element. See image.
Curious as to what the nowikis would do to formatting, I found an article that had formatting on the first word. It added space, no "nowiki." [9]
It allowed me to remove the space in VE. [10]

Any ideas what's going on and how this can be reported, anybody? :)(Also using Chrome on 7.) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 10:37, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

There's another bug, possibly; I don't know if this has already been reported. If a page already contains text, followed by a template (not necessarily on the same line) and the next line has a leading space, attempting to remove the leading space using the backspace key also removes the template. The space can only be removed by moving the cursor beyond the end of the template on the same line and using the delete key. Peter James (talk) 22:57, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm sure I've seen this discussed before but I can't immediately find it. It might be Bugzilla:50995 or Bugzilla:50250 but I'm fairly sure that's not what I remember. Thryduulf (talk) 23:59, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I tracked what Bilby found and what I came up with at T53528. If it's a repeat, the developers will merge it, I'm sure. Since I don't really have a clue what's causing the problem, it's hard for me to say, "Oh, this is related to that!" :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 12:22, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Thought I'd best say this here too.

I think VE is a good idea. However, I think that there should be an easy way to turn it off, so you don't have to retrain your muscle memory, and think Wikimedia did it a huge disservice by the manner of its launch - it's buggy and largely unusable as it is now. I can't even scroll down to the bit of text I want to edit in it because it slows to a crawl when I slow. It damages the code of the site. It's not ready.

But it's a good idea, and, were, for instance, the WMF to switch it out of default to "opt-in" for now, and stop the hugely counterproductive pushing forwards with the schedule before fixing the bugs - do you really need another several million editors using it to tell you it's still massively buggy? - I'd look forwards to a relaunch in a few months, and would likely give it another try then. (Hell, another wiki I'm on already has a working Visual Editor, and I think that one's pretty great. MoinMoin-based, for the record. Of course, the big difference is that one works perfectly, is quick, uses minimal resources, and feels natural to use.)

But you can't launch buggy software, make it the default, ignore it's causing damage to the code of articles, try to prevent people from turning it off - a problem because misclicking, a.k.a. clicking exactly where you used to click, means a 15-second loadtime and an unusable interface because I can't scroll without massive lag - and expect happy users.

A way that would likely have gotten everyone on board would have been to announce that VisualEditor would be tested by a one- or two-month trial, during which time it would become the default for all editors, but could be turned off using simple instructions that were put in the sitenotice for the first few weeks or first month of the run.

After the period, turn it off, but tell everyone how to turn it back on in the sitenotice.

You now have a bunch of enthusiastic users, and a lot of bugs. Patch it up. Make it work better. Get a really good product ready. Then turn it back on for everyone, again, telling them how to turn it off. Muscle memory is an awkward thing, and Visual Editor, after all, puts the VE-edit link where the Wikimarkup link was - but a lot of people will use it. [By the way: Edit (Text) and Edit (GUI). That's what the MoinMoin wiki I like uses, and which are far clearer terms than the unclear-at-best and actively-misleading-at-worst "Edit" and "Edit source".]

Anyway. Yes, I do think you should make VisualEditor Opt-in only for now. You've screwed up the launch really badly, and backing off a bit will show you listened to the community. Of course, you should make a sitenotice to help people willing to put up with the bugs to keep using it, and you'll almost certainly get enough users still using it to keep the bugchecking up.

Should you run out of bugs, or reach a stage where you don't have enough testers to know if you've got everything, just turn it back on for everyone. So long as you're actually responsive to the community, and know the difference between "test of potentially buggy software" and "suicide pact to launch our software permanently, even if it causes damage", you should keep the support of the community, barring, perhaps, the ones you got too upset by this PR disaster.

However, eventually, you're going to have a great product. And at that time, you want to have the right to turn it back on for people. You don't want to be in a situation where everyone's already turned it off, because when you did turn it on, it was too buggy to use.

In short, I think you should take VisualEditor away. But I want it back later. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 07:28, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi Adam, thanks for posting this here, I had already read it at the RfC. I would just add that the "ignore it's causing damage to the code of articles" does not look like a fair statement: there's been a team for some time now (weeks? months, maybe?) keeping an eye on recent changes exactly to revert unwanted article disruptions (then of course, we might miss something, nobody's perfect), and my understanding is that we are also trying to make such disruptions easy to spot (filters, tags, these kind of things). I definitely don't think we expect people to be happy about it; instead we appreciate people being _very_ patient and helpful with bug reports. As for the buggy thing, please take a look at how many bugs there were in MediaWiki before VE: I was mind blown when I did that. Everything you mention is being worked on, so, stand by for a better version :) Thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 07:45, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

While I know you're trying to deal with it, apparently, a lot of the bugs causing damage to articles are not fixed yet - and you've just extended it to IP editors, meaning more people are editing with code you know is causing damage to articles.

I can't understand why you're sticking to a schedule that means you're expanding usage, at a time when the sane thing is to decrease usage - I mean, you need enough usage to know if you've succeeded in fixing things, obviously, but this is the fifth most popular website on the internet, so you have a lot of users, and some will probably do whatever you need them to. It's just madness to go through with a schedule that means you increase usage before the bugs that cause damage to articles are fixed. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 07:54, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Again, I'm not so much into tech thing :), but, "a lot of the bugs causing damage to articles are not fixed yet" is not accurate, from my POV. Major bugs do get fixed quickly: what we keep finding out is, that as we keep deploying, some of them "mutate"; bugzilla tickets are re-opened, and the thing gets studied again and again. Stop that now, VE dies. This is really only about the "given enough eyes"-thing, and it would not be savvy for the VE not to benefit from something our communities are truly skilled for. Plus, we are not as many people as we usually believe: yeah, 5th site, 500 million readers, millions of accounts, but not so many editors as we'd hope, yet - that's incidentally what VE is here for. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:14, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I have to second Adam on this matter - why is the editor rolled out at such speed while there are still so many issues present? I can understand the rollout to regular editors as a means to find these issues, but what purpose does a global roll out to IP editors serve? As far as i am aware new editors are only bound to be confused by issues, and less likely to report them.

The visual editor is technically taken quite the accomplishment, even in its current form. Even so, i would point out that (new) users generally don't care HOW something works, as long AS it works. I have seen applications best described as "Bugs, Bad Design and Bad Code in a Blender"; Yet somehow those applications still managed to present users with the data they wanted so the users were happy. The visual editor on the other hand has a large share of simple issues that a user might run into. Simple example: A basic operation such as moving a section that contains an image simply doesn't work. Cut and Pasting such as section will result in the removal of all of the sections formatting, and click and drag is not supported yet. Effectively this means means that there is no (working) method to move a section that contains an image from within the visual editor. These (often small) problems cause the main problem: The end user will think "I can't even copy and paste a simple section? Even notepad can do that!" and dismiss the editor as buggy and unusable.

If anything i would recommend polishing the editor's end user experience some more before releasing it globally. Removing the most glaring issues before a full release should increase editor acceptance by a fairly large margin. I'm not sure why there is such a steep timetable and I suppose there is a good reason, but i would personally slow down a bit for the sake of acceptance. Excirial^{(Contact me,Contribs)} 08:16, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi, I am not sure how many bugs IP will file properly (seasoned users don't seem to like doing it by themselves either :p ), but, again, it's the "given enough eyes" thing: earlier on IRC there were devs commenting and starting to work on variants of problems they had never seen before, and sometimes I think it is also difficult for them to reproduce the issue and find out what originated it. Also: newcomers/IPs are more likely to save edits even if they break something. That unfortunately helps. So, more eyes = more bugs we spot = better versions of VE on the way. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:49, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

@Elitre (WMF):. I'm quite surprised by several things you've said...

there's been a team for some time now (weeks? months, maybe?) keeping an eye on recent changes exactly to revert unwanted article disruptions : not to my knowledge, the WMF team only looks at this page, but doesn't watch edits made with VE. I think Oliver said this himself, there's not the man power required to do this.

It's not a task force or something, but as you can easily see by checking the liaisons'contributions, we do take a look at recent changes focusing on unwanted disruptions/behaviors - especially at deployment times. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:39, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but that's just not true, look at edits that are triggering Filter 550, many of them are not fixed even after a few days. I think Oliver said it himself: the VE team never planned to watch edits made by VE, only to answer reports here. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 08:53, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I'll try and rephrase this. It is "not our job" to revert each and every "wrong" edit done by VE. Still, we do actually check whether disruptions are being caused by VE and, in case, fix them. We might not be doing this 24/7, we might be missing something, but we are definitely doing it. Otherwise, there would be no reason for us to edit ns-0! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:02, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

my understanding is that we are also trying to make such disruptions easy to spot (filters, tags, these kind of things) : to my knowledge, this things are not put in place by WMF, but rather by volunteers being annoyed of so many articles damaged.

I apologize if that leads to confusion, but my point was simply that there are people trying to minimize inconveniences in many different ways. Not sure about en.wiki, but at it.wiki I was the one who requested such things :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:39, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

As for the buggy thing, please take a look at how many bugs there were in MediaWiki before VE : yes, MW has a lot of bugs, but you don't usually run into them as a basic user, which is not the case with VE...

--NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 08:23, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

My point was just, MW is a over 10 years-old software, it's stable now. VE is alpha stage still and yet there are editors using it comfortably (TeamGale comes to mind). --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:39, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, and the problem for many people is alpha + default editor for everybody... Yes, it's normal that VE has many bugs, what isn't normal is it being forced on everybody at this point. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 08:53, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

While, yes, we're not trying to catch every VE edit we ARE looking at an enormous quantity of them. Both during the initial default roll out and during this roll out we also have people assigned 24 (actually 26 hours) in a row to keep watching specifically to help respond to feed back AND to watch edits for common issues to make sure we preemptively see bugs as they happen even if others don't. We're certainly not perfect, and I don't think we pretend to be but there have been 100s of bugs closed in July already, I believe roughly 200 possibly a bit more now. The VE team is working constantly to go as fast as possible and to work in order of how bad they are (and things get re prioritized quickly if it's a killer). I find it highly highly unlikely we would have found that many bugs this quickly (I think it would have been MUCH MUCH slower) if we hadn't rolled out. I think it's very wrong to say that isn't the case, I just don't think it meets the facts. Jalexander--WMF 08:57, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, we'll never know since the beta-testers never had a chance to try a VE version with template editing, references editing, ... before the roll-out to new users (this major features were released at almost the same time than the A/B test). And, with the current number of open bugs, why was it so important to release it also to IP editors ? That won't discover many more bugs, when the list of open bugs/features requests/enhancements will already keep the VE team occupied for at least several weeks. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 09:04, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi again Nico, I think we should also make this clear - many of the things filed in Bugzilla are not bugs, they are enhancements (as in "I think we should add this/change this"). And it's not the number of bugs (myself in the first place, I see it now) we should focus about; as I said before, rolling out to IPs already provided insightful information to devs about variations of known bugs they had not seen before yesterday. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:32, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

We're not trying to gang up on you here, but you happen to be the one on duty on this page. The problem here is that what the community considers a bug is being recategorized as "enhancements" all over the place. Almost all of the VE bugs I've been watching have been recategorized this way. We don't think it is an enhancement that VisualEditor work properly with the AbuseFilter; we think this is core functionality. (Bugzilla 50472). We don't think it's an enhancement that VisualEditor and PendingChanges work properly together; we think this is core functionality. (Bugzilla 49699) And even if we don't think it is core functionality, it is absolutely essential that VE work properly with the sister software FlaggedRevisions before VE is deployed on projects that have FR deployed by default on most if not all pages, such as dewiki and ruwiki. The downgrading of bugs to "enhancements" implies that it is acceptable that VE not properly work with other existing WMF-designed and heavily used MediaWiki extensions. We're telling you that's not acceptable. Risker (talk) 11:38, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I think devs have already explained at least once what they mean by using some of those terms, unfortunately I can't recall where this happened now. I think that any downgrading now might just imply that these things can't probably be seen as bugs at this stage of development, because right now it is probably expected that they can't work. Of course they must be working at a later stage (what shouldn't?); right now a bug IMHO is an unexpected behaviour of what VE should already be doing by now (like, regressions, which unfortunately happen), and everything else is considered as enhancement, as in, VE must be doing this at a certain point. Again, I'm not much into technicalities, but hope this helped a bit. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:53, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

And I think Risker's point, and many of our points, is that there are some things which many not be vital to the software working (bugs) but are near-vital to the community working (so-called enhancements)—and until neither are major problems, VE should be opt-in, not opt-out. (Especially, as Adam pointed out, forcing it on us now makes it more likely for people to turn it off and never look back.) Ignatz mice•talk 12:24, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi there :) How bugs are labelled/sorted/solved is definitely dev's call. I think it is safe for me to say that what liaisons do in that regard is actually asking the devs about some of them to understand when they are going to be assigned, or if there's any chance that they can be solved earlier than others, things like that. While I check the ones Risker listed, please don't hesitate to a) make sure these concerns are also voiced at the relevant bugzilla page; b) check in here from time to time and list a few more of them that you feel are absolute "blockers", because I'd be really interested to hear about this - not that we'll manage to have them solved immediately!, but we might at least know where we are with them (I sometimes get notifications of solved bugs days after they are fixed). I'll also check on this, but probably something being classified as an enhancement does not mean it is not going to be fixed soon either. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:43, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

A bug is something that doesn't work per the requirements for a release, whereas an enhancement is some behavior that wasn't requested as part of a release. I think what we're all looking for here is some idea of what the WMF spec'd as requirements for the editor to be used by new/inexperienced editors. - Pointillist (talk) 20:46, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Delay the rollout to other big wikis

[Unindent]:For that matter, Please, I beg you, cancel the rollout to the other big wikis until such time as you've sorted out more of the bugs.

There's no need to cause problems in more places. You'll just upset those wikis, and how on earth will you defend yourself? You need more data? More data than en-wiki can provide? Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 09:22, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

We're not going to pay more attention to you because you use size 72 font. I can't speak for everyone but at least, personally, I pay less. I am, obviously, not the person who makes the decision on when and what gets deployed. I know that those that are, however, read here and will see the concerns and we will constantly pass them up. Jalexander--WMF 09:33, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

*Grins* Nothing as "Enjoyable" as being stuck between the end users on one side, and the developers on the other side while being slowly crushed between them is there? Large size aside, the original question does have merit though so let me rephrase the above in a smaller fon: Browsing trough the reported bugs in Bugzilla i still see many open issues that new users are bound to stumble over. Exotic bugs and non supported functionality is one thing, issues in basic editing functionality that should work is another. What i don't understand: Why aren't these basic issues fixed before a global release? And why is the editor under such a tight deadline to begin with? Excirial^{(Contact me,Contribs)} 10:08, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't know this, since I'm not WMF, only a small volunteer developer, but I can take a guess. Having seen this thing from afar for a while now, I suspect the following is the reason:

By the time en.wp would be satisfied, we would be 3 to 4 years down the road, and keeping up to date with the rest of MediaWiki would occupy much of that time. We don't have this amount of time. So instead, we will USE them (our most diverse and complicated scenario) as reluctant beta group to get the quickest to where we need to be. They will curse us now, but the net effect will be positive.

And for anyone who says "throw more people at the problem", that has its limits. A team like this, can absorb about 1 highly qualified 'outsider' per 2-3 months, without it hurting the team productivity (and remember that people can and do leave as well, further limiting your growth factor). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:27, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I made this into its own section, since it is a different idea than those made above. The relevant part of the roadmap:

"22 July: Deployment of the VisualEditor to most large Wikipedia wikis, available for all users. Which wikis are in this list is still to be determined, but will definitely include Wikipedia in German, French and Italian."

98.243.174.235 (talk) 20:51, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

At this point, the deployment is scheduled to go ahead. I know the developers are working hard on bug repair and enhancement, and I hope that it will go as smoothly as possible. The liaisons here continue to list and alert them to what we perceive as "blocker" bugs, so that they can assess their impact and hopefully expedite repair. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 12:24, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Adding text after a link includes that text in the link. Undoing sometimes gives a pawn

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

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53531

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53532

If you place the cursor after the last character of a link and start typing then your text becomes part of the displayed text for that link: [[Fish]] → [[Fish|Fish and chips]] rather than the intended [[Fish]] and chips or [[Fish and chips]] which would be expected from a WYSIWYG editor (even if it isn't what is wanted).

There is no way to edit part of a link at all, the only way around it is to unlink the whole phrase and relink the part you want linked.

This is not usually a problem, as you can work around by starting from after the space after the link rather than before it (i.e. start from position 9 rather than position 8:

0123456789AB
[[Fish]] and

However, this is counter intuitive if you want to add punctuation after the link (add it after the space, delete the space, add space after the punctuation). It also means it is impossible to add unlinked text when the link ends the line, as happens often on disambiguation pages. For example try adding context to the links at Mandi#People.

It is possible this is the same as bugzilla:50945 but I don't think it is.

Additionally, when your text becomes part of the extended link when you didn't want it to, pressing ctrl+z to undo it sometimes (but not always) results in the last character you typed being replaced by a white pawn (♙). I have a feeling this one might have been reported before but I can't find the report if it has. Thryduulf (talk) 19:28, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I reported a bug where adding a comma or full stop after a link created a white pawn, and it turned out to be triggered by a character in an Indian language in the translated name of the article. Not sure if it's related. But I can't find it - is there an easy way to trace ones contributions to this feedback page: can't find it by searching under "pawn" or "PamD"! PamD 19:41, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Not to my knowledge. I believe you're thinking of bugzilla:51140. Thryduulf, frankly you're more technical than I :). Can you see if this is related? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:05, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't think that's related. There is no non-ascii text in the Mandi disambig where I first found this and I replicated it at user:Thryduulf/sandbox2. Or at least its not obviously so (and I'm not as technical as I think you think I am!). I'll leave this a while longer to see if anyone else has any ideas before reporting it. Thryduulf (talk) 20:25, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Without the pawns or Indian language, I've today been noticing the problem that text or punctuation added immediately after a link gets linked within the link, though it's been possible to work round by inserting a newline, adding the new text, then backspacing to delete the newline. I don't think I came across it before, except in the weird pawn-generating case of bug 51140, so it might be something new today. PamD 22:27, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

(Note: There's an archive-search-box at the top of the page :)

Previous pawn thread was at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive_2013_06#Pawn_on_C3 - It links to Bugzilla:49888

But there's also mw:Thread:VisualEditor/Feedback/Really_weird_bug#Really_weird_bug_27346 from May, which links to Bugzilla:48346. HTH. –Quiddity (talk) 06:55, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Is there an edit filter yet that detects pawns? - David Gerard (talk) 06:58, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Not that I know of, but given the number of bugs which involve pawns it probably wouldn't be a bad idea! Thryduulf (talk) 12:54, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestions, but none of those bugs seem to quite fit. I've reported the link issue as Bugzilla:51531 and the pawn issue as Bugzilla:51532 as I also encountered a pawn when using ctrl+z not in conjunction with a link last night. Thryduulf (talk) 12:54, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Indentation with colons rendered with blank lines. Attempting to delete these deletes entire section and cannot be undone

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

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52595

At this sandbox page I experimented to see how the VE would cope with the {{od}} template (Ignore all the text, it is left over from a previous test). I actually found myself experimenting with indentation. It seems that where text is indented, VE renders one blank line before and after the indented section for every line that does not exist. i.e. section 1 of the sandbox page is rendered with five blank lines between the line starting "Fiji" and the outdent template. Section 2 had two blank lines at the end of the section (2 colons indenting), Section 4 is illustrated right, there are 5 blanks lines (one for each level of indentation) before and after the indented section (the Roman numerals are just to show the indentation and were not produced by VE, the line marked 0 was a pre-existing blank line).

If you try to delete any of the blank lines before the indented text, that level of indentation is deleted and subsequent lines moveed left one indent:

i                           i
  ii                           ii
     iii                           iii
         iv                        
             v                     
                Text 1                Text 1
                Text 2   →            Text 2
                Text 3                Text 3
             v                     v
         iv                        iv
     iii                           iii
  ii                           ii
i                           i

If you try and delete a new line following the indentation, then the entire indented section and all associated VE lines are deleted. This cannot be undone. Thryduulf (talk) 01:54, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I've reported this as additional to bugzilla:50995, but it might not be quite the same. Thryduulf (talk) 16:00, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

*nods* I was thinking that looked a lot like the Eckstein bug, too. --j⚛e decker ^talk 17:11, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Teamwork Barnstar

		The Teamwork Barnstar
		Hi, This is a Barnstar for all those developers who worked on MediaWiki software and various MediaWiki extensions.Special mention to VisualEditor, Universal Language Selector, Edit Filter as milestones which helps achive wiki moto access for all , and many more extensions which are user freindly.Thanks to all you developers Mahitgar (talk) 03:45, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

On their behalf, thank you. :) I will make sure they are aware. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 19:14, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Nowiki occurence rate

Of the last 5000 edits, 201 (4%) were tagged as "nowiki added". Dragons flight (talk) 05:04, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I have official WMF word that I shouldn't consider this to be a problem and that I should put this in perspective. Besides, the simple fact is that it's really all the editors fault and the glorious Visual Editor is just valiantly rescuing them. You wouldn't be suggesting that Okeyes and Jdforrester don't recognize the severity of this problem, would you? The sad thing is that the "fix" to issue a little warning message has already been installed, and it still is this bad. I think the edits should just be blocked in Visual Editor. If someone really wants to insert wiki markup as visible text in an article, they can use the source editor to do so.—Kww(talk) 05:18, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, let's put James's words in context; as I explained soon after that edit, and as I have explained on other occasions on this very page (most recently yesterday), what James means is not "this is not a problem" but "if we threw raw wikimarkup into the VisualEditor, Bad Things (TM) would happen". Nowiki tags are a small formatting area, albeit a serious one, but not so serious or so substantial as what would happen if the nowikis were not added.

The flaws around the nowiki popup are well known, and the pertinent thread suggests that a fix will be deployed tomorrow, which will hopefully reduce the occurrence. At the same time, we have several volunteers, including staffers in their volunteer capacity, working on a bot to identify and eliminate the nowiki tags, which will be hosted on Labs and in production hopefully soon. In the meantime, we may as well wait. There's no solution to the problem that doesn't either break things further, take longer to develop than the solutions in the works, or eliminate edits entirely based on formatting inconsistencies - which, as your WP:VPT thread on the topic notes, is something that has led to other editors rejecting your suggestion. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 06:49, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

If you would disable the Visual Editor until the reported bugs were fixed, someone works out a solution to this problem that actually works, there's an interface for references that the community approves of, there's a template editor that people agree upon, support tables (a pretty basic concept), and reintroduce it after it has been corrected, these problems actually would go away. The reason I get so irritated correcting things is because I know that they are being introduced for apparently the sole purpose of sticking to a schedule despite negative feedback. The only reason you think there's "no solution" is because you insist on overlooking the obvious one. I do my best to stay polite and reasonable, but the way we are continually told that so long as we aren't individually forced to use it, we have no right to complain about WMF exposing editors that know no better to a buggy tool is extremely frustrating. Having to make fixes like this and this because one of the most common edits that new editors make to pop music articles is impossible with the tools they are given does make me angry, and all you have to do is turn it off until it's fixed. That's easy. It's what should have been done weeks ago.—Kww(talk) 07:20, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not overlooking it, I just don't think it's pragmatic. As you say, we've got a schedule; this is not one I set, or one that I control (although I pester people abut specific bugs with some regularity). I cannot say "excellent idea, let's do that" because even excluding my personal objections to it, it's very unlikely to happen. Yes: allowing wikimarkup to be typed into the VE would solve for this problem. It would also be a substantial technical challenge for a problem that can at least be mitigated with other, smaller fixes, and that will reduce as muscle memory adapts. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 07:27, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Who is responsible for deciding that proceeding is the best move? There has to be an individual responsible for that decision. Who is it?—Kww(talk) 14:02, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

As the change management document says, James F, with ultimate reporting authority to Erik and Howie. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:45, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Quick insert panel

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

At the bottom of a conventional editor has a qiuckly insert bar. I would like the same with the visual editor, but more elegant. — ƒora jump, 07:02, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

This is apparently the issue noted at Bugzilla:38029 - see the section immediately below this one for a bit more about it. Thryduulf (talk) 15:48, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Can't follow links in templates out from article I'm editing in VE - new or reappeared problem?

Way back on 30 June I complained that I couldn't follow links from within hatnotes or refs while editing articles in VE (I'd been using ctrl + left-click) and Oliver pointed out that with right-click and menu choice they should work. I'm sure that advice worked at the time. But today I'm finding that even right-click isn't getting me anywhere useful. I may be missing something but it feels as if this is a change, that right-clicking used to work OK - eg to follow a link in a hatnote (eg the link to PLI in the hatnote while editing Pli). PamD 09:26, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

It does work for ordinary wikilinks and external links embedded in the text, but (to my knowledge) has never worked for templates or references. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 09:35, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Repeated blank lines

I've added edit filter 573 to test for the addition of multiple blank lines to articles. Looking at the results from last night, this is not strictly a VE issue (many people and tools using source editor also do this), but people using VE may account for 50% or so of the cases it traps. Dragons flight (talk) 12:40, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Can't add rows in tables

Can't add rows to tables 94.142.172.21 (talk) 14:27, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

That is correct. At present you can only edit the content of existing cells in a table, full support for tables is one of the many features that the devs are working on but which don't yet exist. Sorry. Thryduulf (talk) 15:21, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

No popups

I tend to use Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation popups a lot. Mainly to check that the link I'm inserting is actually the right one. I can just hover over a link a small popup window will appear with the first line of the article being linked. This allows me to readily confirm the link target is correct. Without this I feel like I'm editing blind, the link I've just inserted might be the right one but I can't confirm it until I save the article and hover over the link.

This raises two questions. 1) Could some popups like function be applied to give a better indication of where a link is pointing? 2) is there going to be any way gadget can work with VE? --Salix (talk): 14:39, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

This is frustrating. There is a workaround for the minute, whereby you can ctrl+click (I think it's command+click on a mac) on a link and it will open in a new window or tab (depending on your browser settings). This doesn't work for links to sections or redlinks currently (see bugzilla:51122).

In answer to your specific questions, 1) this has been requested, see bugzilla:50593, but remains unprioritised and classed as an enhancement so don't hold your breath. 2) Modifying Visual Editor to spport the current popups gadget has apparently been rejected, but whether it or a future gadget could be made to work with Visual Editor I don't know. Bugzilla:503 and Bugzilla:29272 are possibly relevant to this though. Thryduulf (talk) 15:33, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

If gadgets don't work with VE, we're headed for a two-class Wikipedia: novice editors using VE, and experienced editors using gadgets, semi-automated tools (TW, AWB, etc.), scripts, etc - that only work with the wikitext editing interface. Experienced editors can move in and out of pages quickly, tweak various settings, etc., and VE editors are limited to whatever the developers decide are important enough "enhancements" to roll out. And crossing the divide? That will require novice editors to learn a completely different editing system.

I'm all for making VE into the one best editor, but WMF absolutely needs to recognize that there is an entire ecosystem of tools (which reminds me - will toolserver/WMF labs stuff ever work with VE?) that has grown up around the existing editing interface, an ecosystem that makes it possible, for example, for a single (human) editor to have well over a million Wikipedia edits. Which means that VE absolutely must support such tools, even if they have to be rewritten. (Those who remember Web history may recall when the AOL website was written in a proprietary language called Rainman, because AOL didn't think it was necessary - or desirable - to expose its dial-in subscribers to the chaotic Web. And there are other examples out there: http://dashes.com/anil/2007/10/rainman-blackbird-facebook-and-the-new-tables.html ) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:46, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Browser tab crash on editing lumpectomy

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

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52043

When editing lumpectomy, when you make a selection that includes the block of references at the end, and then press ctrl+x, it crashes the google chrome tab (chrome 28). WS (talk) 15:32, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I can't reproduce this in Firefox 22 so it could be browser specific. I don't have Chrome to test it with but other people watching this page do. Thryduulf (talk) 15:46, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Confirmed on my own Chrome 28 : message "Aw, Snap! Something went wrong while displaying this webpage. To continue, reload or go to another page.". No problem on FF 17. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 16:31, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Reproduced in Chrome 27 on OSX; thanks, all :). I'll throw it in now. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:25, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Nowiki. Again

I'm not sure what the user intended here, but I'm sure that <nowiki /> was not supposed to be part of it. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:32, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I got an instance of that here as well. Insulam Simia (^talk/_contribs) 16:50, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) ×2 Almost certainly they were trying to change the link to "Grand Theatre, Blackpool". I'll add this to Bugzilla:50945. Thryduulf (talk) 17:00, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

here it seems the editor attempted to insert one link using wikitext and VE inserted nowikis around every bit of markup in the paragraph, including preexisting stuff. Just got to work out which bug to update now. Thryduulf (talk) 17:10, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Reported at Bugzilla:51554 but it's probably a duplicate of something. Thryduulf (talk) 17:19, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Both those instances looks like UI issues where the user didn't leave a space after the ']]' and the next word: (Ex: [[..Theater]]and, [[Hamitic]]stock). Without the <nowiki/ > after the link, "and", "stock" would become linktrails of the preceding link which would be incorrect. So, the UI could maybe alert the user about this. I assume this is not a very common scenario. Ssastry (talk) 18:02, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

In testing a week or so back, I found that the link editor sometimes included the space after a word in the link even when you dind't want it to. It's also difficult to get links to do what you want them when you try and edit them. It's very likely that other users will stumble on the same issue. Thryduulf (talk) 18:29, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Toolbar

Toolbar is really big relative to the size of the screen. 199.212.27.245 (talk) 17:00, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

199.212.27.245, could you provide a screenshot? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:05, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Album ratings

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53558

Has someone brought up Template:Album ratings? This is an instance where the transclusion option on VE, while it does work, is more inconvenient than just wiki-markup. In wikimarkup, if you want to insert a new review into the middle of the template, i.e. between reviews 3 and 4 (rev3 and rev4), you just change rev4 to rev5 (and rev5 to 6 and so on), then insert the new score. With VE, you have to add a new rev parameter to the bottom, and move the content of ALL of the parameters affected through copy-paste. This is much more time consuming than editing the wikitext.--¿3family6 _contribs 17:44, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

That's not something I've been able to find has been brought up before, so I've reported it as Bugzilla:51558. Thank you. Thryduulf (talk) 18:24, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Mysterious

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An editor made a change to the Danny Worsnop article using VE - but the changes haven't showed up in the article (even when there is a diff). What on earth is going on here? Insulam Simia (^talk/_contribs) 17:58, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I see the "artists" in the displayed article. Clear your browser's cache, perhaps? Ignatz mice•talk 18:04, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I see the changes. Are you seeing a cached version in the browser by any chance? Ssastry (talk) 18:05, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Both of you can slap me with a huge trout - I was misreading something in the article as the editor shuffled the citation needed tag onto another line when I thought he removed it. This lead me to think the edits weren't processed properly. D'oh! Insulam Simia (^talk/_contribs) 18:11, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

How long does it take to recognise a newly created article

I'm beginning to get the hang of it, and learning all the idiosyncrasies of the software. (What to the < and ^ arrows on dialogs do, why do I need to click on the template name to show the list of parameters, why does the newline and tab not work as expected in template dialogs).

Working on a Cornish parish involves creating a lot of small interlinked articles, and I've noticed that link dialog does not know about recently created articles, I created Penpol Creek (River Fowey) about 30 minutes ago and I'd like to link to it. However its not coming up in the hints and it I enter it in manually VE thinks its a new page, shown in red in the dialog. How long does it take to recalculate the list of articles?--Salix (talk): 18:43, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

That's a really good question; I'll find out. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:45, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

The answer is that the cache clears every 86400 seconds - so, 24 hours. That's realistically the maximum you'd have to wait, unless you're really unlucky. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:54, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Even though the link displays in the dialog as red, you can insert it just like a normal link and it will appear and work as a blue link in the saved article. Thryduulf (talk) 18:58, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, but I'm a) lazy, b) dyslexic and c) got no short term memory. How am I going to remember the name of an article I created 10 minutes ago?--Salix (talk): 19:02, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

When I do things like that I keep the original open in a separate tab so I can refer to/copy and paste from it. I find that a great help, particularly when dealing with misspelings and typos at RfD. None of laziness, dyslexia and short term memory problems are bugs with the VisualEditor though, and no matter how useful it would be asking the devs to fix them is unfortunately out of scope :) Thryduulf (talk) 19:21, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

@Salix alba: Regarding "How am I going to remember the name of an article I created 10 minutes ago?", is there some reason you wouldn't look at your recent edits, via "Contributions"? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:09, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

javascript does not work after a save

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53565

After hitting the save button and then the final save button (bring back finish editing). It looks like none of usual javascript is working, popups does not work, neither does the wiki min atlas links (you can't see the little round globe). You need to reload the page to get anything working again.--Salix (talk): 18:55, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I wondered about that last night but I wasn't really awake at the time! I'll have a look to see if this has been reported anywhere. Thryduulf (talk) 19:01, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Has now :). Great catch, Salix! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:04, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Ah, you were marginally quicker than me! I've marked the bug I opened as a duplicate :) Thryduulf (talk) 19:14, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Incompatible with template:Episode list

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53217

Still corrupting articles. See [11]. There seems to be a major problem between VisualEditor and template:Episode list, I don't care which one is at fault, and I am getting weary about constantly fixing these. Until this is fixed please disable VisualEditor from making change to the attributes in this template if it is unable to suppress exposing internal details of the template. Geraldo Perez (talk) 19:04, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Instinctive reaction: what the heck is that?! :P. I'm looking into it now. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:06, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Part of bugzilla:51217; subbu is on it :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:19, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Reference templates needed

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52458

"Edit source" has an easy option to type in the ISBN or doi number and have the details of the book or paper automatically filled in. The visual editor needs this if I am to use this. J1812 (talk) 19:48, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, Visual Editor needs lots of work to make reference editing useful and consequently there are lots of bugs related to it. This issue might be covered in bugzilla:50458 but I'm not sure. Oliver filed that particular bug so I'll let him make a judgement about it :) Thryduulf (talk) 20:03, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Yep; covered by "local wiki-specific workflows". Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:08, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Huge dialog boxes

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T51969

It has been noticed on the plwiki ([12]) that the dialogs (especially References and Page settings) are like modal windows: they are unmovable, huge, they are at the center of the screen and, unfortunately, they cover the content. It confuses users who have small-resolution screens and those who want to compare the data they're adding with content without losing added—but not applied—changes (for ex. when adding categories:year births/deaths with the introductory text or when adding a reference with the info being sourced). Tar Lócesilion|queta! 22:16, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

There's a bugzilla entry for this, bugzilla:49969 ("Dialogs should be repositionable/draggable"). Add yourself to the CC: list to watch updates. –Quiddity (talk) 22:26, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you :) Tar Lócesilion|queta! 22:37, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Another nowiki oddity

I found an example of this in the Filter 550 list. If you enter "In 2012 he was included in Variety's Legal Impact Report 2012" and some following text, and then select "Variety" but not the following "apostrophe-s" and click "Italic", you get this. The result actually looks like what was intended, with only the word "Variety" in italics, and if the closing </nowiki> was immediately after the apostrophe it would make sense; but it is confusing (and might cause other problems) to have it so far downstream. JohnCD (talk) 22:44, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Tracked in T52841 Ssastry (talk) 22:51, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

"By the end of July 2013, the VE team expects VE to be available to editors on almost all Wikimedia projects" - WP:VisualEditor

The point has been made and this is not the location for general comments about the programme nor about the staff and volunteers involved in it. This page is intended for specific feedback about what is and is not working so this can be tracked. Thryduulf (talk) 00:25, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

This is madness. VE is not yet ready for primetime, and I suspect the devs do not speak every language there's a Wikipedia for, meaning that this won't even provide useful data back.

People should be fired over this. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 23:03, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Adam, there is no benefit from making such aggressive and mean-spirited comments. At this point, your comments are distracting from the key issues being addressed on this page (i.e., what needs to be fixed in order for VE to be fully functional), and suggesting that people be fired isn't going to improve VisualEditor one bit. In fact, you're starting to scare off people who want to make constructive criticisms because they don't want to be associated with your much more extreme language. Can you please tone it down several notches? Risker (talk) 23:14, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

The justification given for launching so early in the development processs is that it's necessary to find out what goes wrong, so VE can be fixed. Launching it to people who cannot communicate directly to the devs is madness until it's far more featured, and the bugs already found are fixed. Then will be the time to deal with things such as script support bugs; as it stands, can anyone state even a single benefit of launching VE to the other-language encyclopedias at this time? If the software's buggy and lacks key features, people will find ways to turn it off, and you will have lost all ways to get them back at that point, because the switches will no longer be in your control.

I don't think this is an extreme view. According to WP:VisualEditor/RFC, VisualEditor, in its current state of development, is not considered a useful feature at this time by an overwhelming majority, despite a similar overwhelming majority thinking it will be useful at some later phase of development. Also at the moment, by an extreme supermajority, are passing a censure of the WMF for launching VE as the default editor before it had reached the level of development that would justify that. A majority think that VisualEditor should only be opt-in, not the current cannot-even-opt-out-if-the-WMF-has-their-way, as well. The WMF seems determined to ignore the Feedback. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 23:17, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, Adam, do you really think that telling people they should be fired is going to motivate them to share your opinion about other matters? And yes your edit (self reverted) on the Wikipedia:VisualEditor page was trolling; please do not do that again. In fact, I urge you to step away from this topic entirely for a few days. Risker (talk) 23:28, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I note you ignore the actual question, asking what benefit the rollout has? Can you name a single benefit of rolling out VE to additional languages before some more bugfixing? Also, can you point to a single instance where the WMF have accepted fault in response to negative criticism, throughout the entire rollout? Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 23:37, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I tend to agree that people should be fired — not the coders, but the people who set the schedule. But I agree that it's not constructive here. We need to have the schedule unset. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 23:46, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Adam, I'm sure that you are aware that I'm of pretty much the same frame of mind as you are, and I also feel that your style is getting in the way here. There's only a very small chance of getting this problem fixed, but every time you post one of these things, it gives the people that are pressing for VE's continued release something to point at and say "Look! The people opposing VE's release are completely unreasonable, and there's no way you can make them happy!" Every time you post something vitriolic, you make it less and less likely that you will get what you want. Please stop. Let the rest of us try.—Kww(talk) 00:04, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Can I come in here in Adams defence. There is a pattern going on here. An active editor with an excellent track record spends hours of her/his time, explaining why the project is broken beyond repair- and everyone agrees with the analysis. Their comments are then ignored, and eventually pass into the archive. Tiddly issues are given a Bugzilla number and praised as 'a great catch' then are passed to the dev team who are overwelmed. What must Adam or anyone do to gain attention? Last night Pam put together her little essay- an excellent summary but discussion has dried up I do hope that Pam is going to post a copy of her essay again later tonight to keep it current- and I do hope someone will go back through the last two archives to resurrect all the comments on project management methodologies, and the need to understand the nature of a wikipedia edit in 2013 before you start coding. I haven't the energy, or the desire to provide free consultancy knowing it will be ignored, I am just very pleased that Adam has been noticed- that in itself is an achievement.-- Clem Rutter (talk) 00:36, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Pam's essay has a chance of having a positive effect: well phrased, well reasoned, hard to refute. Adam's vitriol results in people looking for the slightest factual error in order to discredit him. Since he tends to start before having all facts in hand, there tends to be factual errors in his posts. The net result is that no matter what you might think of his motivations, he does more harm than good.—Kww(talk) 00:56, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Hate to butt in here, but I would like to echo Adam's original point (less the calls for firing)—rolling out VE, in its current state, to any languages that at least two people on the WMF dev/liaison/whatever team do not speak (type) fluently is sheer madness. Unless you'd like to have the discussions that have been going on here for the past weeks all over again, only filtered through Google Translate. Ignatz mice•talk 03:05, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I have no doubt whatsoever that Adam is right. Leaving it released on English Wikipedia is a really poor idea, and deploying it more widely will damage multiple projects while returning little to nothing of value.—Kww(talk) 03:16, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Tables

I can't figure out how to insert or properly edit tables. BuddylBat (talk) 00:54, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Tables are not supported from VE yet :( Working on them and there will be a support in future release TeamGale (talk) 00:55, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

As she said. Of all the deficiencies, this one is the biggest, and people are being encouraged to overlook it because it was essentially a planned deficiency. Whoever thought that newbies didn't add rows to tables has never edited music-related articles, because that tends to be the most common edit: adding a release to the release history table, a chart to the chart table, or a certification to the certification table.—Kww(talk) 01:00, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, actually, if it keeps doing this the problem will solve itself, because there won't be any tables left to edit. Sorry if that sounds uncharitable, but there's little more annoying than software that breaks something the user wasn't even trying to edit. Begoon ^talk 03:53, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Anatomy of a PR disaster

Alright. While I'm being calm and collected. Here's why I - and I think a lot of others -got so upset.

Let's ignore the Flow issue: I think it's clear now that all statements that were causing so much upset were Jorm's opinions alone, and pretty much exactly opposite to those of the WMF.

So, what was wrong with the launch? I think it can be divided into two issues: 1. muscle memory and 2. the fact that bugs in VisualEditor were, objectively, damaging the site.

Muscle memory This introduction is rather long, in retrospect. Feel free to skip to "What went wrong", below. One develops habits as a long-term wiki editor. And some of us have special needs - but I'll get to those in a minute. Long story short, the VisualEditor tab is where the old "edit" tab was. In early days, you had to hover over it to get the edit source tab. I do a lot of tasks that VisualEditor can't support. I'm heavily involved in both images and templates, and, even when VisualEditor supports images better, I'll still be better off using Wikitext, because I do image restorations, and, for example, a rather common situation is that someone, four or five years ago, went to the Library of Congress, and grabbed a low-resolution copy of an image, because the high-resolution images there are TIFFs, and no indication is given that the TIFFs are higher resolution than the JPEG. So I take the high-resolution version, do some restoration, upload the restored copy with a consistent filename system (the older uploads to commons generally have rather non-descript filenames), and then... I have to put it in wikis to replace the low-resolution image. It's far easier to use the "find" tool on my browser to locate the filename of the image I'm replacing, then pasting in the new filename, than it could ever be to look for the image in VisualEditor, delete the old one, copying the caption, add the new one, pasting in the caption, and rescale the new one to the same size as the one being replaced.

And I think you'll agree that's not a problem with VE. It's simply not a function VisualEditor can, nor should, support; it's just far more practical to use Wikitext.

By the way, this is an aside, but... can turning off VisualEditor will be a globally-supported user preference? Because file replacement in that manner isn't always one wiki, and whilst we have bots for that, CommonsDelinker has regular periods of downtime. It's hard enough finding the edit button on Wikis that use a language you don't speak, some of which are right-to-left languages, without needing to avoid the VisualEditor edit button.

Anyway. So, long story short. Some of us should almost never use VisualEditor. But your mouse automatically goes to the "Edit" button, because it's gone there for the.. let's see.. seven or so years you've been editing Wikipedia. And so it's better to shut it off. Unless someone can make a gadget that puts the link to VE somewhere safe, like over in the left hand column or something. And even when not doing image work, I can often type out long-memorised template names, ref tags, and the like faster than I could ever use an automated tool, if using the tool meant I had to keep lifting my hands off the keyboard to use the mouse.

What went wrong

Two things. A member of the WMF added a line to the FAQ stating that we'd be able to turn it off in editing preferences, which stayed in up to three weeks before the launch. Broken promises never end well. Added, removed.

Secondly, when the functionality was removed, a hack was created. Now, had the WMF kept its promises and told people where to find the off-switch that had been promised, all would have been fine. But the sitenotice didn't mention it at all. When I came up with a simple message, and suggested it as a sitenotice, Okeyes threw a fit, for example, "I feel it would totally undermine the software proper to fire everyone at an instant switch to permanently disable the VE" Context if you look at the rest of that link: Okeyes didn't know what Sitenotice's features were, and basically presumed it had exactly the opposite features to what it had. Now, remember, this is the switch that a member of the WMF had promised would exist.

It's fine to launch new features, but when rearranging the site interface, muscle memory is going to get screwed up, and, remember, when launched, you had to hover over edit for a bit to get the edit source button.

That hovering over "edit" to get the "edit source" button - and, yes, of course it's gone now - was particularly bad in muscle memory terms. If VisualEditor wasn't right for you, the least disruptive thing you could do was turn it off so you could stop complaining, and let those it was meant for have the benefits.

But that was precisely what the WMF was trying to prevent.

Bugs in Wikieditor

This one's actually quite simple. When it became clear that VisualEditor had bugs that were screwing up articles, it should have been temporarily turned off until at least the first fixes could come in, and relaunched. It was frankly shocking that the WMF was willing to damage Wikipedia.

These bugs still aren't fully fixed.

No-one wants to see the site they volunteered for damaged because insufficient testing was done. The moment the WMF knew it was damaging articles, the schedule should have gone out the window, leaving only sufficient people still using the tool to help them find out whether bugfixes worked.

This one really amped up the us-vs.-them mentality. "We made this site. All you're bringing to the table is code that's damaging it. GET RID OF THAT DAMN THING."

And the thing is, there was and is no sitenotice about this. No warning that people need to be extra careful with VE, particularly during the early days, when the bugs were severe. I mean, the bugs are relatively harmless now, but weren't they stripping references and such at first? And didn't VE launch without the ability to add references?

Okay, now, that said, the really bad bugs were fixed pretty quickly. But the WMF did a really, really bad job of communicating. As an example. On Commons, CommonsDelinker, which helps manage file renames, went down a while ago. A sitenotice went up warning to be careful about moving files, giving explicit instructions about the need to clean up after yourself.

Never at any time did the CentralNotice about VisualEditor say anything more than it had launched. So far as I recall, it didn't even warn people to check all edits made using it, even during the most buggy phase.

The WMF's communication was terrible. Absolutely unforgivable, and gave the very strong impression the WMF didn't care. Now, I presume you were actually working on bugs or the like, but you can't shut up at times like this.

Yes, users were angry. They had a right to be: their site was being damaged. Unfortunately, fuel was poured on those flames. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 09:14, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

"The WMF" never promised that there would be a full opt-out. That edit was made by a regular member of the community (who then happened to be hired by the WMF). There are merits to debating whether a full opt-out was desirable or not, but saying "the WMF promised it" is simply not true if based on that edit. guillom 10:35, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Adam, I appreciate that you are going for a more cordial tone here; it would be nice if you could extend that to your subject lines as well, particularly with the AGF-challenged speculation of a "Possible Conspiracy Theory" two sections down. :) Accusations like that can really get a conversation off on the wrong foot. :/

In terms of whether or not "turning off VisualEditor will be a globally-supported user preference", I am speculating that at this point it will not. As I imagine you know (since it says so in the edit notice on this page), it is not currently supported by the WMF at all, but by a user-created gadget. The section in the FAQ about why "no standard user preference to disable VisualEditor" exists was added by Erik Möller, so I think it's safe to rely on it as the official position unless that changes. Things do change, but I have heard nothing to suggest this will.

That said, as Guillom points out, the line in the FAQ about preferences was written by a community member, not by staff of WMF. WhatamIdoing has since joined as a contractor, but when she wrote that it was a good faith belief of somebody who did not have inside information.

You say "you can't shut up at times like this", but the WMF has never shut up. The contributor list of this page makes that pretty clear. There's quite a few staff members on it--currently, the top three contributors are Oliver, me and James Forrrester, who is the Product Manager for the VisualEditor team. On the day of deployment, we had 24-hour staffing of this page...given timezone differences in staff, we have nearly that throughout every week...and we are in the midst of another such rotation, given the IP deployment. Developers and liaisons have been working seven days a week to coordinate fixes and improvements to this software, collaborating heavily with volunteers throughout. I understand you don't like the way the message was presented, and I'm sure that the WMF can learn from such concerns. I certainly understand that you're not happy that rollout has continued in the face of existing bugs. But we have by no means been silent.

In terms of muscle memory, this is of course going to be an issue. Some community members have requested that a preference be created to permit reversal of the [Edit | Edit source] order to help with this. I filed this request on their behalf at T52688, and your thoughts there would surely help developers in determining the best approach. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 11:14, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Okay. Time to spam Möller's talk page, everyone. Because turning off VE is vital to a lot of tasks. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 11:17, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure why you think spamming his talk page is going to turn off VE. The IP rollout was delayed in the first place based on reasonably expressed concerns of the community and bugs that needed urgent repair. It was a reasoned decision, not an emotional one. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 11:22, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't mean literally spam, I mean to calmly explain why VE being turned off is an important thing, because it keeps those of us for whom VE will cause problems from causing problems to VE editors. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 11:28, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Maggie, I understand why ignoring Adam is so tempting, but it should be kept in mind that the reasons for his frustration and rage are quite real. There's been substantial negative feedback from the community about the quality of this editor. It certainly isn't in any kind of condition to expose novice editors to, and yet it remains enabled as the most accessible editor for novice editors and has been rolled out to anonymous editors now, editors that we can't even talk to and explain why their edits are going badly and how to use a functional editor instead. Why is there such a rush to get this editor deployed so widely and rapidly instead of waiting until reported bugs are fixed?—Kww(talk) 17:36, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I think this question won't be answered, as it has never been answered in the many times it was asked... --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 18:00, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not ignoring him, Kww. I gave him as much information as I have. :) Anything I might say about the rate of release would be my own speculation, which would obviously not be a good idea. I have passed along a request for more information as to the rationale for the schedule, but it'll have to come from someone who is part of that decision-making chain--whether they deliver it directly or pass it through one of the liaisons. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 18:04, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Cool, thanks :-) Who would be the people in said chain? - David Gerard (talk) 18:15, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

As the VisualEditor change management document notes, James Forrester is the Product Manager, reporting to the Director of Product Development Howie Fung and the Vice President of Product Development Erik Möller (who is also the WMF Deputy Director and VP of Engineering), but I do not know how the schedule was set (if all of them were involved, or a subset, or what others might have been part of the chain) or why; I'll bring you more details as soon as I get them, unless they deliver them directly. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 18:40, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Lest you should think only Adam and a few others are concerned, I assure you he is far from alone in failing to understand why the WMF is determined to shoot itself in the foot over this launch. Throwing VE open to yet another class of editors while it has so many deficiencies and such a long outstanding bug-list has increased the pressure on the hard-pressed devs, increased the damage to the encyclopedia (Filter 550 nowiki tags inserted into an article is still being tripped every couple of minutes - 25 times between 21:00 and 22:00), confused and put off the new editors you are trying to help, and turned against the product people who would have been much more willing to give it a fair trial if they did not feel it was being forced on them. What is the deadline? Why not hold back a month, or if necessary two or three, until the the product stabilises and the essential facilities are all there? If there is some rationale for this excessive and damaging haste, we would dearly like to know what it is. JohnCD (talk) 22:48, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I realize that the rationale is of widespread interest. :) I communicated as much when I initially requested information, and I do hope that I'll get a response soon. As there wasn't one in my inbox this morning, at this point it would be later today if it comes to me directly. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 12:27, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi Maggie, did you get an answer or the question will be left unanswered as it has been in the previous weeks ? Could Howie or Erik explain to us why the VE planning is so vital ? Thanks for your involvement in trying to get answers for us. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 20:40, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi, Nico. When I get an answer, I will post it here. I will not forget. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 22:49, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Apparently, WMF bosses have clearly decided not to answer the question (which was asked several times in several places), but rather keep going on rolling out VE to as many users as possible without any concerns with the damages its currently doing to the encyclopedia itself and to many users who are tired of being treated without any respect... Any tool made by a volunteer which would create even 10% of the damages VE is currently creating would have simply be blocked without any hesitation until the tool writer would have fixed it. People are here to write an encyclopedia, not debug software or fix damages created by this software. (nothing against you Maggie) --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 20:23, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Follow-up

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I just noticed there were some questions I never answered about my previous post. So in case people are still interested:

Why does the Tab key behave like Page down? Still doing that. — HHHIPPO 19:50, 8 July 2013 (UTC)
When I go into "edit" mode and press "tab", it jumps from wikilink to wikilink. "Page down" pages down. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 15:53, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Tried that again: it's now jumping between the inline citation marks. Might be it did just that when I first tried. But it's not jumping between wikilinks for me. — HHHIPPO 22:14, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

It's doing that for me, too, now - except that it jumps between wikilinks in templates. (I tested it on Bone anchored hearing aid.) In any event, what it's NOT doing is increasing the indentation, which is what the VE says it should do. T53530 --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 12:35, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

OK, thanks! — HHHIPPO 19:45, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

When marking a block of text, empty lines are not shown as marked. Still the same. — HHHIPPO 19:50, 8 July 2013 (UTC)
@Hhhippo:, I'm not sure what you mean by "marking a block of text". Can you clarify? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 15:53, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

I maybe should have said selecting, not marking. I mean what you do by putting the cursor somewhere in the text, holding shift and pressing the down arrow several times. If there are empty lines within the such selected text, you can't see that they're selected. That's particularly confusing when trying to select only empty lines for deleting them. — HHHIPPO 22:14, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Can you give an example of an article where this happens? It might help illustrate the issue. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 12:36, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Just take any article, insert two blank lines, place the cursor in the first one, then press Shift-ArrowDown twice. Now, where's your cursor? Press delete. There it was! Actually, I just found that the wikitext editor does the same thing, and I never noticed, so I guess it's no big deal. — HHHIPPO 19:45, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Beta menu:
It's not at all obvious that Leave and Feedback aren't two different entities. Still the same. It's the second link in the "Beta" flyout. — HHHIPPO 19:50, 8 July 2013 (UTC)
Found the "Leave feedback". They look like one link to me. :) Can you clarify how this is confusing or how it looks different to you? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 15:30, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

I see an empty line between User guide and Leave and another one between Leave and feedback. My very first thought was that Leave would be the switch for signing out of the beta test (note that I didn't click it ;-) — HHHIPPO 22:14, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Interesting. I can see why that would be confusing. What browser and OS are you on? It still looks like one line for me (Chrome; Windows 7). --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 16:50, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Firefox 22.0 on Ubuntu 12.04. I now figured out that the culprit is Ubuntu's default font: DejaVu Sans. That's a bit wider than e.g. Arial, so it causes a linebreak in the link. Maybe one could make that space non-breaking and have the flyout widen instead? — HHHIPPO 19:45, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Why is the feedback link grayed out? Ditto. — HHHIPPO 19:50, 8 July 2013 (UTC)
Don't know - once we work out the above, I can track this (in case I need to say something about that, too.) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 15:30, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Just noticed another funny feature of the Leave feedback link: it gets underlined when you hover the mouse anywhere over the flyout, the word Beta or the question mark, but it works only when clicking directly on the link. — HHHIPPO 22:14, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I'll wait to report all the "leave feedback" issues in one bug, probably, after I figure out what's up with the note above. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 16:53, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Good. Here's another one: assume you are a non-techy, non-wiki newcomer and you read VisualEditor is in 'beta'. Wouldn't your first reaction be Who is where???. — HHHIPPO 19:45, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

"Leave feedback" issues at T53500 , T53618, T53619 and T53620. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 15:47, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

The VE team is using the Agile cycle?

Okeyes (WMF) recently said the functional specification is "the VE should do what the markup editor does". In terms of very precise, fine-grained analysis of "button X, when clicked, goes to state Y", we apparently don't have that, indeed, for reasons that boil down to "we're not a government operation". The VE team is using the Agile cycle (diff). Skipping over the implication that describing a UI state machine is somehow not Agile, I wonder whether this is a broader symptom of the problem we have here. Agile aims to deliver a cycle of frequent releases, where each release is small, works well, has minimal bugs and delivers some incremental benefit(s) to delighted users. It's great when you need to discover requirements incrementally. The Visual Editor project isn't anything like that. The requirements are vast and already known. VE touches all our existing data and editing processes so it requires thousands of features, which are effectively being delivered in a single "big bang" release. Because it's so big, it has far more bugs than a typical Agile iteration. The potential benefits will accrue to new users, but the risk of damage to existing articles is borne by current users, who aren't in contact with the developers anyway.
I could go on, but you get my point. If WMF wants to roll out Visual Editor to all users then it's a traditional big bang "bet the business" software project which necessitates the traditional painful software engineering cycle. If WMF prefers to use Agile practices, then they have to accept an incremental release approach which means having fewer features per release but making sure they work safely (e.g. you can't create a citation, but you can't delete one either). You can't have it both ways. Don't make Visual Editor the Dreamliner of software projects. - Pointillist (talk) 22:05, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Indeed. I'm hardly a fan of "Agile" the buzzword, but "Agile" does not mean not writing a spec. (Presumably this point will be clarified.)

But the question is the codebase. I am told there are indeed volunteers who are not WMF employees working on the VE codebase. Said volunteer coders, what's the state of this thing? - David Gerard (talk) 23:07, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for moving this to a separate section. I agree with your points. I would also like to add that VE is essentially a software re-engineering project if they are wanting VE to be as functional as the source editor (SE). re-engineering non-user-facing components is easy to do with Agile, however re-engineering user-facing functionality requires an understanding the use-case of the existing software before high level design is undertaken, and documentation of that is critical for acceptance testing which should come before deployment.

In order to break deployment into phases, with only some functionality delivered, I believe that one core functional requirement is that the VE absolutely must allow flicking between VE and SE during an edit, as there are cases where a lot of work has been done in the VE, however it is not desirable to save an incomplete edit in order to fix it in the SE. The user shouldnt be forced to decide between starting again in SE, or saving the article in an imperfect state. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 23:21, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

My recollection from talking to some of the developers a couple of years back was that the WMF are using Scrum. I like Scrum - it is an excellent methodology for the right teams, and it feels like it would be a good fit for the WMF. However, it is perhaps best viewed as an agile project management methodology, and has a lot of strict requirements. Although not as strict as Extreme Programming. :)

Using a formal agile development methodology like XP might work, although the amount of initial functionality required in the first release makes it feel like a difficult fit, as a Visual Editor that only supported 3-4 use cases wouldn't be a particularly valuable first iteration. The frequent small release cycle would make the methodology tricky at best, and would have had to have been started 18 months ago. But if used, there wouldn't necessarily be an overall full specification for an agile methodology, as if you could draw full specs then you wouldn't need or wouldn't be using agile. There would, however, be formal requirements for each iteration in XP, and in Scrum you have the overall product and individual sprint backlogs.

With that said, per Pointillist, this isn't agile. Agile methodologies need to be rigorous to work, in part due to the "circle of snakes". This is a standard "release and fix" methodology, where unfinished code is released early and developers need to scramble to fix the bugs that keep cropping up. Like the use of "beta" to describe what was a full release, or "Linus' Law", it is being misused. It often is - unless you do serious work maintaining the rigorous requirements of an agile methodology, it is easy to fall into cowboy programming and making it up as you go along, which isn't what agile is about.

I should note that I don't have any problems with the coders or the people helping here. This feels like what happens when you are forced to release to a tight schedule that the coders can't meet. I think many of us have been there, and no-one likes releasing incomplete code.- Bilby (talk) 02:28, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Entirely agree. There's no deadline, is there? - Pointillist (talk) 09:31, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm presuming from observing the behaviour that someone's decided that if it's going to happen it's going to be painful, — Preceding unsigned comment added by David Gerard (talk • contribs) 09:35, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Suggestion

Can I suggest you make VisualEditor opt-in rather than rolling it out and making it anything but obvious how to disable it.

Those that I have spoken to universally dislike it and I myself find it very un-user-friendly, especially when it comes to infoboxes and categorisation. For saying wikipedia is supposed to work on consensus, there appears to be very little of anything close to that in the way visual editor has been rolled out.

The fair option would be not to force it on people and allow people to opt-in if they want to experiment with it. --Rushton2010 (talk) 01:26, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Near the top of this page you'll see a FAQ section (it's collapsed; to read it, you'll need to uncollapse it). Please see the question "Can the editors here order the developers to turn this off?" -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:22, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Dealing with invisible templates, e.g., Cooking

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53322

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

If I go to Cooking, edit the page, and then cursor to the very last line, backspace once removes {{Link FA|kl}}. Backspace two more times then removes {{Use dmy dates|date=April 2012}}. There's no indication these templates are even there—no box or transclusion symbol. For all I know, I'm just removing blank lines. FF 22/Win7Pro SP1. --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 07:46, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

This is bugzilla:51322. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 08:12, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 08:19, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Images that aren't thumbnails can't be edited

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53615

Images which are not thumbnails can't be edited properly using VE. If there is a single image, it can be selected, but the resize handles don't appear and the media icon doesn't appear. Moving the image around works and deleting the image works. When there are two images like this, the mouse pointer turns into a "forbidden" symbol (the mirror image of ∅), with the tooltip "Sorry, this element can only be edited in source mode for now.", and semi-tansparent shading covers both images. The images can't be moved, and can only be deleted as pair - you can't delete only one image. I am using Chrome (v. 28) on Windows 7, and was playing around with VE on List of freeways in Victoria, Australia. - Evad37 (talk) 10:41, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Confirmed on Firefox 22. I moved a copy of the page to my sandbox and tested this there. It seems that images cannot be resized at all if they have a specific size in the template. I wonder if this is in any way related to T52645. Before that change one couldn't resize images that were marked as thumbs, now one cannot resize images that aren't marked as thumbs. Excirial^{(Contact me,Contribs)} 14:38, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I've reported this as Bugzilla:51615, thank you. Thryduulf (talk) 14:47, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Eighteen new pairs of nowiki tags

The more I look at the Filter 550 log, the odder the things that turn up. Here what looks like a simple rearrangement of one sentence has scattered eighteen pairs of nowiki tags throughout the article, none of them actually enclosing any wiki markup. I tried without success to reproduce this by copying the whole source text into a sandbox. JohnCD (talk) 14:06, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I have seen the same thing happen as I have edited. Nowiki's appear randomly. Odd... Capitalismojo (talk) 14:10, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

All of those nowikis are because leading spaces have been added at the start of paragraphs. The question is whether the user or the VisualEditor inserted them. See Bugzilla:51462. Thryduulf (talk) 14:19, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

That'll be it - it looks as though the user added leading space at the start of every para. It's odd how VE places the trailing </nowiki> tag as far back as it can without hitting any other markup - that is commented on under "Another nowiki oddity" further up, and at Bugzilla:50841. JohnCD (talk) 15:28, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Thryduulf: For what it's worth, It's quite easy to verify (as I just did) that adding leading spaces to paragraphs in that article from that draft leaves "nowiki"s, just edit the old revision, add some spaces to paragraphs, and look at the generated diffs. --j⚛e decker ^talk 16:17, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I never doubted that. My only query was whether the leading spaces were inserted by the user and the nowikis then added to that by the Visual Editor, or whether both leading spaces and surrounding nowikis were added by the Visual Editor. Thryduulf (talk) 16:28, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I misunderstood. I find the latter scenario highly improbable, but hey, what do I know? ;-) --j⚛e decker ^talk 16:31, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

It would be a bug I've not seen before, but then I've long since given up by being surprised at how VE manages to mange things! Particularly when it's something that I'm not familiar with it being a common thing for users to do. Thryduulf (talk) 16:44, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I reverted the edit at Adygea that resulted in 18 nowiki tags, and then tried to duplicate what the editor did, assuming he/she only was trying to rearrange one sentence. The good news is that VE didn't (at least for my edit) gratuitously add nowikis to subsequent paragraphs. The bad news is that although what it showed me, just before I saved the page, looked fine, what VE saved as wikitext resulted in a nowiki tag between a wikilink and the subsequent word, rather than the space that should have been there (and looked like it was). In short, VE isn't very smart when text is being moved around near existing wikilinks. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:24, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I've seen several of those, e.g. here. These are isolated <nowiki/> tags with the / at the end. Is VE perhaps using them to prevent the following word being absorbed into the link, which sometimes happens? ~~This particular glitch is not too much of a problem, because the <nowiki/> displays as a space,~~ (wrong, see below) but if VE knows the word is not part of the link, it would seem simpler for it to use a space character. JohnCD (talk) 19:38, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

@JohnCD: It's a problem in this version of the article, because the single nowiki tag (see the last sentence in the first paragraph) did not result in a space, so the link and the following word appear (to the reader) as jammed against each other. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:36, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

That puzzled me because the four examples in the link in my last post displayed correctly, but looking closely I see the reason is that each of them has a trailing space within the double square brackets of the wikilink. Goodness knows how that happened. I have been trying different ways of creating wikilinks to see whether I could reproduce this effect, without success. JohnCD (talk) 22:17, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Titles got pulled out of table

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53624

Hi,

Trying to reproduce a bug reported above, I did some manipulations just before a table :

in The Drover's Boy, if you put the cursor just before the table and hit Del, the first title (Song title) is put outside the table while Performes becomes the first title.
I saw this because I tried to insert a template just before the table, then deleted it => an empty line was visible before the table. When trying to delete this empty line, the first title was put outside the table.

--NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 16:32, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Confirmed and reported. The same happens pressing delete before the first cell, or backspace at the start of the first cell. Delete at the end of the last cell, or backspace before the first character after the last cell pulls that line into the last cell of the table. Thryduulf (talk) 17:01, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Giant icon in cornwall stubs

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53628

When editing Fowey Gallants a {{cornwall-stub}} the image in the stub template is massive. This seems to be the same for other cornwall stubs but I'm not sure it applies to other stub templates as well.--Salix (talk): 17:24, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Confirmed, the problem seems to be related to the stub template itself as it didn't happen with any others I tested. Looking at the difference in code between {{Cornwall-stub}} and {{Nigeria-stub}} which didn't give that problem, I believe it is related to the "size" parameter in the {{asbox}} template that stub templates use being "30px" in the Cornwall template and "30" in the Nigeria one. I've changed it in the Cornwall template and that seems to have worked around the issue. I'll pop it on Bugzilla in a moment. Thryduulf (talk) 18:00, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Tracked as Bugzilla:51628, thanks for reporting it. Thryduulf (talk) 18:16, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I ran into a similar problem with an image in an infobox (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback&diff=prev&oldid=563473294 this posting at VE/F); the wikitext editor was fine with 300px for the size of an image, or just 300, but VE was not. You might cross-reference the two issues. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:31, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

James identified it as a generic "pxpx" issue about 4 minutes after your post here (technically it's a Parsoid bug rather than a Visual Editor bug, but it makes little difference to the editor). I've linked the old discussion you mention, thanks. Thryduulf (talk) 21:49, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Tool for fixing nowiki tags

Hi,

If someone is interested in spending time fixing the hundreds of articles with nowiki tags, I made some modifications in WPCleaner to help on this. To activate this detection, edit Special:MyPage/WikiCleanerConfiguration and add the following contents (with the <source>...</source> tags, so clearly with the wiki markup editor):

# Configuration for error 518: nowiki tags
error_518_bot_enwiki=true END

After that, in WPCleaner the Abuse filters button lets you choose which Abuse filter you are interested in (choose 550) and gives you the list of pages having triggered that filter recently. When you analyze a page, <nowiki>...</nowiki> tags are found and suggestions are given to fix them. It's quite basic, so if you think of any enhancement, tell me. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 17:28, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi NicoV, I briefly looked at the java code on sourceforge, and I suspect this 'errorResult.addReplacement("");' on line 70 would be a better hint if it replaced the <nowiki/> with a " " instead of "". Usually <nowiki/> show up in contexts like this '[[PageLink]]<nowiki/>and' to prevent the 'and' becoming a linktrail of 'PageLink'. Ssastry (talk) 21:26, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Good point, but I think both replacements can be justified (sometimes a linktrail is better than a " ", often it's a "s"). I'm modifying it to show both suggestions (Replace with " " and Delete). Release available in a few minutes. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 21:40, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

There seem to be two different cases: <nowiki> ... </nowiki> pairs, sometimes quite far apart, bracketing areas where VE thinks there is wiki markup, and solitary <nowiki/> tags (with the / at the end) immediately after a wikilink as in Ssastry's post. JohnCD (talk) 22:22, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, the suggestions are already different: for <nowiki> ... </nowiki>, the suggestion made by WPC is to remove both nowiki ; for <nowiki/>, the 2 suggestions made by WPC are to replace it by a " " (for the example in Sssastry's post) or to remove it (for situations like "[[color]]<nowiki/>s"). --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 22:32, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Switching to Edit source deleted modifications

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T49779

I did some edits in the Visual Editor (which is very, very nice, by the way!), but then switched to Edit Source for more fine control on my edits. All my Visual Editor modifications vanished, and I couldn't get them back even when I tried to go back to the visual editor. Very annoying! Ochado (talk) 18:55, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Unfortunately at the moment the visual and source editors are entirely different and there is no way to transfer edits between the two. The ability to do this has been requested as Bugzilla:47779 but it is marked as low priority. Sorry I can't be more helpful. Thryduulf (talk) 19:04, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

You should get a popup window appearing if you try to do this. When I do it I get a window with "Confirm Navigation, Are you sure you want to go back to view mode without saving first? Are you sure you want to leave this page?" That should at least give you a chance to save before you loose work.--Salix (talk): 05:28, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Headers remain after sections are removed

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52100

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shiva&oldid=564830932 --Redtigerxyz ^Talk 19:27, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

This is a known bug, and I think it's Bugzilla:50100 but I'm not 100% sure of that. Thryduulf (talk) 20:21, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Ambiguity in "Are you sure you want to cancel" dialog?

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53655

When a user makes an edit in the visual editor and then clicks the "Cancel" button, a dialog comes up asking whether the user wants to leave the editor without saving. The two buttons on this dialog are "OK" and "Cancel". Some users might find it confusing that clicking the "Cancel" button on the web page leads to a "Cancel" button on the dialog that cancels the cancellation. 128.84.98.128 (talk) 19:55, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

The "OK" and "Cancel" button labels are apparently produced by the browser and not Visual Editor. This means the VE team can't change them, but what they can do is reword the dialog box so that it is clearer what the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons do. The only reason this hasn't been done yet is that nobody has come up with a better wording - if you have any ideas please share them at Bugzilla:50995. Thryduulf (talk) 20:17, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I think that is the wrong bug, as Bug 50995 is "VisualEditor: Deleting newline before indented text deletes entire block". But anyway, the solution is for VE not to use the word "Cancel" on the button. Make it "Discard" (or any synonym other than "Cancel"), then the process becomes [Discard] → [OK] or [Cancel] - Evad37 (talk) 02:08, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Changed tracking to new bugzilla:51655. Ignatz mice•talk 03:17, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

It appears Thryduulf made a typo, I think he meant Bugzilla:50955 "VisualEditor: Clearer message when cancelling out of active edit", created for this feedback - Evad37 (talk) 03:55, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

When trying to save a VE edit, no message about the database being locked

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53636

I made some edits to an article with VE, but when I tried to save (after final review), nothing happened. Well, the moving blue and white stripes appeared for a second, but then nothing, still looking at the save dialog. I discarded my edits (this is one of the least fun features of VE) and went to the source editor and tried to make the changes. Found that the database was locked so the slaves could catch up. Waited a minute and made the save. I wouldn't have discarded my first efforts if VE had let me know what was going on and let me wait and retry. Currently, Blown save is a redirect to Save (baseball) (and it's not a statistic any player desires); we may soon need a hatnote there to mention the VE variety of blown save. Chris the speller ^yack 20:53, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Heh. FWIW, I ran into this same issue earlier. Theopolisme (talk) 21:04, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Someone has already reported this as Bugzilla:51636], although it is possible that this might be the same as Bugzilla:50472 which is fixed but apparently not yet deployed. Thryduulf (talk) 21:25, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Not supported on Firefox 22.0

If I try to use VisualEditor on the most recent version of Firefox, version 22.0, I get You are using a browser which is not officially supported by VisualEditor. Pseudonymous Rex (talk) 03:11, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

@Pseudonymous Rex: It is working in 22.0 for many users. Which platform do you use? Windows/Unix/OSX/Linux? version? starsign? John Vandenberg ^(chat) 04:18, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

@John Vandenberg: Windows 7. Chrome 28.0.1500.72 m on the same computer does not give that message. Pseudonymous Rex (talk) 04:26, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

And now it's no longer giving that notice in Firefox. Oh, well. Pseudonymous Rex (talk) 04:31, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Just for the record, I've also had the same notice occurring sporadically and inconsistently on FF22.0 (also Windows7). Sometimes VE opens fine and sometimes I get the "not officially supported" message. There does not appear to be a pattern. Risker (talk) 04:58, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Time for an essay

I've hitherto more-or-less limited my input to describing bugs - albeit many of them are what are termed "enhancements", ie requests to regain some of the functionality hitherto available which is lost in VE. I see I've been in the top 10 contributors to this page, so perhaps it's time for something of an overview.

I'm with the many others who reckon VE is not yet ready to be made the default editor for new and inexperienced editors, registered or IP. There are too many facilities missing. It seems likely to lead them into making bad edits, which other editors will have to fix after them. I'm sure that the problems already identified - including our "enhancement" requests - provide enough work for the development team for the foreseeable future, without the need for more eyes to find more bugs yet.

My ideal scenario at this point would be: new and IP editors use Edit Source by default, but are given a prominent announcement on the lines of "A new Visual Editor is under development but not yet bug-free: if you would like to use it instead of the long-established Text Editor, click HERE. If you have any comments on the new editor, please click on the FEEDBACK button." Existing editors get the choice but are told clearly how to choose whether VE or Edit Source is their default editor. Announcements about MAJOR step-changes in VE are made to all editors, using Echo (brilliant suggestion someone made above), so that they can make an informed choice to switch to use it at a future point when it's good enough.

I can see that "bugs" which will actually crash the system or totally mess up someone's editing session have to be a priority, but many important aspects of the editor experience are "enhancements": areas where VE does not yet match the editing experience we had with the old Text Editor plus our various gadgets, browser-dependencies, etc, and where the developers' response sometimes seems pretty negative.

Things where VE seems dangerous include:

Hidden comments are not visible to editors - things like "Please do not make significant changes to the lead without discussing them first on the article's talk page." at the start of London, and also the templated messages like {{Use British English}}.
It's very easy to delete content like infoboxes and templates, without seeing what you've done. Especially things which appear on screen as line breaks.
Adding references is appalling. We want to encourage new editors to add references: the old "RefToolBar" system was pretty good: choose book/web/newspaper etc, then fill in relevant boxes, then preview the ref, then add it. The VE system is a nightmare: nothing like enough guidance to point editors in the right directions. And when you add the reference... it doesn't appear in the article as displayed in VE, so you can't tell whether you got it right or not and are likely to assume it's all gone horribly wrong.
In various ways (including the above) VE is NOT yet WYSIWYG: it's disconcerting enough for an experienced editor when changes I make don't appear instantly online, or when the VE display of a page mangles its existing layout (eg coordinates which appear top right in the displayed page suddenly display, in VE, on a line near the foot of the article): the editor's reaction is "What's going on, what have I done wrong, how can I fix it, do I try this... that... oh heck... stress, stress....". Not good for new editors.

Some of the things which make VE editing sessions harder work than Edit Source, or mean that I make less good edits, are:

Edit summaries - no longer the autocomplete/dropdown menu (apparently provided by the browser while edit summaries were one-line). So editors who do a lot of repetitive work can no longer easily create long, useful, linking, edit summaries (eg "Stub-sorting (you can help!"). In VE I just add "Stub-sorting", no longer the link to the project: too much like hard work.
I am accustomed to being able to mouse over a link and see the page it links to: invaluable in checking whether the links on a page go where they should, or to dab pages or worse. Particularly useful for those of us who work a lot with disambiguation pages. Navigation popups are a Gadget, so not included in the spec of VE, it seems.
I can't see the article while I'm adding categories or stub templates: both the "page data" and the "transclusions" boxes hide the article text. But if I'm adding stubs or categories, I need to be able to see the article (When was she born, for a birth cat? How do we spell that district name for a geo-stub?). Sometimes I'm resorting to opening a second copy of the article in another tab: ridiculous.
I can't see the categories while I'm editing in VE: I don't know whether I need to open "Page settings" to add one or more cats, or whether they're already there. I can't click on a category to work upwards from it to find the relevant stub template.
Red links show as blue, so some aspects of disambiguation page cleanup are going to be impossible - and there are other situations too where knowing that a link is red makes me look harder for, and often find, the intended target: can't do it in VE.
The En.Wiki rules of layout, as in WP:ORDER, are ignored by VE: stub templates don't appear after categories. This means that pages edited in VE are more difficult for later editors to edit manually, as stuff isn't where it's expected to be. Order of events at the top of the page is also pretty suspect: I doubt that the accessibility-oriented rule of putting all hatnotes above all other templates is within VE's capabilities. The sort of tidying up which was AWB "general fixes" or the good practice of Twinkle's habitual behaviour is now lost.
VE's ideas of layout in general are not what most human editors would do: I made several additions in one edit of Çilikya which ended up looking like:

{{Şanlıurfa-geo-stub}}{{Coord missing|Turkey}}
 {{DEFAULTSORT:Cilikya}}
 [[Category:Populated places in Şanlıurfa Province]]

No blank lines, two templates on same line, generally grotty to read and edit.

I'm struggling on, using VE most of the time (but occasionally just going straight to Edit Source when I know it'll make life a lot simpler, or want to copy and paste a ref from another article, etc). I don't think VE is yet good enough to make it the default editor for our newest recruits. It has massive potential, but it's not ready. I'm doing my best to help, by carefully pointing out bugs, as are many other editors (though it's a pity that one of the sharpest minds on the project, who figures on the list of feedback page contributors, was banned for a month on 4th July so can't currently help).

Very few of the articles on my watchlist seem to be being edited using VE, and even when stub-sorting I don't seem to be finding many VE edits, but if use of the current VE becomes more common I fear that there will be a lot of cleanup to be done, or a lot of grotty edits going past un-noticed and damaging the encyclopedia.

Please let's all concentrate on getting more of the bugs/enhancements fixed, bringing VE up to the standard we ought to be offering to new editors, and please revert the decision to make it the default for new and IP editors, postponing this until it's a better product. PamD 22:03, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

100% agreed. Just one more thing to add: please, don't proceed with current schedule displayed in VE page ! Don't force VE on other wikis yet. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 22:37, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I'd like to ~~second~~ third everything Pam says in this eloquent essay. VisualEditor will be excellent, but it isn't yet. Thryduulf (talk) 22:47, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

The amount of work that has gone into VE is impressive. Some things - I'm particularly thinking of how images are added, (re)sized, and moved within an article - are clearly superior to the wikitext way. (Yet the alignment parameter on new images is set to "right" by default, and this parameter can't be edited on either old or new images!?! Why skip such an essential feature?) But VE is not ready to be rolled out to everyone. The developers didn't have time to do mockups/prototypes and get iterative feedback from experienced editors for the more "advanced" features (like adding footnotes, templates, and categories). Now we're into "fix" mode, but modifying the UI/UX via bug reports is hardly a "best practice" for software development. So to the extent that people learn VE processes, they're going to have to unlearn them when (I really, really, really hope) the UI/UX/dialog processes are completely rewritten so they are much more intuitive/obvious and can be completed more quickly. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:12, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Yep. I wish that WMF would understand that holding back a bit and getting critical flaws fixed before going ahead would be a better plan than rushing ahead, bugs and all. It doesn't seem they are listening when we tell them that the severity and quantity of the bugs in this thing are unacceptable. This could be great. This could turn around the loss of editors. It won't do either of those things in this condition.—Kww(talk) 23:23, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Agreed with Pam, Thryduulf, Kww... Unfortunately, the rollout schedule for VE was determined by the WMF management months and months ago. The "1 July defaut for en.wp" was set in stone independently of the status/stability of the software merely to meet an arbitrary reporting deadline. So, no amount of complaining, bug reports, essays, logic or pleading is going to change their forward schedule either. The WMF engineering department have been criticised for delays in the past so I presume the management decided to set a firm deadline for their staff in order to avoid this critisim being made again. Unfortunately this opens them up for justifiable criticism of releasing sub-standard software. I feel very sorry for the WMF staff who are responding on this page and fixing all the bugs - they're doing the best they can under the circumstances that have been forced on them - crushed between an angry community and an immovable management. Witty lama 00:26, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Fifthed, or sixthed, or whatever. Hoping (in response to Wittama) that higher-ups at the WMF will use some common sense and roll with the punches. Ignatz mice•talk 04:02, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree and thank PamD for pulling quite a lot of the 'near critical' problems together into an essay. Regarding templated messages like {{Use British English}}, see bugzilla:51322, and for geocoords and {{top icon}} see bugzilla:51420. We need to find or file bugs for the other problems that PamD has raised. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 05:08, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

There are probably bug reports for all of them - things like T52341 covering the non-WYSIWYG response to adding {{italic title}} to an article. (I just started to try to make myself a list in my VE sandbox ... and was reminded how hellish it is to try to add a simple template with one un-named parameter, as it took 3 attempts to add just that one bug, in VE! Forgot to include that in the list above ... ). PamD 07:44, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Putting bugzilla numbers with your essay would help ensure they are tracked together as a "what needs to be fixed before one use-case is bearable" list. bugzilla:49603 and bugzilla:48274 and bugzilla:50239 seem to be three of them. Is there a bug report for opening categories from the page settings dialog? I couldnt find that one. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 08:51, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I've made a start at tracing the bugs I've found, at User:PamD/sandbox_for_VE#Some known bugs, but that's only from the 2013 06 archive of this feedback page - and yes, those three are on the list. No time right now to continue... need to spend a lot of time on Real Life today, so logging out right now. PamD 09:40, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

@PamD: You might want to build on Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Known problems rather than work further on your own page. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:31, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you, Pam, for your steady work on this, and your excellent summary. Risker (talk) 05:25, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

+1 on all of the above - David Gerard (talk) 06:59, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

+1 on all of the above - This is an excellent synopsis of the current state of play. So can we see all of this being introduced into the Bugzilla system so it is not lost- as may helpful comments have been over the last month. -- Clem Rutter (talk) 08:14, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

The Cathedral and the Bazaar is taken as an inspiration by many. Dipping into it always reveals new ideas: before you even get to Linus's law is the concept, that giving up, throwing away the code and starting again from scratch is often the best way forward. The fundamental flaw with VE is that a full Functional specification was never done. At no stage was the basic question asked 'What tool is needed to edit Wikipedia?', Who are our editors?, 'Who are our potential editors and what computing skills do they already have?' Having asked these questions, and then asked users and trainers what tools they and their clients need to become effective editors you would see that ability to add {{cn}} templates .... and read hidden comments (Pam had done that bit) was more important than having a nicely rendered page while editing on the libraries locked version of Firefox 10 or IE*. Scrap the code but keep the experience gained in the DEV team.

Years ago I was working on a neat bit of CMS written in PHP. We standardised on oedit.php, which had a mode button to switch between pseudo-wysiwyg and HTML markup. (I believe WordPerfect used this architecture). Superficially, I would see this as the way forward- and the experienced gained could then be applied into making the Visual UI stunning but the present code base needs to be ditched.

I have also seen the same symptoms in the many student assignments I have marked- if the planning is not done, the structure is wrong and no end of sleepless nights are going to fix it. The clues are in slow loading of section edits- now abandonned. Lack of provision for Firefox 10, IE8 prevented access to most of the worlds population. An ongoing \nowiki error that is so deeply embedded in the structure that it can't be erased. Continual nasty surprises. The lack of a published testing schedule. Staff being harassed beyond the point of tolerance and users being invited to find bugs rather than test the system against their editing requirements.

Again I would appreciate it if this comment was added to bugzilla.-- Clem Rutter (talk) 08:14, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

You've never asked for the functional specification, Clem, so what's your argument that we don't have one? You misunderstand; IE8 support simply is not possible. There is no way to provide it that would not eliminate most of the functionality the VE provides, and no way to provide that functionality with other tools that wouldn't massively bloat development and cause problems for, well, everything that isn't IE8. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 09:00, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Alrighty then...may I please have a copy of the functional specification, and the URS & SRS, a risk analysis if you have one, and the unit & integration test plans while you are at it. :P John Vandenberg ^(chat) 09:07, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Surely the obvious response would have been a link to said specification - David Gerard (talk) 11:19, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Having now spoken to James: it looks like the functional specification is "the VE should do what the markup editor does". In terms of very precise, fine-grained analysis of "button X, when clicked, goes to state Y", we apparently don't have that, indeed, for reasons that boil down to "we're not a government operation". The VE team is using the Agile cycle, which makes it pretty much impossible to produce a Big Book Of How Everything Works 12 months in advance - and such a tome would also be pretty useless. I can't speak for the developers, but the last time I saw a full functional spec used it caused me almost physical pain. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:43, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

@Okeyes (WMF): could you clarify that the VE is supposed to have feature parity with the old textbox editor? Anything possible in 'edit source' should be possible in 'visual editor'?

I hope you'll agree we're a long way from feature parity currently. Has the WMF developed a list of milestones for VE, breaking that challenge into achievable chunks?

Also, a functional spec would also include information like: 'which platforms/browsers must be supported?' (and how should the software react to unsupported configurations) ; 'what response times are considered acceptable?' (often with averages used, because users don't mind the occasional slow operation provided most operations occur in a timely manner); 'list of the backend componentry that needs to be part of a stable API to support extensibility'. Agile and govt have nothing to do with this, and I sure hope the devs know this even if you dont; proper Agile still results in specs being written, it is just that the specs are continually improved throughout the project rather than signed off in advance before the next spec is started and any coding begins. If you don't have a URS or FSD, I suggest you start writing one right now using the feedback being given here. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 22:11, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi John. It looks like we're both wondering about what Agile means in this context. Maybe that's why the WMF liaisons aren't meshing cleanly with the community. I started a fresh section The VE team is using the Agile cycle? – is that the way you see it too? - Pointillist (talk) 22:21, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Fully agree the essay above. --WS (talk) 10:48, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Would be great if these issues could be added to a tracking bug, and further roll-out be postponed until these essential things are fixed. --WS (talk) 10:59, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

+1 on Pam's essay and thanks to her for her careful work in compiling it. I have been working on a list of reasons why, though still experimenting with VE, I go straight to Edit source when I want to do something accurately or quickly, but she has covered most of it. JohnCD (talk) 11:13, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Oliver, don't take this personally, and please do not try to respond to me in personal terms. To lay one inaccuracy to rest-look at External_links_from_Functional_specification from my request on 18th June 2013.

Now you raise IE8 as a point and it is critical to software design. We provide the tools the user needs- we do not barr him from editing because we don't like the browser he is forced to use. IE8 is a dog, and I do not have any MS software in the house, it makes grown men weep and this browser has destroyed many software initiatives in the past. But we cannot tell every institution in the UK what browser to provide and it is that which our clients are forced to use.

The point second point is: we should have found out before coding started what systems were actually in use and not assumed that everyone would be free to choose. I understand perfectly well that lib arts students are confused when their laptop works, but when they go into the library (to get a printout) and they are confronted by IE8/9/10. I understand perfectly well they want to edit Wikipedia but can't explain to them why Microsoft deliberately chose a differ DOM and what the implications are for coding. I also can explain that bloat is the fault of patched-together code that was not designed to a well thought-out Functional specification. This issue is not one of personalities it is new user requirement. -- Clem Rutter (talk) 11:31, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

This is an excellent contribution, Pam. Thank you. This part is worth singling out: you can't tell whether you got it right or not and are likely to assume it's all gone horribly wrong. A system should never, ever, make its users wonder about whether it worked or not. Until such time as VisualEditor can be used without the fear of any kind of uncertainty, it is not ready for general usage. — Scott • talk 11:36, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Support +1. Heimstern Läufer (talk) 13:19, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
If you want, you can visit irc://irc.freenode.org/#mediawiki-visualeditor to ask the developers directly. _→AzaToth 18:53, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
I am looking forward to seeing an update on the twelve issues that Pam identified, and the link that David Gerard requested.-- Clem Rutter (talk) 23:03, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

"Edit reference" was vague and error prone.

Trying to edit list of references and it fails (no list). Try editing individual reference and there is no explanation of title= and HREF=. Can't hide URL. "What are the rules for references" should be accessible from the dialog. "Edit reference list" should allow easier updates. tygrus (talk) 06:58, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

While this would certainly be helpful, trying to edit list of references in the wikitext editor does not generate a list, either, unless the references are actually placed in the list rather than inline. In that case, VE should be able to edit it also. I'm not sure that there's a way around that. In terms of the latter part of your question, can you explain where you are encountering title= and href=? I don't see them in the article you were editing. That said, the reference editor was recently revised in VisualEditor so it may not behave precisely as it did when you used it. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:30, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

em dash

Not sure if this belongs here but here an IP user complained that there was no possibility to add an mdash: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DDT&diff=564582042&oldid=564436694 and consequently s/he had to use the non-VisualEditor. Greetings --hroest 09:24, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Looks like the same complaint as just above - no apparent way to add special characters (greek, accented, em-dash, etc), to replace the drop-down menu below the edit window in Edit Source. PamD 09:29, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Seems to be the "low enhancement" T40029. Again, that infuriating "enhancement": it's not a "bug" because it doesn't crash anything ... but it crashes human editors by preventing them from doing an action they could do effortlessly in Edit Source. Perhaps there needs to be a further division into "desiderata" ("It would be nice if VE could ...") and "fixes" ("Fix VE so that I can do xyz which I used to be able to do in Edit Source"). Most of the enhancements suggested to date are Fixes rather than Desiderata. PamD 13:04, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Until something is done by VE to allow inserting special characters, on a Windows machine you can insert an en dash by holding "alt" and typing '0150' on the numeric keypad; Alt+0151 gives an em dash. Chris the speller ^yack 17:32, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

You can also copy and paste from Character Map or a similar utility. Depending on your operating system you might also be able to set up dead keys. Thryduulf (talk) 17:35, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not a coder, but I'm told that "enhancement" v. "bug" doesn't have anything to do with the severity of the issue and is not the sole determinant factor by which it is prioritized for addressing. It's simply a question of "Does something the product is designed to do not work? That's a bug. Is there something that the product is not designed to do that it should? That's an enhancement." I'm not sure why they are subdivided into that way, but it's been helpful for me in filing them to consider it from that perspective. (Although there are still times when I'm not sure which I'm dealing with.) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 14:20, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

You're misusing terminology there a bit. The Bugzilla system distinguishes between "severity" and "importance". "Enhancement" is considered the lowest level of severity, because it doesn't prevent the product from working as designed -- but it's entirely possible for a bug report to have a severity of "enhancement" and an importance rating of "high". As for distinguishing bugs from enhancements, that's often a challenge, especially when (as for VE) there is no formal written specification describing how the software is intended to work. Looie496 (talk) 14:51, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Referencing not well supported

T53683 I've just tested VE with adding a reference, then cleaned up the resulting mess. It wasn't exactly intuitive, as slow as one has come to expect of VE, and afterwards I had to manually add a retrieved date and add the square brackets. Before this is ready to come back for a fresh round of beta testing I would suggest adding a question "did you check that site today" and then add the retrieved date. Better still simply tip people back into the classic editor when they do complex stuff like adding referenced content. Ϣere SpielChequers 21:27, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

The degree of support which the Template Editor provides is in large part dependent upon the TemplateData which has been provided and penetrated into the VE interface. If you had to manually add a retrieved date, then this means the retrieved date had likely not yet been coded in the TemplateDate. It is true that adding citations is a two-step process for in-line citations ... first add a reference, then add a template into that reference ... and this is not terribly intuitive. It might be good to have a single icon button which indicates "add citation" which auto-puts the ref/ref tags and launches the template editor with a subset of the available templates, those focused on citations, with the option to not use a template (as in roll-your-own additions like bare urls). --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 22:47, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

My limited experience to date with adding cite web refs in VE is that some parameters are sometimes not selectable, but OK at other times. Retrieved date is one such problem child. Downsize43 (talk) 01:32, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Ceyockey, "two steps?" I think you mean 73. But yeah, there's a lot that can be done to improve the flow here, and many of the suggestions through that link are in Bugzilla. --j⚛e decker ^talk 02:57, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Sorry for butting in...there are many unnecessary steps on that long list that dublicate the steps and the time someone needs to add a reference! You don't need 73 steps but ok, sure you don't need only two as well. I am not sure what Ceyockey meant by "two steps" TeamGale (talk) 03:37, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I think, to be fair, he or she was referring just to the template/footnote separation, which is only a bit of the flow problems with the current implementation of references. --j⚛e decker ^talk 04:00, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, Joe, that's what I was getting at. When editing in classic mode, you still need to mod or fill each parameter individually; the advantage of classic mode there is that, though the number of clicks might not differ much between VE and classic, the clicks in classic are all in text mode while those in VE switch between dialog interface and text mode. One way to reduce number of clicks would be to provide an auto-cycling of parameters where one either a) enters text or b) dismisses the parameter or c) defers the parameter - this would eliminate the need to click to choose a parameter, though it would lead to lengthy cyclings for some templates; just a random thought which isn't deeply considered. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 10:07, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Seriously? The Visual Editor expects editors to know which template they need and to add that template? I thought the idea was to make editing simpler and more user friendly. If we are going to try and make this work then I like your idea of a dropdown menu of citation templates, but they need to appear to the editor as a list of possible types of source - book, website etc etc. If we added "local gossip", "rumour" and "I made it up" as options that lead to a tutorial that would also help. I can see that there is a lot of potential in this software, it just got deployed too early in the development cycle. One of my worries about VE is that it makes things easier for that first often mistaken edit in an editors career, at the price of putting an extra burden of cleanup on the core community, and making it much more difficult for newbies to become part of the core community. Our real need is for the opposite of what VE is trying to do. We have lots of new editors making a few goodfaith edits, and we need better ways to enable them to become active members of the community - or if they are only going to do one or two edits, encourage them to supply a reference, rather than discouraging them from doing so by just making useful edits by newbies too difficult. Ϣere SpielChequers 07:08, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

The reason the VE is having such ... teething problems ... is that it makes easy things easier - but it makes hard things harder, or even impossible - David Gerard (talk) 08:17, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm really happy with some of the recent changes to the template editor. :) That said, I certainly agree that making this easier is important. I've opened a discussion at T53683. Please join in. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:50, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Reference error

Infobox post-modification rendering issue

unusable

Text at very bottom of the page

Infobox problem?

Problems editing templates

Help links for dialogs

Author parameter for web refs

save changes

Save changes/review changes dialogs are not intuitive.

User-unfriendly terms.

Syntax error in JSON

Inserting Infoboxs Is Way Too Slow

TemplateData problems

A simple table gets doubled after an unrelated edit of plain text

Was Someone Simply Bored?

visual editor -- don't like it

Make it say [edit | source] all the time?

Feedback

Templates not aligned

Not as many things to do

All the older VisualEditor tags have vanished

Problem with italics and Apostrophe

Slow to scroll, even on a pretty good computer with a fast internet connection.

"wikitable sortable"

Add a link to template documentation page

Drag-and-drop appears to work, sort of, but doesn't

Terrible

Issues with images

Template display error: Template:Discogs master

Table editting

Thoughts about UI improvements

Follifoot

How do I preview adding [dead link]?

Quotes in template data

Edit session expired though the editing was done quickly

New edit mode too slow. How to disable?

Page won't save

VE deletes syntax from an incomplete table

Lost comment

VisualEditor back.

Worst thing I've ever seen

Doubleclick

What the hell

Icons are incomprehensible

Add a preference option to opt out of nowiki tags

Fucking hate it

Problem Adding web link

Reference numbering

Confusing and erratic

Without TemplateData

Error: Invalid error code

Your java is buggy

Visual Editor exhumes itself and forces itself on me

Won't let me copy

Citation system unclear

Duplicate parameters in a template

Edit transluction button

Interaction with Flow

Insert icons stop working

Issues with the template dialog process

Allow wikicodes to work instead of assuming nowiki

Template data for coord and other templates using overloading

Difficult to add template at top of article - layout problems, VE not WYSIWYG

Any progress on making Hidden Comments visible to all editors in VE?

Any progress on ability to see the article while adding template/category?

new editing!

Word of encouragement

New parameter didn't show up in {cite web}

Color picker

Still can't add text to an external link

Wormshill

edit summary?

excited and concerned

Template:Coord

Review your changes at article creation doesn't wrap

Blanking of last section on page results in ===<nowiki/>=== tag

How did it go to Vedit mode?

Dustbin icon not intuitive for "unlink"

Ugh! Turn it back!

How do I preview adding ^{[dead link]}?