Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive 2013 11

Visual Editor
Having learned how VisualEditor works, the problems make far more sense - it has to convert Wikitext to a carefully-formatted and marked-up intermediary (based on HTML, though this is largely because it simplifies displaying it in the browser), in a reversible way, with a lot of tests to make sure it only changes the bits that were actually changed. Parsoid really is an ingenious reinterpreter, but it was bound to have some problems.

Also, the lack of features also makes sense - everything's basically handled as a modular expansion, apparently, even bold and italic are, effectively, in the same modular coding. They needed to get the base right, then they could begin rushing into other features.

In short, I'm... just going to retract 99% of everything I've said about VisualEditor, and apologise. It's a very, very clever project, and, if it wasn't explained very well, well, time to move on from that.

My only request to the VisualEditor team is to please get those videos up as soon as possible. Everyone needs to see them. Just having VisualEditor explained, in full, makes the whole thing make sense in a way that it didn't before, and makes me hugely optimistic for its future. Adam Cuerden (talk) 15:27, 9 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi again Adam, it's great to hear you're having a good time there. I also hope to have those vids up on Commons ASAP. I think a Parsoid presentation is scheduled for tomorrow, if I read a related tweet correctly?, in case, you might want to be there as well. Also, can you please tell VE folks that I miss them and am looking forward to having them back, although I know they needed such a break? Thanks :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:44, 9 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I'll definitely tell them. I just wish I didn't feel so stupid about this, now that I understand it. Missing features make a lot more sense when you learn it's a modular system - they missed some key ones, yes, but the backbone makes sense; and a lot of strange features, like "Why use constant forms to fill out even simple templates?" make a lot more sense when you learn "Ah, so that's a default handler that at least works in all cases, and improved handling can be added later in specific cases where it's appropriate." And the details of converting from wikimarkup into a carefully-constructed, heavily-annotated HTML-based system that can both be displayed (hence HTML-based) and can be used to flawlessly reconstruct wikitext is actually incredibly ingenious, and explains some bugs that, while annoying, were almost certainly unavoidable when large-scale testing something that complex.
 * Also, the Parsoid talk's at 11:30 in the Lightning Talks room, if I remember right. I'll be there. Adam Cuerden (talk) 15:47, 9 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I do have to say that when I saw you'd posted on this page Adam this wasn't what I expected to read :) Thank you. Say Hello to the VE team for me as well. Thryduulf (talk) 15:53, 9 August 2013 (UTC)
 * "Not understanding" can definitely happen. "Refusing to understand" is different and I don't think this is what happened here, so, it's ok. (Bonus if you post a pic of yourself in a VE shirt or near someone wearing it!) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:58, 9 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Adam visualises the light.PNG Here's a picture of Adam in a VE T-shirt. I took it after teasing him that it must have been the gift of the shirt which won him over.  Me, I attended the same presentation and was also impressed by the concepts and the demo of the Google maps add-in.  But then I tried working on a new article later that evening with VE and found I couldn't save my work.  Perhaps I need a T-shirt to be converted too.  :)  Andrew Davidson (talk) 09:47, 12 August 2013 (UTC)
 * First link, slides: File:Wikimania_2013_-_VisualEditor_-_The_present_and_future_of_editing_our_wikis_-_Full_build_01.pdf. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:51, 9 August 2013 (UTC)
 * As I've long said, and discussed with a couple of WMF staff, I think the biggest problem with the whole VE rollout, development, basically everything about it (and other recent software deployments), has been the atrocious communication between WMF/developers on one side and users on the others which has left users feeling like they're being ignored and their views don't count. I'm a little reassured that WMF are somewhat aware that they have communication issues but still aren't very reassured by what they're doing about it. Dpmuk (talk) 17:11, 9 August 2013 (UTC)
 * One thing I also learned is that the Wikipedia development staff massively expanded this year. It's why a lot of new things are suddenly coming in, which is great, but well, I'm not entirely surprised that the first really big launch from what's basically a new team was a little rocky. Adam Cuerden (talk) 01:48, 10 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I'd say that the biggest problem with V/E's rollout has been that it was rolled out too quickly and as a result the developers have not been able to keep up with the rate at which bugs have been found. Testers like myself then wait months for the bugs that we reported to be fixed, and that makes it a very difficult uninspiring project to engage with. In the meantime training sessions take place in which trainers have to show people how to opt out of V/E as the first thing in the lesson, and huge numbers of newbies are burned, some fairly mildly by just finding that editing Wikipedia on a not particularly old pc is a mind numbingly slow experience tat they probably won't repeat. Others get warned for vandalism when actually it was v/e damaging their edits. These are the people we should really regret losing as they will be justifiably pissed off with us. The aim of V/E is great, if only it could be switched off until it is ready for another round of testing. As for communication, bugzilla is a barrier, we really need to replace it with something on meta, within SUL, something that gets the developers on wiki. I never doubted that the problem it was intended to address was important and worth trying to fix. As to whether it can be fixed, some of the damage of the early rollout is not easily repaired. Obviously some newbies will have been lost to us. Perhaps the slowness can be fixed, though it has been months now, at worst we could just park it for a few years and wait for most of the world's current PC to be replaced.  Ϣere  Spiel  Chequers  06:58, 11 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm kinda sick: but the pic made my day. Thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:45, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

Actually, one of my best memories of Wikimania is trying to use VE, hitting a problem where I couldn't figure out how to do references, asking James about it, and ending up spending about half an hour in a rather productive discussion of design interface ideas with him. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Adam Cuerden (talk • contribs) 2215, 13 August 2013

I can't edit the references
This is really awful what you have done here. Cyberplasm (talk) 19:15, 10 August 2013 (UTC)
 * References certainly should be editable. Looking at your contributions it seems that you were trying to edit LeGarrette Blount and that article works for me, including the references. Could you be more specific about what you were trying to do, what didn't work and what browser and operating system you are using? Thryduulf (talk) 21:14, 10 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Many editors using VE instinctively try to edit the reference list at the bottom of an article. That can't be done. Looie496 (talk) 16:06, 11 August 2013 (UTC)
 * That can't be done with the classic editor either, it's just not the way references work. You can edit each reference by clicking on its number in the text instead, and it's far easier to do that with VE than with the classic editor since it saves your time when looking for it :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:11, 11 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, but in the classical editor the temptation is not there, because when the classical editor is active all you see when you look at the References section is or something equivalent.  In VE you can actually see the entire list of references -- and you can't directly see them in the body of the article. Looie496 (talk) 16:16, 11 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Ok, but one should actually read the User Guide to learn more about references, where this all is explained. Not sure this can/should be done, but we might also investigate the possibility of asking for the VE link to be disabled for specific sections. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:21, 11 August 2013 (UTC)
 * To alleviate any possible misunderstanding here, I'm not the slightest bit confused about this myself. I'm simply pointing out that a new editor using VE who wants to edit a reference will naturally guess that the way to do it is to "visually edit" the reference where it appears.  It would probably be a good idea for VE to pop up a special message when a user tries to edit a "reflist" template. Looie496 (talk) 16:36, 11 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, I was just thinking the same - a message explaining how to edit references would probably help. I've filed as an enhancement request for this message. I've asked for the text of the message to be settable on-wiki but do say if you can think of a good default/initial wording (I'm not good at that). Thryduulf (talk) 21:47, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

Elitre, I love you and all of the VE folks for your work on the editor and on this page, but I believe I must say this: when it comes to usability issues reported by newbies, "read the manual" is a fundamentally unhelpful response. Newbies, who possess the very instincts that VE should be designed to facilitate, never read the manual. If users are required to read the manual before being able to perform tasks that they feel they instinctively know how to do, the interface is not designed correctly. (And I would say this in the context of any newbie-oriented interface, not just VE.) <3 ♥ Cryptic C62 · Talk 23:06, 11 August 2013 (UTC)


 * One - far more intuitive way - to edit footnotes would be for VE to make each footnote number a way to edit that footnote (by clicking on the number). Those footnote numbers would be outside of the reflist template, and (ideally) would be shown with a different background color. They would also react differently than the rest of the footnote section when the mouse pointer is put on them.


 * It's true that there is certain logic to editing a footnote by going to to the footnote number, in the body of the text, but it's more logical to try to edit a footnote at the point where the text of that footnote is visible. Think of this from the editor's viewpoint - s/he is reading the article, sees where a footnote can be improved or needs to be replaced, clicks on the section link for VE (or, less likely, scrolls to the top of the page to click to start editing in VE), sees the footnotes displayed exactly as they were in reading mode (hopefully), and starts to make the improvement by (yes) clicking on the footnote.


 * I also note that "[Esc]" should unselect the reflist template, if that's mistakenly selected. Instead, the editor has to click outside of the template area in order to unselect it. That's not anywhere near as intuitive as [Esc]. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:52, 12 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Glad to see this in bugzilla; it was something some people we were usertesting with brought up, too. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 05:33, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

Curiously Elitre's read the manual conflicts with JDF's "In general, if you have to prompt a user with text telling them what to do, your interface has failed." I tried to get some sort of text description explaining how to use references into the dialog boxes but it was shot down by JDF pretty swiftly in .--Salix (talk): 08:53, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

So why not make the reflist editable? As just about every object you see on a page is directly editable with the VE, of course having the reflist not editable is counter-intuitive. Displaying a message is a workaround, but VE could also be much more helpful by just letting you edit the references. Surely needs this some work and fleshing out how to exactly do this, but I am sure this is more helpful than adding in messages. --WS (talk) 10:53, 12 August 2013 (UTC)
 * That's another good idea. I've put that in as a separate enhancement request as . Thryduulf (talk) 13:53, 12 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I'd suggest popping up a note telling the user what he or she is doing at least the first time, though. Something like "This reference is used to document the source of text in the article. You can also edit it by clicking on the number after the text. Please make sure that you don't accidentally break documentation with your edit. Thanks for your work!"
 * We don't want to have a situation where newbies, for example, try to alphabetise the list, say. Adam Cuerden (talk) 15:05, 12 August 2013 (UTC)
 * A good point, I've copied those comments to, although I don't think "documentation" is the right word - to me documentation would be something that explains the referencing feature rather than part of the feature itself. Something like "verifiability" might be better but I can't immediately work that into a sentence that is both concise and meaningful. Thryduulf (talk) 15:42, 12 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Here's my suggestion for a message: This list of references is automatically generated and cannot be edited directly. If you would like to change the content of a reference, click on its number where it appears in the body of the article. Looie496 (talk) 16:04, 12 August 2013 (UTC)
 * A good suggestion that I've added to, where I have also suggested that the backlinks should take you to the position of the reference, as they do in article mode, while remaining in edit mode. Thryduulf (talk) 16:09, 12 August 2013 (UTC)


 * My suggestion was not meant to be "have them RTFM" :) but merely, chances are that at least some of them will a) already know that's not the way refs work b) learn this from the guide. I think/hope someone is working on a guided tour about VE, which is probably a good place to put this info in. We are using many messages, and I don't think this means we failed, we just really need people to see how/why some things are also working differently now. I guess this is the first time I read concerns about this specific issue, but if many people share them, I'll be happy to help you get the solution you think it is more appropriate. Thanks for weighing in about this :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:12, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

as a newbie using freindly interface, I would prefer this to be automatic

 * Cite error: There are tags on this page, but the references will not show without a template (see the help page).


 * We can arrange to make a apear Cite error notice but why not add the template automatically ?

Mahitgar (talk) 15:21, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

discusses this. There, James comments that instead of displaying the warning, VisualEditor could: "auto-fix for them (insert a "== References ==\n works by itself and isn't an ending tag without a start. See WP:NOWIKI. VE placed the space in a silly place inside the wikilink instead of outside, and then   or something else was needed to not make "module" part of the link. Compare GPS module and GPS  module. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:39, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

}}

Math hooks
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3AFlow&diff=569260097&oldid=569182992, the &lt;math> tag is supported in Parsoid, but not in VE, due to a lack of a hook. Since LaTeX is so ubiquitous in math markup, a trivial hook that just added the option to add math from the interface (with the instructions stating it uses LaTeX markup), and the ability to edit preexisting math would likely solve a lot of issues. A fully visual version probably isn't as useful in the short term when the code is so standardised.

Another easy support that could be added would be a simple, cut-and-paste-in-the-code LilyPond hook. There are many programs that format LilyPond, so merely pasting it in isn't so bad of preliminary functionality, particularly if you link to http://lilypond.org/web/about/faq in the pop-up box. Adam Cuerden (talk) 18:44, 19 August 2013 (UTC)


 * There is a math extension planned. If you're interested, you can comment at mw:User:Jiabao wu/GSoC 2013 Project Work.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:07, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
 * It might be a good idea to put in a stopgap, though: I'm a bit worried the mathematicians seem to be getting restless. Of course, I'm presuming a stopgap is easy based on a Wikimania talk that live-coded a VE plugin, which was most likely highly simplified. Adam Cuerden (talk) 20:03, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

Math text that doesn't parse when in VE
If you edit this revision of radiocarbon dating with VE, and scroll down to the section on accelerator mass spectrometry, you'll see a math parse error, although the math parses properly when not in VE. I know it can't be edited, so it's harmless, but it's ugly and might indicate other parsing errors. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:05, 18 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I see the errors when not in VE as well:Jay8g [ V•T•E ] 22:58, 18 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Looks like it displays OK when not in VE in Chrome/Win7, but not in IE9/Win7. I don't know if there's anything wrong with the math markup, but it's odd that it should parse it differently in VE than out. Mike Christie (talk - contribs -  library) 13:16, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
 * If we are talking about the red "Failed to parse" messages, I can see them in the diff yet with both FF and Chrome on Win7, so not a VE issue. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:41, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I see the red error messages at Radiocarbon dating when I'm just reading the page, for both Firefox and Safari. If the code really appears to be correct (ask for more opinions from WT:MATH, maybe?), then we presumably need to file another bug on the wikitext editor and its parser. Ssastry and the rest of the Parsoid team might be interested in knowing about it as a possible edge case for testing, although the problem is clearly independent of VisualEditor and Parsoid.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:04, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

Do you have mathJax turned on? It looks like the formula parses fine using MathJax but not with the texvc parser. The problem is mixing UTF8 character with maths. There is a unicode δ character in each formula with causes the formula not to parse correctly. Using \delta instead and it works fine. Other unicode also cause problem notably the proper minus symbol rather than a simple hyphen  and there also seem to be a problem with a quote character. MathJax is modern enough to handle unicode but texvc is older and stricter.--Salix (talk): 20:53, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
 * How can we tell whether MathJax is turned on? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:54, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
 * We are getting the default MediaWiki rendering from the API which is currently using texvc. We'd like to render using MathJax instead, but will need changes to core before we can do this. See bug 51698. -- GWicke (talk) 20:06, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

VE can't parse a table and as a result damaged it when the article was saved
{{answered|text=

{{VE Bug | status        = new | description   = I did a minor change to to the text of a page. VE did that change but also broke a wikitable in the section following the one I edited. Related to this is that while in VE the table was not displayed. In its place I saw " {| class="wikitable" " followed by the table contents though not formatted as a table implying this is an issue with VE parsing the original wikitext. | duplicate     = Run VE on this page. When looking at the diff, I intended to change "Eclipse" to "Ecxxxlipse". The remaining stuff that was changed was a VE generated side-affect. | OS            = Windows Vista | browser       = Firefox 23.0.1 | site          = En-WP | workaround    = | skin          = Vector | resolution    = | bugzilla      = }} --Marc Kupper&#124;talk 04:46, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Now at, thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:09, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

}}

All right edited
All right edited Danydel (talk) 18:52, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

Templates with VTE links
Currently when you click on a template with the "VTE" (view, talk page, edit) links, Visual Editor gives you the option of adding parameters to the transclusion of the template. Most of the templates with the "VTE" links are navigational boxes or other transcluded items without parameters, but as the VTE links suggest, we want people to easily view the template page itself. Maybe if someone clicks on a template with VTE links in Visual Editor, rather than being given the regular option to add parameters they should instead be given a dialogue box saying something along the lines of "This is a template that appears on many pages. Would you like to open this template's page in a new tab?". —Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 13:45, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I bugzillaed it here, thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:31, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I suspect which adds a link to the documentation of the template will cover this.--Salix (talk): 18:00, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
 * You want to have the option to edit the navbox's parameters. Specifically, you need to be able to set   parameters for these.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:31, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Ok, but there is a point here I had not thought about, we should make it far more obvious now that 1) changes through VE will only affect the way that specific template behaves on that page only 2) which parameters are then allowed. This was not an issue before since users knew they had to find their way to the template page to change its global aspect; they are now apparently given the option to edit single instances of such templates and might not realize these edits will not be recorded on the template page instead. Ping @Arctic Gnome and Whatamidoing (WMF) to see if I am missing something here. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:39, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Most people probably didn't know that it was possible for them to change navboxes or other templates, especially if there is no "VTE" label. If people wanted to do this, we could suggest a "click here to open the original template in another window" button.  I wouldn't be surprised is "ease of editing" equated to "ease of screwing up", though, and was not an especially popular option with the template editors (the people who are most likely going to have to clean up mistakes made by inexperienced people—or even experienced ones.  I've screwed up in templates before). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:31, 21 August 2013 (UTC)

VE created link to another Wikipedia page - as an inline EL
See. VE created a link to another Wikipedia page - but using the format for inline external links.

I also continue to come across the  mess, and. -- Red rose64 (talk) 07:44, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi Redrose64, I don't see anything weird with those links, just common behaviour trigged by unexperienced users. In the first case, the user pasted the URL of the page he wanted to link to, instead of typing its title (I think VE shouldn't allow this, but I am not 100% positive this was already requested - I wanted to ask it myself). In the second and third case, that's the expected outcome when the user ignores the "wikitext warning" and saves, instead of using the correct tool to create the links. Or am I missing something? Thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:02, 21 August 2013 (UTC) PS - this is what I was talking about in the brackets.
 * It's for the external link to the English Wikipedia.  You might not want the conversion to be automatic, because that would preclude using it as an example of how to make an external link and might cause complications if you're referencing a particular version (although you should be able to identify that from the structure of the URL).  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:39, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, it turns out that this is not necessarily user error. They've just issued an emergency patch for external links being added when you wanted an internal one.  If you see any more of these (starting as of about two hours ago), please post the diffs.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:20, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

VE appears in IE10, but only on one article
I just got a Edit beta tab on The Adventure of the Reigate Squire, even though I'm in IE 10. What's weirder is that this is the only page where I've seen a VE tab. Also, I can't make any edits with it: I changed a few words in one sentence and added an edit summary, but the thing's just hanging there. I got a message of Warning: Your edit may have been corrupted – please review before saving. However, I've been unable to find anything corrupt, even though I reviewed everything that I'd done. Nothing of WP:EF came up, either. 2001:18E8:2:1020:202A:8DD6:6403:B77 (talk) 16:25, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * After several minutes of fruitless waiting, I gave up and reloaded the page. I then tried to add Category:Reigate and Banstead to the article (it's where the story is set), but after typing an edit summary of "Add category", I was forced to see that it's just been hanging there again.  2001:18E8:2:1020:202A:8DD6:6403:B77 (talk) 16:30, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * It's weird because as far as we know IE is still on the "blacklist". So until that does not change, should you encounter the VE tab again (I did not get it on my IE on that article), remember it is not going to work yet, as you reported. If you're interested you might add yourself to the CC list for this bug. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:58, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * That's why I said "even though I'm in IE 10", because I know that it's supposed to be disabled. But why do I get the tab when the software won't let me use it, and why does the tab appear just on one page?  2001:18E8:2:1020:202A:8DD6:6403:B77 (talk) 17:26, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Why do you get the tab in the first place, while I don't? I have no idea :) That's why I had added your feedback to that ticket. Thanks! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 17:28, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I wonder if its something to do with your user agent. If its been modified in some way Wikipedia won't be able to tell which browser you are using and might be tricked into trying to use VE. As VE has not been tested to IE10 you will get a half working system. You can check you user agent at its the first line in the results.--Salix (talk): 18:00, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * The user is an IP user, and it's at one specific page, so this is probably a caching problem. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 20:08, 21 August 2013 (UTC)

Problem adding multiple references
hey folks -- Last night I created a new article with multiple references, and when I saved the page many of the references disappeared and some I think had jumped around. (I didn't save-as-I-went -- I wrote the whole thing and saved once, at the end.) I can't describe exactly what happened, but here's a diff: the latest revision is roughly what I was aiming to do, and the earlier revision is what I actually achieved. (Ignore the missing reflist: I just hadn't gotten around to figuring out how to add it in VE yet, so I did it afterwards in wiki syntax.)

So, in my initial VE save, it looks like references #5, 6 & 7 disappeared as did #14 and 15. (Numbers taken from the latest revision.) This suggests to me there's a problem with VE saving multiple adjacent references -- when there are multiples adjacent, it seems to save only the first. I think also some references jumped around, but I'm not 100% sure about that.

Also and separately: today I tried and failed to delete the empty spaces between multiple adjacent references (between #13 and 14 and #14 and 15). Post-save, I got a success message but the spaces remain, and there's no record of the edit.

I haven't checked Bugzilla for either of these -- apologies if they're duplicates. (I'm a bit sick and therefore lazy.) I'm using Chrome 28.0.1500.45 on Ubuntu 12.10. Thanks Sue Gardner (talk) 22:47, 21 August 2013 (UTC)

Add it to Special:MyPage/skin.js.--Salix (talk): 23:39, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi Sue,
 * I hope that you feel better soon.
 * You may have two bugs here. Did you by any chance do some cut-and-paste rearranging that involved the "[3]" sentence about "...rooted in the assumption that, in general, a man is likelier to be knowledgeable than a woman"?  There's a known bug about copying and pasting.
 * I'm pretty sure that the other one, about multiple refs in a row, was supposed to be fixed in the previous (not the most recent) release.  We may need to re-open that.
 * If you haven't discovered it yet, the
 * Thank you - that works for me. --Marc Kupper&#124;talk 04:23, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor/Updates/August 21, 2013 added " beta " after the word "edit" to activate VE. I tried hiding it via my monobook.css but that did not help. The fix provided by Salix is still working but now there's a "beta" floating out there. --Marc Kupper&#124;talk 03:08, 22 August 2013 (UTC)
 * The fix above was for the vector skin thing are slightly different for monobook. Try this in Special:MyPage/monobook.js


 * I've also added a couple of other changes to not display the [ ] in section edit links. Comment out as needed. i think this should also work for vector.--Salix (talk): 05:34, 22 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Thank you Salix. I was and am using User:Marc Kupper/vector.js. My reference to monobook above was a typo. The last line for h1#firstHeading .mw-editsection-divider did the trick in that it removed the beta that started showing up. That, however, really confuses me. I can't see how switching "h1#firstHeading .mw-editsection-divider" to  turned off the   and that it was able to do so for the tabs at the top, the first section, and all following sections. --Marc Kupper&#124;talk 16:29, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

Chess pieces still happening
-- Red rose64 (talk) 23:15, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi there, although I am not sure exactly to which bug this belongs, there's a bunch of them (about pawns) still open, so I am not surprised, and I also think this is one of the main reasons why the label potential VisualEditor bugs exists and is applied to edits. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:57, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
 * It's most likely due to the presence of an unnecessary/improper extra "line" on the table. That table ended with


 * }
 * }
 * and it should have ended with just the  part.  I wonder if there's a way to find all instances of such malformatted tables and repair them.  A bot, maybe?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:25, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
 * It seems like having VisualEditor fix them would make more sense. Adam Cuerden (talk) 10:49, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, generally speaking, if a user adds wrong code on some articles we can't really expect someone to use VE there sooner or later so that the code gets fixed. We should 1) make sure we write tables correctly so that they also work with whatever editor :) 2) hope that VE will be able to fix these things anyway - probably not now though, I think people might want it not to "break" code, in the meantime! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:00, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, yes, but the example given, while "wrong", is harmless without VE. If VE fixes, it will never be a problem for VE; if a bot fixes it, it'll only not be a problem if the bot spotted it in time. Adam Cuerden (talk) 21:09, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * FWIW, I had not known a trailing |- was "wrong" and have been using that when I create tables as visually, I like the separation between the last row and the |&#125;. --Marc Kupper&#124;talk 02:17, 22 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Like Marc, I didn't know a trailing |- was "wrong", and so as long as people are able to create tables by handrolling the syntax it is something that will continue to appear in new edits. To my mind this means it is something that VE should expect to encounter and be agnostic about. Thryduulf (talk) 14:59, 22 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I've now reported this issue as, although it might get merged with an existing bug. Thryduulf (talk) 15:13, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

About links
If I want to make a link to e.g. target, why does I have to find it on the list first? Target coperation is the first on the drop-down-list, and if I press escape (the list disaperes) and only "target" in the "link-box", but the actual links I get is the first entry on the list. Why are the red links blue? Its misleading - maybe all the links should be colored another color? When open the link-box at the bottom of the page, I cant see the list (without scrolling - using the mouse) - Christian75 (talk) 09:39, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
 * The first two are known bugs (can't find the link for the first one now, sorry, while the second should be this. For the last one, the "link-box" is prompted exactly under the word, if this does not happen for you, please list OS/skin/browser so that we can check better, thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:10, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I would have made a screen shut, but the links suggestions doens work anymore. But if you are at the bottom of the screen, I think the box shouldnt be right under word – then you cant see the box. Christian75 (talk) 21:01, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * The box will always be visible. If you are at the bottom, when popping-up it will autofocus your window so that you can see everything. That's why we need to know your OS/Wikipedia skin/browser (and its version) in addition to the title of the article. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:23, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

VE, Sfn template within reference, Vcite error
So I made this page with VE: User:Atethnekos/sandbox2. It looked fine as I was making it. However, the Sfn template within the reference doesn't render in view mode (to be expected), but it does in VE. Nothing while placing this template within the reference in VE suggested that it wouldn't work.

Also, when first making it, the Vcite book template would render properly in VE, but now going to VE with the page after having saved, it doesn't render properly. It shows a &lt;span&gt; tag. -- Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 00:35, 22 August 2013 (UTC)
 * "Relatively weak referencing support" is cited among the most common and known issues with VE at the moment. There is also a specific bug requesting support for SFN and similar templates. Thanks for your reports so far. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:08, 22 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Oh, thanks. That bug seems strange to me, though. Is Sfn really not supported? I have no trouble creating them in VE, like most other templates.  They seem to work fine, except as here when an Sfn is placed within a reference, which makes VE go wonky, but that's all it does. -- Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 15:16, 22 August 2013 (UTC)
 * If memory serves, sfn is now "supported" in the limited (but important) sense that VE no longer makes an enormous mess of the page when it's present.
 * If I understand this question correctly, it isn't really about sfn, but about nested refs, so putting something like this into VisualEditor:

Chocolate tastes better than other foods.

Notes

Sources


 * produces expected and desirable results in VisualEditor:


 * until you save, in which case it breaks completely:


 * I'm not sure whether this problem is truly a VE problem or a problem with the normal interpretation of wikitext. (They ought to match, but what should we do with sfn/any ref inside a ref?  Which one's behavior should be changed?)  I'll ask around.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:20, 22 August 2013 (UTC)
 * is about this. It's a problem with Cite.php.  Do we want bug-for-bug compatibility, or should we leave VisualEditor alone and try to get the other team to deal with the underlying problem?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:02, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

"Error: Unknown error" saving changes
Hello - I do believe there remains an issue with very long pages. I dared to try VE on 2009 flu pandemic timeline, which is ~227kb, and a) encountered a "your edit might have been corrupted" message, indicating that I should check my edit and b) the inability to bring up the edit diff (timed out). Now, this article is known to be long enough to warrant splitting, but it would be useful to know the current confidence limits around page length and the ability to edit same. Is it dependent upon local environment (i.e. PC configuration and memory allocated to browser)? Or is there a server side known performance limit? Thanks for considering this. --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 01:28, 23 August 2013 (UTC) P.S. I did not try hard to implement my changes and did check to see if I had put an edit into the history which might have needed reversion; no edit in edit history was recorded after my truncation of the process, which was reassuring.

Just encountered the "Error: Unknown error" with a successful edit while editing Fairfield, Iowa; see diff. --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 23:07, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Another instance
 * Hi Ceyockey, I added your concerns to that bug as well. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:39, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

Edit Buttons
Thanks for switching the buttons. unfortunately the way its implemented leads to (possibly right now only the english is different) the button being in a different place each time I switch between language versions.--Saehrimnir (talk) 16:10, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, it's a bit awkward. We've also heard some complaints from people who had just gotten used to the old order, when the new order was imposed on them, so they had to re-adjust.  But this is how the vocal participants of the English Wikipedia want the tabs ordered, so that's what's happening here for now.  Similar discussions have happened at a couple of other Wikipedias, and they have been less inclined to shuffle the tabs around for exactly these reasons.  Someday (probably months from now, maybe years), the English Wikipedia will likely switch back to the default arrangement, but for now, this will be a problem for some people.  If it's seriously disruptive to you, then I believe that someone could create a script that would change them back to the default just for your account.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:06, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * (e.c.) I think it might lead to confusion, so I guess at some point there will probably be the need to "think globally" and take a decision about the position; this might be the same for all wikis, while each wiki might still label them as they see fit - my2c here. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 18:11, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I was one of the advocates for changing them back from the moment I discovered that this was done so I am happy now by switching it of in every Language but en since I only do source code stuff in every other anyways. I just would have liked to be able to test/use it further in the german version also.--Saehrimnir (talk) 14:05, 24 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I was under the impression that in the German version of Wikipedia, you can use VisualEditor - but you need to select it (opt-IN) via preferences. Is this true? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:53, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes. Go to de:Spezial:Einstellungen and select the last checkbox on the page, "Aktiviere den VisualEditor (nur im Artikel- und Benutzernamensraum; nur Firefox, Chrome und Safari)". Then click the button immediately below to save the changes. Thryduulf (talk) 09:14, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, you can of course activate it manually, but if you think VE should be default on de.wp as well (at least, this is my impression reading your words), it might be useful that you let that community know it. Regards, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:48, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * No that is not what I meant, because I know and am capable to activate it there, but its still no use because the buttons are still in the wrong order. Wht I meant you should have made the change of positions globally because in this way all the things are fracturing. The fact that the same field in german wikipedia if checked activates the VE and in all other wikipedias deactivates it is another symptom. I that said I really like that you are finally doing a Visual editor I am just not happy with the fact that you try replace the the normal editor with it while it does not have some core capabilities like table formatting and special characters. Sorry for keeping you away from fixing and maturing this good feature with my confusing comment. --Saehrimnir (talk) 14:22, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

VE sucks. WMF shouldn't have released it yet.
It's true, really. There are still dozens upon dozens upon dozens of bugs in it, and nobody on this site likes it or appears to find it trustworthy. The old wikitext editor was so much better and more reliable. I don't know why the WMF thought it was a good idea to release the VE while it is still in beta testing. It's just like commercial software; think about it! Would developers want to release their products while still in beta? Of course not! Because all that does is lead to the company making significantly less money than expected, and people not ever wanting to buy their products, because they will think that the developers are lazy, impatient, and always rushing their products before they're even ready. BTW, I have VE completely disabled for my account. Sometimes the stuff that's designed to be convenient just doesn't work. Anyway, that's my feedback on VE. Interlude 65 (Push to talk) 15:47, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Without commenting on whether or not it should have been released, I think it should be pointed out that it's not the case that "nobody on this site likes it or appears to find it trustworthy". At least one editor (me) likes it, and I find it trustworthy enough to use on most of my content edits. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:53, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * OK, maybe not everybody hates it, but from what I've heard and seen, I'd say (roughly) about 95% of the users here on Wikipedia do, and would much rather edit using the wikitext editor. Further, just what are you insisting on the part where you said that "it's trustworthy enough to use on most of my content edits"? Can't you see (or at least heard of) all of the commotion VE has been causing on this site? Users have been reporting numerous problems with it, and I feel like all it's doing is hurting the world's largest, open source encyclopedia. Interlude 65  (Push to talk) 19:14, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I just meant that I use it for most of my content work (currently radiocarbon dating), and while there are certainly bugs and missing features, I've found it a net positive for editing that article. I'm aware that there are bugs that cause unintended consequences including loss of text, but I haven't run into that myself.  I find that I'm starting to default to using it, only switching to wikitext when I know VE can't handle it -- primarily math markup, and some punctuation issues. Mike Christie (talk - contribs -  library)
 * For what its worth Interlude me and about 500 other editors agree that VE sucks but the 5 or 10 that really like it keep insisting there is nothing wrong with it and refuse to do the right thing and make it opt in only. I'm not even saying we should stop working on it, but in its current state its too much of a mess to be pushing new users to it Kumioko (talk) 19:39, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, I know I'm in a minority; I did, rather belatedly, !vote in the RfC, and I see the direction that's going. That's fine; my preference would be otherwise, but RfCs are there partly to avoid minorities making decisions.  My objection is simply to the blanket statements that I see occasionally: "nobody likes it"; "it has no benefits"; "everyone wants it to go away".  Those aren't true.  In addition, I think that arguments made acknowledging minority positions tend to sound less like rhetoric and more like reason, and so, to me, anyway, more convincing. Mike Christie (talk - contribs -  library) 19:54, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * The VE is still there for those that want to use it. That's a good thing: it's already useful for some types of simple edits, and it's getting slowly less painful to use over time for slightly more complex edits. However, in spite of the improvements, it's still essentially unusable for non-trivial "technical" Wikipedia editing, where editing the Wikitext is still really the only practical way to go. I look forward to seeing further improvements, but at the current rate of improvement, I suspect it may take years before it's ready to be made the default tool for beginner editors. -- The Anome (talk) 20:03, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Wikilink problems
When I edit the end of a wikilink (not the link itself, but the text displayed), such as changing it to a plural, the actual link does not continue over the new characters. Also, I want to create a line break in the middle, the break and any text after it are not included in the link. Is there a patch being developed that will allow editors to choose whether they want the link to extend over some new text or not?-- &iquest;3fam  ily6  contribs 20:05, 25 August 2013 (UTC)


 * I think the stage that they're at is realizing that it's complicated. People want:
 * Example
 * Examples
 * Examples
 * Example's
 * Example.
 * It's a bit hard to guess which form is what the editor wants, but you probably don't want to get to asked every single time, either. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:23, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * The way to do it at the moment is to enter your new text, select everything you want to appear in the link and then load the link dialog (using the button or ctrl+k) and confirming the link target. While possibly not the best, this reliably includes what the user wants linked and nothing else. Prior to a couple of updates ago, it was nearly impossible to end a link as everything you typed apart from a linebreak was included whether you wanted it or not. That was far more disruptive than what we have now. Thryduulf (talk) 23:53, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree, I remember when the editor did that. I think your suggestion is the best solution.-- &iquest;3fam  ily6  contribs 23:58, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Fixing Badly Constructed Tables Messes Up Contents Below It
Editing (in order to fix) badly constructed tables like in this page (Android_version_history, there were two rows with one left column at the end of the Android 4.3 table) shows the content below the badly constructed table within the table. PhistucK (talk) 08:14, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * It took me a while to understand this, but viewing the end of shows the error. I'm not sure this is actually a VisualEditor bug, as VE is correctly displaying what the source is telling it to as   is not a tag to close a table. The issue is that the php parser treats the specific malformed markup in  as a correctly closed nested table i.e. at the end of an otherwise correctly formed table

|-} Is treated as

|} Whereas if there is any content between the  and   the php parser treats it as the code says it should. Consequently I'm not really sure what VE or Parsoid should be expected to do when it encounters this? Pinging Ssastry, who may have some useful input here.

As an aside, the markup here appears to be the result of incompletely cleaning up this VisualEditor edit on 27 July. That's one of the known table bugs, but I can't remember which, and so has either been fixed or is being worked on. Thryduulf (talk) 09:57, 23 August 2013 (UTC)


 * I think the fixup is being done by Tidy which cleans up bad HTML generated by the PHP parser. It seems to close unclosed tables at a heading tag (&lt;h1&gt; and others).  But, given that we've run into more several instances of unclosed tables, I think we (Parsoid) could think of implementing that behavior as well.  However, it is a lot more trickier in our case since the table would have been closed automatically based on HTML5 specs by the HTML library we use (and unless the library is buggy, unclosed-tables seem to be handled differently than Tidy).  So, to replicate Tidy's behavior as in the PHP parser pipeline, we would have to detect these automatic fixes, undo them, and close it before headings.  That seems like a lot of work and hackery for unclear benefits when there are other higher-priority things to deal with.  At this time, I am inclined to say that unclosed tables are best fixed up by editing source.  Sounds reasonable?  Ssastry (talk) 16:38, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I think that malformatted tables ought to be properly formatted. I wonder whether someone like User:MZMcBride could produce a list of tables that end with


 * }
 * }
 * or other known "illegal" structures so that they could be fixed. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:01, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * At some point Parsoid should be able to cope with unclosed and malclosed tables, but as it sounds like a lot of work I think setting that as a low priority task seems fine for now, as long as it doesn't destroy ones it encounters. When table editing comes to VE things may change, but hopefully the tools wont allow the creation of an unclosed table - I can't imagine a use for them outside templates (cf (comment #8)/)? Thryduulf (talk) 18:16, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I think you're conflating two issues here:

is being discussed at above. That is a scenario that most definitely should be handled as valid sequence of valid tags. as discussed here is not a valid tag and something that Parsoid should not be expected to frequently encounter. Thryduulf (talk) 18:16, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * }
 * }
 * -}
 * I agree that "start a new row" and "close table" are valid tags. But why should "start a new row—close table" be considered a valid sequence?  "Start a new row" ought to be followed by a new row, not by a sudden end to the table.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:23, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * It should be considered acceptable because it has produced tables that render correctly since pipe syntax was created, thus as noted in the above section, people will continue to write tables that way. Even though the html doesn't validate perfectly, html tables ending with a blank  line render fine in browsers - e.g. this test page, so VE needs to able to deal with it on an ongoing basis. Thryduulf (talk) 18:50, 23 August 2013 (UTC)


 * This is a philosophical issue that I see the VE team not quite grasping: the way that wikitext is pretty much parsed today is correct by definition, and is the behaviour they need to emulate. WYSIWYG only works if you actually present the same way that the established wikitext parser presents, or What You See Is What A Developer Thought You Should Get. No one needs a WYISWADTYSG editor.&mdash;Kww(talk) 19:06, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't think that "how it works today" is really what we should be aiming for. "How it works today is correct by definition" means that, the "Thou may not add citations to explanatory footnotes" bug, should never be fixed.
 * If we can get perfectly validated HTML, then why should we preserve invalid table formatting? I'm thinking that Parsoid and VisualEditor should quietly produce valid HTML in these tables (without making a mess, which is what they're doing now).  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:36, 24 August 2013 (UTC)
 * The point is that if a given string of wikitext produces something that works and appears as intended, whether or not the HTML is valid, Parsoid and VisualEditor need to expect to encounter that wikitext on an ongoing basis and accept it as valid input. What you do to it to produce valid HTML is up to you, as long as the wikitext is preserved on roundtripping.
 * Tables ending with trailing new line are a good example of this - the wikitext produces a table that looks and works as expected. VE and Parsoid need to deal with it as valid input and work with the resulting table in exactly the same way as a table that does not have this feature.
 * Tables with a malformed closing tag followed by open and closing tags does not produce a table that looks or works as expected. In the long term VE should offer a way to fix this, either manually or automatically. In the short term VE and Parsoid just need to not damage the article when they encounter it - conceptually they need to recognise it as a malformed table and leave it exactly as it is. Thryduulf (talk) 08:54, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * That's my question: Why should we preserve the (busted/worthless/invalid-HTML-producing) wikitext on roundtripping, when we could actually fix the wikitext, so that it does not contain a pointless new-row tag?  Why not make it 100% right in wikitext as well as in other forms?  Why preserve the pointless wrong stuff?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:11, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Because as far as the user of wikitext is concerned it isn't wrong, afaict doesn't produce invalid html, and isn't regarded by everyone as pointless (see comment in the above-linked section). Thryduulf (talk) 00:00, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Visual separation (the only hypothesized benefit) could be achieved by leaving a blank line. I think we should kill these.  (We definitely shouldn't be creating a big mess when we encounter them, which is why we filed that bug, but I think it would be preferable for them not to exist, per Adam's suggestion in that same section.)  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:25, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Invisible deletion of lead word when adding maintenance template
Back from a fortnight away, so I'm not up to speed on all recent developents, but decided to have a go with VE while stub-sorting.

Editing Parvardigar (Pete Townshend song), I fixed the stub, wanted to add unref after the navigation hatnote. Put cursor in front of the "P" of the lead sentence, added the template, all looked fine. Went to save it, looked at "Review your changes", and the word "Parvardigar" had been deleted, replaced by the template. Closed the "save page" window, had another look at the work in progress: the unref displays, and so does the word "Parvardigar": so the word seems to have been deleted, but is still being shown in the displayed version while I'm editing. Ouch. Will save the edit, then go back and fix it.

... Interesting: when I've saved the article, the word Parvardigar is missing, immediately. The change to stub template and resulting category don't appear till I reload the page. Quirks of VE. Pam D  16:34, 25 August 2013 (UTC)


 * And this is reproducible. Go to my VE sandbox and try to insert a maintenance template after the navigation hatnote and before first word of text. The natural way to try is to put cursor before first word of text and add template: the workround is to put cursor there, hit return to get a blank line, arrow up to get onto that blank line, and then add template. Pam  D  21:34, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Actaully, the problem is that inserting any template before a bold, italic or linked word deletes that word. It doesn't seem to matter what else is around it. I've reported this as . Thryduulf (talk) 00:38, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
 * It also happens to multiple words (e.g., all bold-faced words) and to formatted or linked words that you add immediately after a template. Putting a space after or hitting return between the template and the text seems to work correctly.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:39, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

hlist in infobox, File:Image, and tables
I made this User:Atethnekos/sandbox4 as a demonstration. If the hlist template is used in an infobox or a table like on the page, when I go to VE, the list will end up be extended far into the page. If it's used with as on the page, the list will end up being cut off, and then some weird things will happen if I try to click on the hlist template (e.g., the page will be extended to right and my browser will give a horizontal scroll bar). FF 23.0.1 Win7-- Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 19:33, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I filed all here - I did some tests as well, please feel free to revert them if you want :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:59, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Super/sub script issues
I took a poke at the subscripting and superscripting feature now available on mediawiki.org, and I think I may have encountered a bug. First, I noticed a strange behavior where anything I typed at the end of that third line, if I then hit enter, it would be duplicated in the fourth line, and my cursor would move to the fifth (blank) line. I then took a look at the wikitext generated by VE, and it looked odd, so I copied it into a wikitext editor, and got a rather different looking result than VE was showing. Also, upon saving with VE, I got this result, which is the same as copying into wikitext editor, but not what VE was showing me. Chris857 (talk) 20:54, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Testing this now. Note to self: when I created the sandbox to test this, I got the message that it was created only when I hit Edit again to change that text. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:10, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Ok, I don't think it has to do with the new features. Proof is, I can reproduce (on Mediawiki) the same bug without using them. You just need to add quickly casual sequences of words, as if you were vandalizing the page. In the linked diff I kept writing on the third line, it was VE which splitted what I wrote on more lines. I was also able to reproduce the difference among the content you "write" and the one which is saved. Filing this now. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:27, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I'll actually add everything here. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:34, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Corrupted hyperlinks
After editing a page in beta mode on the iPad, the format of several links, which have not been edited by me, was changed (HTML hyperlink tags added), prompting an error message on saving the page. The corrupted links can be found in my edit (undone afterwards) of the EMD SD90 MAC article. Wetzgau21 (talk) 14:51, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi there, it is a known thing, see here (and it is probably caused by the browser or some broken plugin/extension, not by VE). Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:12, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi, sorry, didn't know that. But it would be great if there would be a workaround for this problem without having to change any (default) settings on iPads. Wetzgau21 (talk) 21:21, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Don't be, Wetzgau21, you were not required to know about this, of course! I actually found out about this yesterday because I noticed NicoV's comment on a related bug. Hope this gets fixed soon :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:29, 26 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your message, and for noticing and fixing the problem in the article. In this edit, your iPad apparently thought that the numbers were telephone numbers.  We'll need to find a way around this.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:45, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

An experience with an edit-a-thon
Just over a week ago, I helped out at an edit-a-thon at the Royal Ontario Museum. Whilst there, I did talk to the new users about trying out VisualEditor (as opposed to the wikitext editor). To a person, they all said that VE was *more* difficult to use than wikitext, especially with respect to references. Now, they had all had reinforced to them the importance of referencing factual information, so they were all trying to include references. They pointed out that at least with the wikitext editor, they could pull up templates that were complete and they didn't have to try to figure out the parameters. They were using mostly printed sources, not websites, so there was no URL to use as a quick-and-dirty reference insertion. The wifi wasn't great there, and even I had a hard time opening pages with VE as compared to wikitext (it kept hanging on me). Finally, they complained that the help pages weren't as helpful as they expected because they were now oriented toward VE, while they were working with wikitext. That last point tells me that we need two complete sets of help pages. Risker (talk) 02:08, 27 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Real life experience is particularly useful - thanks for this report. My take-away (besides agreeing with you that parallel help pages are needed) is that VE should have something like RefToolbar/2.0 added, for references. This actually isn't that difficult, programming-wise (at least, it isn't difficult for the four default templates):


 * Set up a place on the editing menu (perhaps a second line) where the pull-down menu for reference cite templates
 * Provide an option for each language Wikipedia to indicate whether to display or not display the pull-down menu (default= "no")
 * Set the label so that it can be specified by each language Wikipedia
 * Set up a place where each language Wikipedia can specify the templates to be included on the pull-down list
 * Modify the template/transclusion dialog so that it can be invoked with a new template already selected for it.


 * The other thing that would help would be a significant redesign of the template/transclusion dialog, to address the existing, significant problems with the user interface/user experience. A lot of the process is far less intuitive than it could be. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:07, 27 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks for this, John. I forgot one other very significant point: not a one of them understood what the "puzzle piece" was supposed to represent, and when shown, all of them still thought it was a poorly chosen icon.  Most had no suggestion as to an alternative, although two thought "curly brackets" would be a good idea.  I suspect that's because they'd seen curly brackets for templates when using wikitext.  Risker (talk) 03:12, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your comments.
 * Do you have the links to the help pages they were using? Most of them say nothing at all about VisualEditor except for a warning at the top, but I believe the pages oriented towards new users have been changing recently.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:42, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Whatamidoing (WMF), the one that was immediately pointed out to me was Tutorial/Editing which is linked from Help:Contents as the first wikilink under "I want to edit Wikipedia". In fact, most of the pages in the tutorials have been rewritten to focus exclusively on VisualEditor. Risker (talk) 03:58, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * The help page comment should be easy to implement - just copy a pre-VE version of each help page to the corresponding Wikitext help page and update some links. VQuakr (talk) 05:46, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

I've added your comments about reference editing to and reported your comments about the icon for inserting templates as. Thryduulf (talk)

Why are we still using this?
A couple months have gone by since the release of Visual editor and eventhough a large number of problems have been fixed, there are still hundreds of bugs nad enhancements needed. With all the problems that have been identified, and as fast as that list is growing, along with all the limitations and exceptions to using this app, why are still forcing it to be used? We need to stop forcing this out. This application needs to be opt in only for now. Once the major bugs are worked out and we can trust the application to make an edit without screwing it up, then we can make it opt out. The RFC to make this opt in has overwhelming support so its time for the WMF to do the right thing. We need to take a step back, make the app opt in only and not encourage new editors to try and use it yet. We need to fix the bugs and increase the functionality. We need to do these things because its the right thing to do. Hate me if you want for continuing to call attention to this but the bottom line is this application is largely a failure and it needs to be fixed. Kumioko (talk) 14:38, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Agree if this was an AFD, the whole thing would have been closed DELETE a long time ago. Time to Drop the stick and back slowly away from the horse carcass.--Paul McDonald (talk) 14:42, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Definitely not a fan of "hating" people. As I did before, I'd just remark this is not the right place for similar discussions. For example I can see a similar one ongoing here, which you edited as well, and this specific page has a very different purpose. This said I'd be really glad to help you with specific issues, if you have any. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:10, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Yeah it seems like there is no good place for this type of discussion. Thanks for the offer but I stopped using the application or submitting feedback about problems after the problems we were identifying and the feedback we were providing were being ignored. But it still annoys me how many problems are allowed to litter the articles without being fixed. VE continues to have problems with adding templates and I have a list of more than a dozen articles that have yet to be fixed. I have 5 that have a broken table, several more that have image problems, etc. I fixed a lot of others but I am sort of using these as a control group to see if the WMF is going to fix the mess they created or rely on the community to do it. I also stopped fixing the problems since the WMF seems intent on using Wikipedia as a petri dish to test and doesn't seem to mind that the application is breaking articles. When the WMF starts to act like they care more about the project than about testing broken software, then I will fix the problems and continue to support the process. I think a lot of others would too. We realize that creating this software is not a trivial thing and problems are going to occur, but we shouldn't be moving full speed ahead knowing that we are leaving a wake of destruction in our rear view mirror. Kumioko (talk) 16:17, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * 100% agreed. And on frwiki, it's even worse: even difficult to have an answer on the feedback page, and when you report having to fix problems like that you get an answer saying that nothing proves it was VE's fault. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 18:18, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I think in the case of the French wiki the problems go beyond VE. IMO, that shows that not only is Visual editor problematic but the underlying Parsoid and Universal translator apps need serious refinements as well. All three of these work closely (but apparently not closely enough) but they all tie to VE. Again and as I inferred above. Its perfectly fine if we want to keep testing and developing this and we should. But this should absolutely not be available to IP's and new users yet and it should only apply to users who want to opt in to using it. Kumioko (talk) 18:26, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * In some defense, work is in progress to fix the bugs, but it is unreasonable to expect a bug to be fixed immediately. To give an indication of the scale of the task the developers have for Visual Editor there are 319 new bugs, 411 bugs which have been assigned to someone, 9 with a patch to be implemented so should soon be fixed, and 721 have been fixed. Its going to take a lot of time to fix all those, even going through the new bug to work out if they are real bugs or duplicates of others takes a significant amount of time.--Salix (talk): 21:46, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Kumioko, what is this "Universal translator app"? If you mean the Universal Language Selector, it has nothing at all to do with VisualEditor.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:08, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * @Whatamidoing, Yeah that's it sorry and I was under the impression that was what helped translate from one language to another for things like Visual Editor so that the WMF wouldn't have to make a separate VE app for every single language. Maybe I am wrong. That is very possible.
 * @Salix, your right and no one, not even me is saying that we expect these bugs to be fixed immediately and no one is saying there shouldn't be any bugs, because that is inevitable with any software application no matter how mature it is. There have been a lot of improvements but the volume o bugs identified in the last couple months alone show it wasn't ready for release. Let alone to new users and IP's. What I am saying is that it should not be pushed to the new users and IP when it has a lot of major problems. Like deleting content, adding things it shouldn't add, breaking tables, etc. These are the kinds of problems that should have caused the WMF to unrelease it and keep it in a beta, opt in status until they were fixed. What's worse, the WMF has absolutely no plan to clean up the hundreds of articles broken by the app. They expect the community of volunteers to do it while disregarding any of our comments other than pats on the back telling them what a wonderful job they are doing and identifying problems with the application that anyone can see was not even close to being release worthy. That isn't even taking into account that several of the most widely used internet browsers isn't even supported. They can't even get it to work. Kumioko (talk) 23:10, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
 * They don't make separate software for each language. They just make a separate file for each label.  If the label is "vector-view-view", then whatever you put in the file "vector-view-view" will show up in that spot.  (Have a look at the label names:  .)  It's the same system that allowed us to switch between "Talk" and "Discussion" tabs a few years ago, and to change "Edit" to "Edit beta" three weeks ago.  What the ULS does is—if you've set some other language—show you the labels from the same kinds of files, but using a different group of files.  ULS needs some performance work, but the actual process of showing "Página" instead of "Article" requires no extra work.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:37, 22 August 2013 (UTC)
 * @Salix: I do understand that it will take time to fix the bugs, and I also find that normal and expected. The only thing I don't understand is why VE hasn't been rolled back to opt-in by WMF when it's obvious that it will take time to fix the bugs and have an editor that is not damaging hundreds of articles every day. Especially since WMF has decided that it's not their task to fix the articles damaged by VE, but volunteers who are repeatedly asking to go back to opt-in mode... --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 05:13, 22 August 2013 (UTC)
 * @User:NicoV, not sure you saw that Ssastry took care of the problem you linked here, it's here now, and it's a Parsoid bug - it appeared on it.wp as well, and it's useful for others to know it is duplicating parts of the article. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 17:20, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks, but not sure this bug has anything to do with the problem I linked, and the problem I linked was in fact 3 problems: nowiki at the beginning of a line, nowiki inside internal links with no text, strange internal links . And the only answer I got on frwiki is still that "nothing proves it has anything to do with VE". --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 18:47, 23 August 2013 (UTC)


 * The nowiki tags at the start of the line (Il prit la voie directe allant de Langres à Lausanne...) are a known bug that was fixed in the most recent release (reached frwiki late on Tuesday).
 * The Alésia mess (...une citadelle religieuse celtique,  Alésia. is.
 * The multiple link mess (Commentaires de César sur la guerre des gaules is probably a consequence of fixing the bug that made anything you typed after a link become part of the link. I'm not sure what do with it.  It would be very helpful to know exactly how this series of links was created.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:28, 24 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, to know exactly how the problem was created would require to ask the user and that he knows how he did it, but he probably won't because I don't think he ever signed up to be a beta tester. But you can ask him.
 * Can I also ask why no WMF liaison is answering on the frwiki feedback page now that VE has been forced on every user ? Users are reporting problems there, but their reports seem to be simply ignored. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 10:59, 25 August 2013 (UTC)


 * NicoV, sorry for the confusion about the bug :) I just assumed Ssastry and I were talking about the same thing. For the user thing, that's exactly the way to tell it was really VE to cause the mess - and is what I often do, even with experienced users (your user joined just recently). As for the liaisons, both here and on it.wp i.e. you can see that now mostly users help each other because this is how it should work in the long term. It should be also worth noticing that here and elsewhere it's written All comments are read, but personal replies are not guaranteed. As most of the liaisons are increasingly working now on preparing new wikis for deployment, please feel free to ping any of us in case of bugs which are not already known and reported on Bugzilla. Thanks! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:30, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi Elitre. Your answer worries me... In the long term users will help each other, yes sure, but VE has been deployed recently and it's still full of bugs, some of them still damaging articles. So, honestly, when I read that liaisons are preparing new wikis for deployment, instead of managing the feedback on the already deployed wiki, when everything clearly shows that VE is still not ready: I can only think that VE team is still not listening to users and still doesn't care about damages made by VE on wikipedia. What is the point in deploying more when you know that many damaging bugs are still present, and that you don't even manage to handle the current flow of feedback ? --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 13:33, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * NicoV, there is no need to worry. We can definitely keep supporting and keep deploying. If both staffers and volunteers did not care, bugs would not be reported to Bugzilla anymore, which is definitely not the case... No need to overreact, especially since the flow of feedback is actually quite low now when compared to the first deployment days (and I can see some volunteers at work on fr.wp as well, as a matter of fact), and no direct answers, wherever they happen, should definitely not imply "the flow" isn't being handled. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:14, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree with Nico and there is absolutely a need to worry. The RFC shows almost 500 editors are worried. The ongoing cavalier attitude from the WMF and its staff about the damage done to the project are worrisome and irritating to those of us that volunteer our time to help build it. VE still causes too many problems, there are still problems lying around that haven't been fixed and it doesn't work with IE which is one of the most widely used browsers. Once they do get it to work with IE I think we can all assume there will be more errors with it that will need to be addressed. At this point, not pulling the software back and stopping deployment is just negligent and shows the WMF doesn't care about the community or the project. We are just number to the WMF. Kumioko (talk) 14:19, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * By not handling the flow, I meant not handling fixing the flow of feedback: there are currently 777 open bugs for VE in bugzilla (for 735 fixed from the beginning of VE), this number is still increasing. Yes, the flow of feedback is quite low: still people on holidays, and many people are still waiting to see bugs reported a month or two fixed. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 14:34, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I would also add that the flow of feedback has also decreased because most of us know that the WMF isn't listening, so why bother. The flow of discussion has decreased because people aren't even trying to use the application and have given up on it, because its crap. Kumioko (talk) 15:55, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * It doesn't appear to be the case that people have given up on using the application; the hourly edits tracking shows that levels of usage have not changed much over the last month. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:06, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * The people who are using it are not the ones who are leaving comments. These are new and casual users who are editing with the assumption that the application works and are generally unaware that the application causes errors. They assume, and rightly so that the application should work. And the number of usage are down from when it was first released. Kumioko (talk) 16:17, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I believe the drop in usage about a month ago coincides with a change in labelling the link for VE, from "Edit" to "Edit beta"; perhaps someone else can confirm that. Other than that I don't see a significant change in usage. Mike Christie (talk - contribs -  library) 16:26, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, it does. Rearranging the tabs ("Edit source" is first and therefore most convenient) probably had a bigger effect on reducing use.  I believe that the changes resulted in an immediate drop of something like 25%.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:07, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree that was probably part of it but I believe that a significant reason is because we let them know it was a beta release of the app and not ready for prime time. In my experience a lot of people won't use something that says beta. Kumioko (talk) 23:46, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Nico, you do have a WMF staffer at the frwiki feedback page. He's just one of the many staffers who prefers to use an account name without "(WMF)" at the end.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:07, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, check the history of the page, you will see that he's not participating much. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 05:47, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Check better? ;) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:14, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * What's the point in the stats ? I don't deny that there was many posts from WMF on the entire lifetime of the feedback, I was just saying that we had almost no more answers now that VE has been turned to opt-out on frwiki. If you look at the history, you will see that, except for the batch of answers that happened today (only after I have reported here several times), there was no real answer in the last 3 weeks... That's what I was reporting: the official reason for deploying on more wikis was to get more feedback, but on frwiki I felt that our feedback was simply ignored. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 16:52, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Be assured, it wasn't. As a matter of fact, since our dear Guillaume is not "technically" a liaison for VE, I'll guess that I will be soon helping him actively there. There, this is what you get when you complain too much! ;) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 17:17, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

VE + ULS unicode Devnagari Script input issues
Hi,

With reference to bug no 49569. From my todays test edits at mr wiki, it seems some efforts have taken place to initiate/enable ULS  unicode Devnagari Script input in VE edits.But for practical usage,even for primary begining, it seems to have too many issues yet.Before informing the issues do we wait untill we are officially informed from your side or do we start reporting issues ?

I suppose till now there is no separate bug to track "VE+ULS unicode Marathi language  Devnagari script issues". Would you prefer to start a separate bug for tracking or you expect us to join with some existing bug reports for related issues.

Thanks and regards

Mahitgar (talk) 05:31, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Pinging @User:PEarley (WMF) about the best way to handle this, which I suspect should be splitting the two kind of issues since different teams would take care of them. Regards, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:20, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hey Mahitgar, Elitre. As VE will not be usable on wikis where ULS isn't integrating properly, I'd be filing this as a VE bug, and as a "blocker" to Marathi deployment depending on severity. It is fine to file as a separate bug - if the devs discover it is linked to another reported issue already assigned, they can merge the reports.  Mahitgar, can you give us a more detailed report about the specific issues you are noticing on mr.wiki, as well as the browser and operating system of your computer?  With that, we can submit a actionable bug report, and work to get this fixed before any rollout to Marathi. Can't offer much insight to this particular script - I haven't been working with the Indic languages - Jan and his team are working on this. User:JEissfeldt (WMF) - tag, you're it! PEarley (WMF) (talk) 16:33, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Mahitgar, you might also want to know that the bug related to vowels for that language has been fixed in the meantime. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 18:13, 26 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks, I have the CIS in Bangalore putting together a file on critical bugs for Indian language versions for this product since yesterday and will expand it as necessary. This looks like a solid candidate to me, regards --Jan (WMF) (talk) 18:00, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for all above replies.I will study and list problems for Marathi language VE+ULS environment here in a tabular form over couple days

Bugs to watch
 * 51472

Eating references
I did not see this mentioned elsewhere, but I have encountered a bug where, if I add multiple citations to back a statement, the Visual Editor only saves the first citation I added. This happened once when I added three citations to back a claim and had to add each one individually over the course of three edits and again just now when I had to add a second citation after it didn't get saved. Multiple citations can be added if they are separate as I had added a citation for another statement in the same edit and it was saved. Seems VE has a problem specifically with citations being added next to each other.-- The Devil's Advocate tlk. cntrb. 00:39, 27 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Sounds similar to what the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation reported recently: VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive_2013_4. That's for a bug that's supposed to have been resolved. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:13, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * That does describe what has been happening to me so it does not seem to have been fixed.-- The Devil's Advocate tlk.  cntrb. 05:29, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I've reopened and copied yours and Sue's comments there. Thryduulf (talk) 09:55, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

ref name
I tried to edit refs with VisualEditor, but it seems to lack the  feature.- Seonookim  (What I've done so far) (I'm busy here) (Tell me your requests) 06:20, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi there! If you want to reuse a reference, make sure you follow these steps (just remember that, right now, you need to save first before being able to use a new reference). Does this help? Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:01, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * VisualEditor does not currently support adding reference names, but this is requested at . Unfortunately that bug has remained unprioritised since it was reported in early July so I can't say when the feature is likely to be added. Thryduulf (talk) 10:19, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

VE breaks table/references?
The article The Legend of Korra (Book 2) gets constantly disrupted when somebody edits (any part of) it using VE. The following two lines of text are inserted into a table:

        

Please check the recent article history. Although at first I though this was some persistent vandalism, I seriously doubt this now. If possible, please edit the article in such a way that the bug does not show up any more. YLSS (talk) 06:59, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * This is usually caused by some minor error in the table markup such as a missing quote, but I've not been able to find anything. There are other people far better at spotting those things than I am though, so hopefully someone will notice something I haven't. If this is the cause then it is . Thryduulf (talk) 10:44, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Did some testing in a sandbox out of curiosity. The error is caused by the named ref "Futon" in the table, and only when it is formatted as a named ref:
 * Moved the ref as named ref outside of the table structure and deleted all iterations - OK, VE works.
 * Used exactly the same cite within the table, but only as unnamed, single "ref" - OK, VE works.
 * Removed all references from table and added a new named ref "TEST" within the table - VE-edits get corrupted with "TEST"-text. GermanJoe (talk) 11:57, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hmm, it's more than just named references in a table . Thryduulf (talk) 12:30, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * This one [] is an article version, that is OK for VE. I have reverted back to the original situation: [] (VE error). Something in the difference is the cause :). GermanJoe (talk) 12:44, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Indeed, but I haven't yet figured out what that something is! I can't reproduce it in a simple table with that reference in my sandbox, so it seems likely to be the interaction between named references and something else. I haven't got time at the moment to investigate further. I've reported it as , but it can be refined if we can narrow it down. Thryduulf (talk) 14:15, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * VE doesn't accept ref names with leading and ending quotations marks in this specific situation. Changed the OPs article to fix that for now, but it's definately a bug. GermanJoe :(talk) 14:22, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * GermanJoe, Thryduulf: see Template:Episode_list and how the ProdCode parameter is used there:   So, if you pass in | ProdCode = 113 you can see that the td-cell produced by the template will break.  So, the template is not designed to take anything but numbers/strings for the ProdCode parameter.  The same is true for the EpisodeNumber parameter.  All uses of this template in WP pages where these parameters are not strings are errors in source wikitext on those pages.  Hope this clarifies the matter. Ssastry (talk) 16:01, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I've been trying to figure out how this was done. You can't add a named ref at the moment, so it must have begin by re-using (and modifying) an existing one.  But then why did it add a second/different instance with the same name, rather than changing the original?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:19, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * This bug affects all edits in VE, whether you touch the table or references or not, so the inability to name references in VE is not relevant here. As for adding references with the same name, do you mean something like ?
 * Anyway Ssastry has commented on the bug, saying that it's some sort of interaction problem with something the episode list template does. I don't understand it, but those who understand template coding are encouraged to read (comment #1) and see if they can fix the problem. Thryduulf (talk) 16:02, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I also pasted the explanation above. Ssastry (talk) 17:50, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes thanks. Our posts were almost simultaneous, but I didn't get an edit conflict so I hadn't spotted it until I saw my notification flag. Thryduulf (talk) 18:14, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Mysterious attempt to use anchor element
I've just found ; see the first two changes where the  element has been used. this element is not permitted in wikitext - was it added by the user, or by VE? -- Red rose64 (talk) 16:14, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi there :) You'll find this reported above - it happens when editing with iPads, AFAIK. Thanks for any help in undoing these diffs :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:17, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, this seems to be a bug in Safari on the iPad where it "helpfully" converts numbers in certain editing areas that it thinks are phone numbers into external links that phone applications understand. The VisualEditor editing surface is one such text area but it is not limited to VE (and there are similar problems with some other browser plugins). The devs though are trying to work out a way to detect these injections and stop them getting into the saved revision. Thryduulf (talk) 16:45, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Can't access the album review section
In album articles (like Def Leppard's X) I can't edit the reviews section because the track listing is next to it. Please fix this. Mab987 (talk) 05:50, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I forget which Bugzilla number this is, but the problem with editing X (Def Leppard album) is that the article is formatted with multiple columns, another basic fundamental feature of Wikipedia editing that was neglected in the rush to release VE.&mdash;Kww(talk) 06:24, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * See . I am actually able to edit the reviews, but this will need to get fixed anyway. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:04, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Visual Editor
STRONG SUPPORT. This new tool makes me excited to start new pages again! Mashford (talk) 18:30, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the support, the VE team will be grateful for the kind words too. If you don't already know about it, there is an ongoing RFC about VisualEditor at VisualEditor/Default State RFC where you may wish to share your views. Thryduulf (talk) 18:54, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Confirming some positive feedback from time to time is definitely welcome, thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:37, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Unable to make additional changes after previewing
I can not figure out how to return to editing the article when using the "Edit" (rather than "Edit Source") option. In order to preview changes, it appears that I need to click on Save page. From there I can preview the changes, cancel, or accept--but I cannot figure out how to return to the edit form and change my changes rather than discarding all of them (or accepting all of them). Am I missing something, or does the "Edit" functionality not include that feature yet? Grim0098 (talk) 02:30, 28 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Press the Esc key or click the up-arrow in the upper right corner of the Save/Review box. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:04, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I've added comments about this to related . Thryduulf (talk) 09:57, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Problems at 2013 US Open (tennis)
I'm not sure why this is happening, but whenever someone uses the visual editor in the 2013 US Open (tennis), the tables in the "Point and prize money distribution" section get all screwed up. Tad Lincoln (talk) 04:04, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * You might want to check Template:Disable_VE_top out which might be a useful workaround if applied to those sections - we can then remove it once the bug is fixed, as in the case of some airport tables. Looking into the bug now. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 07:06, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Here you can see that a random edit when the tables are "shielded" with those template does not cause any harm. Anyway, it's weird because here you can see that a similar edit did not cause any trouble either when the page was basically featuring almost only the very same tables. It does take a while to load and edit the article with VE, though. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:32, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I have reported this as . I can see no logical reason why the first edit to the table worked and then the next edit caused a monumental cockup. Thryduulf (talk) 11:23, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

In For the fourth parameter can't be added without the third
And this edit is mute. I would expect a warning or something. -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:25, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hmm, this will need an extension to TemplateData so that parameters can be defined as requiring another parameter. is a request to be able to define exactly this sort of dependency relationship, although there appears to have been no full understanding of the need for it by the dev who commented and there has been no activity since July. Unfortunately I don't expect that VE will be able to do anything about this until it can be expressed in TemplateData as that is the only way that VE knows anything about parameters. I've filed the VE request as  though so it can be worked out when TemplateData is extended. Thryduulf (talk) 11:47, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * e.c. I am not sure this is a bug. The template is probably meant to work like this, i.e., if you don't provide the third, you shouldn't add the fourth ;) I think you can already make this clear in the description/label fields of the related TemplateData: this would prevent people to do the same and hence avoid the problem. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:53, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I believe you are mistaken; the documentation gives many examples of correct usage that skips parameters; search for || on that page and you will see them. 28bytes (talk) 11:57, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Of course: and you can "skip" parameters with VE as well, but I guess only in positions where you are allowed to do so, not where the template expects to find a sequence. And you can definitely warn against this with TemplateData already. (I haven't experimented with other templates though). --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:27, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Deleting a row from table has disastrous results
Check this one. The > was removed from all tr tags. -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:41, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

There is a list of all pages using HTML table elements at CHECKWIKI/031 dump. I asked for help converting them. -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:45, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * The problem seems to stem from the fact that that table is poorly formed, it has  tags, but no corresponding   tags. It still shouldn't mangle the table, but at least it should be a rare thing to encounter. My sandbox testing shows that there appears to be no issues with HTML tables more generally.
 * I'll fix the table in the article with my next edit. Thryduulf (talk) 10:46, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Feature request
Nice work. At some point you may want to add LaTeX editing (probably best to do raw, not WYSIWYG LaTeX!). Also, when I clicked the Edit button it added a new line between the title and the first paragraph that I couldn't remove. 86.184.25.131 (talk) 11:16, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I may be missing something, but what would be the benefit to adding code editing to the VisualEditor? Thryduulf (talk) 11:56, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I think this is refereing to the tag which is in the pipeline see  and demo at mw:VisualEditor:TestMath.--Salix (talk): 12:03, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * (I'd also add ). --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:29, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * If you have suggestions for it, then mw:User:Jiabao wu/GSoC 2013 Project Work/Math Node User Interface is a good place to find the person working on it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:12, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

VE not respecting link color preferences
When reading an article or editing it using the standard editor, redirects appear as green links instead of blue since I configured it that way. VE does not seem to use these values, and shows all internal links (including red links) as blue. 28bytes (talk) 11:37, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, this is an often requested feature tracked as . It doesn't presently have a target for when they expect to fix it though, sorry. Thryduulf (talk) 12:00, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks. 28bytes (talk) 12:37, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Request for easier editing of infoboxes
Editing infoboxes using VE (as I did [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Into_the_Gap&diff=prev&oldid=570518360 here]) is somewhat difficult and unintuitive. I just wanted to change an uppercase "T" to a lowercase "t", but instead of just clicking and editing the desired infobox text, you must click on the infobox, then click the "transclusion" puzzle piece, then find the parameter that contains the text you wish to edit, and then edit the wikitext (not WYSIWYG text) as desired. While there are a wide variety of infobox types, some sort of WYSIWIG editor for them would be extremely helpful. 28bytes (talk) 11:48, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Something like this? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:32, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes. That would be great. 28bytes (talk) 12:36, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Issues when creating an article
I tried to create my first VE article today (I've created 100 or so the "old fashioned" way.) Here are some observations.

-- 28bytes (talk) 13:00, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * 1) How does one create a redirect in VE? There does not seem to be an obvious way to do that.
 * 2) When adding references, a plain box is presented. It's not obvious that to use one of the common  templates, you have to click the "add transclusion" button, and then manually type in the citation template you want. There should be some sort of menu to let you pick from the most frequently used citation templates.
 * 3) When adding "The New York Times" as the "newspaper" parameter, I wanted to link to The New York Times but it was not obvious how to do so. Ctrl-K does not work in that box.
 * 4) When adding the first reference to an article, VE should add a   section with  . Or at the very least, just  . As it is, the reference is just "hidden" when you enter it, and it's unreasonable to assume a new user will know they have to click the "transclusion" button and manually type in "Reflist" to get the references they entered to appear. There is no warning that the  is missing until you actually save the article, when you get [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maternity_home&oldid=570524096 a scary red message] at the bottom.
 * Adding: this seems to be a common problem among the other VE article creations today: [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lucia_Tran&oldid=570368202] [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sudipto_Das&oldid=570485610] [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=G3_Telecom&oldid=570449368]
 * 1) Clicking on a link during preview mode doesn't work right: I used the hyperlink button to create a link to Salvation Army, but when I right-clicked on it and chose "Open Link in New Tab" (I'm using Firefox 23), I got this page.
 * 2) How does one add categories? There does not seem to be an obvious way to do that.
 * 3) Why does the "style" box contain a "Page Title" option? It is my understanding that level 1 headers are not supposed to be used in articles.
 * 4) There seems to be an odd caching issue: whenever I try to link to the newly created article from another article, it does not auto-fill and says "new article" with a red link when I type it manually.
 * This looks the typical case where I prepare a very long answer, only to find out User:Thryduulf already got it - and better than me. So, pinging him to find out whether this is what would happen. In the meantime, thanks for your report. Almost everything looks already known to me, luckily :) and some answers can already be found in the user guide or in the known problems page. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:08, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Redirects are not possible (yet). It's.
 * That dialog needs, and is getting, a lot of work. I'm not sure when we'll actually see the improvements, though.
 * Actually, see #2: I want to be able to give it a link to a story at nytimes.com, and have it create the ref automagically.
 * Clicking on the VisualEditor_-_Icon_-_References.svg references icon will add the, then select it, and press to enter the link inspector.  If you press  first, and then type  , the autocomplete "feature" gives you leading caps.
 * I agree that we need improvements to this process. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:32, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I couldn't find anything about the wrong URL on right-clicking, so I added . I didn't have any success in reproducing it in the mainspace, but I got two different wrong URLs from my sandbox.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:43, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * OK, thanks. I am able to reproduce consistently; I just start a new article, and any links I create and right-click on generate the 404 error. 28bytes (talk) 18:53, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * What about a dialog after inserting the first reference ? "There is no VisualEditor_-_Icon_-_References.svg references list in this page yet. Do you want to add one now ?" —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 18:55, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Sorry I wasn't around earlier, I was showing my face at the WMUK office! I've marked bug 53491 (wrong link target) as a duplicate of although as that bug's title "VisualEditor: Respect Parsoid's " describes the solution not the effect so I'm not surprised you didn't find it (I only found it when a bug I reported was marked as a duplicate of it).
 * There are several issues with links, and the workaround for all of them is to write the text of the link first, select it and then link it. I've reported this specific issue as recommending that the first character of the string input should be preserved, i.e. if you enter "Green" you get Green, if you enter "green" you get green.  should make all this easier, as that asks for a way to explicitly set the display text from with the dialog.
 * relates to the paragraph styles drop-down, asking for individual options to be enabled/disabled on a per wiki per namespace basis. This is a low priority request though as its a nice to have rather than something essential.
 * Automatically adding a references section is discussed at and VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive 2013 4. To summarise, it is possible but there are internationalisation issues round the section title (easy to solve) and section placement as different wikis have different preferences relating to the order of references, external links, further reading, navboxes, etc. (this is not so easy). Thryduulf (talk) 20:24, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor stopped working completely like a month ago
My VisualEditor stopped working completely like a month ago. When I try to edit, the article's text goes gray, and the "loading bar" appears and shows does the loading animation. But that's it. It never loads. I am using Fireox 22.0 (technically Iceweasel). I have deleted my browser cache completely. I even tried resetting my Wikipedia preferences but it still happens. Any ideas? Cookies and Javascript are enabled too. Jason Quinn (talk) 01:42, 29 August 2013 (UTC)


 * PS This only happens if I am logged in. It appears to be something wrong with my account. Jason Quinn (talk) 01:46, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Did your resetted preferences include gadgets? Can you list them? Also, can you try to remove User:Jason_Quinn/jqcite.js from your .js pages to make sure it is not conflicting? Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:05, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Another Nowiki-adding VE edit
...that breaks a link, and only adds a closing nowiki tag:. - The Bushranger One ping only 06:05, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi there, that's not a closing nowiki tag: see NOWIKI. On why this happens, see my answer #3 in the next thread, which partially applies. Bye! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:12, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Easier to use
I just discovered something that is much easier and faster to do in VisualEditor than in the classic editor: fixing list formatting. Someone had made a list of books without any list formatting. Each "list entry" was a paragraph, separated by blank lines. Fixing it required only highlighting the list and clicking the list button. All the blank lines were automagically removed. I'm very happy about this. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:20, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * That's useful to know, thanks! Thryduulf (talk) 16:12, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

linking to other wiki pages
Hi, When trying to link to other wiki pages, most of the time the correct page shows up but when it doesn't there is no way to create a new link. For instance, I'm trying to link "Me and My Chauffeur Blues" from the Memphis Minnie list of songs page to the "My Chauffeur Blues" wikipedia page. BIcurious3334 (talk) 15:23, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * The article you are trying to link to is at Chauffeur Blues, although I'll create a redirect from the title you were using in a moment. You can always enter a link to a page that isn't in the list though, just type out the name in full and press enter or click the red linked top entry in the list. Thryduulf (talk) 16:20, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Images shown at wrong size when editing: En-wiki default and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering say 220px for thumbnails, VE shows them much smaller.
Using Firefox 23.0.1 in Windows XP, if I view W. S. Gilbert, whether logged in or not, most images are 220px wide. This is because they use the thumb parameter, and 220px is the default on English Wikipedia, and what I have not changed my preferences.

If I open it in VisualEditor, the images become a lot smaller, however. Can anyone duplicate this? Adam Cuerden (talk) 17:34, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I found 47804 and James added 50379 as well. Next time you're around on IRC make sure to ping someone for live replies :) Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 18:22, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

URL names with Wikipedia links
although probably not what is desired, is automatically changed by VE to
 * Sequence A019283 in OEIS ,
 * Sequence A019283 inOEIS.

Actually, this may be a feature. But it probably should be noticed somewhere. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 22:20, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * For reference the edit in question is . I'm not sure whether what you describe is desired or not and if it isn't what would be better? Thryduulf (talk) 22:36, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Not related to this problem as such, but I've reported the &lt;nowiki&gt; added in that diff as . It seems to be triggered by single apostrophes following links in a bold or italic section. Thryduulf (talk) 23:32, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Can a VE user see comments in the wikisource?
A point was raised yesterday about an editor who was continually making changes to articles contrary to comments in the wikisource (two examples of such comments being "" and "" ). A suggestion was made that as the editor concerned was using the Visual Editor he would not have seen these comments in the source. Is this true? (I don't use VE, and I'm an IE user so couldn't use it if I wanted to, so can't check). - David Biddulph (talk) 18:27, 28 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Yes, that is true. The FAQ, on this page, uses this problem as an example (search for "hidden comments", on this page, above). You might think that being in the FAQ, as an example of a common problem, would make fixing this a high priority for the developers. If so, you'd be wrong.


 * As an aside, "fixing this" is as simple as making text within hidden comments visible but non-editable (and in a different font - for example, white on a black background). That's not perfect (it would be good to be able to edit such comments), but that would be good enough for the moment - and, quite frankly, it seems not-all-that-difficult, programming-wise. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:32, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * My programming is limited to a very small amount of python as well as some HTML and wikimarkup, so I could be wrong but.. Is it really that hard to program in "look for ? Potentially, it could be displayed as an inline box or something. That cannot be that hard to code from my limited knowledge. ~ Charmlet  -talk- 22:34, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * My programming knowledge is less than yours, but my guess is that the difficult bit is making sure that by showing this it doesn't break something else. You also have to decide how to show something that wont be seen when you save the page, given that the point of VE is to be basically WYSIWYG (although it can't be completely). Neither of these things should have held it up as long as it has been though, so there may be something that you and I aren't seeing. I've done what I can to bring it to the dev's attention on bugzilla today, but may have more information about its prioritisation past and present. For now though we all just need to be patient. Thryduulf (talk) 23:47, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * The suggestion was correct, VE users cannot see hidden comments. High priority is about addressing this issue, and I've copied your comments there to try give it another push. Thryduulf (talk) 20:35, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I've commented further at bugzilla about programming and user interface issues. Responses/rebuttals are welcome, of course.


 * I originally was inclined to suggest displaying the hidden text in full, but with a different font/background color. I'm now more inclined to have the person doing the edit see a yellow warning icon (see examples here), and by hovering, to then see the full hidden text. That, to me, seems both less disruptive (the hidden comment is reduced to an icon, so it hardly disturbs the flow of the text, and maintains, roughly, the WYSIWYG concept of VE) and simultaneously harder to ignore - it waves, figuratively, a big flag in front of the person doing the edit, saying "LOOK HERE". -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:26, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * As PamD notes at Bugzilla, the point of these notices is that they need to be front and centre so there is no question that you have seen it. I also understand that hovering is not easy/not possible on touch screen devices. So I don't think that hiding them behind an icon is the best way to do things, unless they are expanded by default and you can click on an icon to get a more WYSIWYG view. Thryduulf (talk) 10:34, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I like this idea: show the comment with a foreground/background different to the editable text, and allow it to be collapsed to confirm a WYSIWYG view.
 * I'd also like bugs that have not been resolved NOT get archived here :-) Mark Hurd (talk) 13:48, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi there, AFAIK the page is archived by a bot. We couldn't really edit here anymore if bugs which are not solved on Bugzilla are not archived. We use sometimes the "answered" template, but any section featuring this template can still be edited, of course. If you'd like to get updates on specific bugs, please add yourself to the CC list for that bug on Bugzilla, so that you get email notifications when the bug is changed: also, if you think that some discussion which is now archived deserves some more attention, just ping people to notify them about updates or new comments, like this: Mark Hurd :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:12, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Yeah that was rhetorical, hence the smiley :-) I have added myself to the CC for this bug, which I commented on a week or two ago, and I actually reported the list continuation bug . Thanks for showing me how easy pinging is now though. Mark Hurd (talk) 14:40, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Entering Visual Editor renumbers references
Entering Visual Editor mode renumbered the references on page Python_(programming_language), so they don't match the references listed at the end of the article. Davipo (talk) 08:36, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * You are right that the numbers won't match, but the references still work in that they can be correctly edited - you wouldn't be able to preview them by hovering on the number anyway. Adding to though, thanks :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:53, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * From the bug comments, this was allegedly fixed two releases ago, but I'm seeing the same problem that Davipo reports. VisualEditor finds ten refs in the inforbox, but still starts over with ref #1 in the body of the article.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:26, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * This isn't the same as, when that was happening the references for the infobox would not have appeared in the reference list at all, this is just problem with numbering. Thryduulf (talk) 18:45, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * It might be related to, an orphan bug that no one is paying any attention to that I can detect.&mdash;Kww(talk) 21:50, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Possibly. I've crosslinked them and given a more descriptive title (making it easier to find). If I get time tomorrow I'll go through some more of the unconfirmed VE bugs and see if they're still occurring, but it would be really useful if James or someone else on the VE team could reduce the backlog of unassigned bugs and prioritise them. Thryduulf (talk) 22:27, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Feel free to look at while you are at it. It truly annoys me to see the VE team brag about responsiveness when they can't even take the time to confirm and prioritise the bugs coming in, especially when I take the time to distill a test case for them to look at.&mdash;Kww(talk) 22:42, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm not awake enough to understand that bug report atm so I'll look at it tomorrow. Thryduulf (talk) 23:29, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Perhaps you can persuade James that deciding that deciding that the feature never should have been supported in the first place falls outside of his scope.&mdash;Kww(talk) 23:53, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hey Kww, you might want to decide whether you want to ping Oliver or James F., it's not clear. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:19, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

No means of inserting "Citation needed".
As the subject says -- no means exists of adding this important feature. Additionally, no means exists of flagging this article as containing questionable content. 173.11.86.22 (talk) 18:57, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi, have you seen VisualEditor/User_guide? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 19:11, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Citation needed can be added. You just need to use the transclusion (AKA template) editor - click on the puzzle piece icon on the toolbar, type "citation needed" into the input box, click add the template, optionally add the reason and/or the date and click apply changes. Thryduulf (talk) 19:15, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I've done it. It's, admittedly, a little harder in VE (this'll likely change) but you just click the icon that looks like a puzzle piece, type "cn" when asked which template, and it'll appear when you hit confirm. I believe the VE team intends to have a some one click solutions in the near future, including adding templates of your choice to a bar? Although I'd hope there'd also be a few automatic lists you could choose to pull up - cleanup templates, etc. Adam Cuerden (talk) 19:18, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Those are good ideas Adam, but not ones I've heard before. Did you get that Wikimania or is there a reference to it somewhere? Thryduulf (talk) 19:33, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I'd thank Adam for the brainstorming: I read this before though - I think this was asked at it.wp before as well. Right now I can't find the related bug, will take a better look tomorrow :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:02, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't seem to be able to find it anymore. I'd file it tomorrow. Thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 21:35, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * At 53590 now, please feel free to improve what I wrote. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:34, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * We discussed a customisable template toolbar at Wikimania, but having a few default sets selectable seemed like the logical extention of that. Adam Cuerden (talk) 15:26, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * VE quick access templates mockup.png I've left some comments on that bug, including suggestions for quick access buttons to commonly used templates. A crude mockup of how they might look is attached here. Thryduulf (talk) 22:16, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

No way to do a subst template
Some templates like prod must be substituted. I can't see anyway to add .--Salix (talk): 07:28, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * You can enter subst:prod as "unknown" template name and add it in VE, after saving it will be substituted (disclaimer: i tested this only with subst:prod and subst:nld in my sandbox). It's not really comfortable, but parameters can be added manually as unknown parameters (f.i. the reason for prod). GermanJoe (talk) 08:08, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * This feature and other necessary improvements to the transclusion dialog have been already noted in . GermanJoe (talk) 08:33, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * It seems is the closest. It is rather confusing behaviour, no real clue it has worked until you save.--Salix (talk): 15:06, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Testing, please ignore, sort of
How are some people thinking this is a valid place for article feedback? I located this link from the BETA link once I'd started the VE. Is there any other place it is available from? Mark Hurd (talk) 14:21, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, it's available from any VE-related page, via the navbox. I should check the "what links here" though since I was asking myself the same question. I was thinking about some kind of sitenotice I might have hidden, welcoming templates, or new user guides. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:30, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I've checked what links here and didn't see anything obviously "interesting". I'll spend a few minutes now trying things in an incognito window to see if I can find something while logged out... Mark Hurd (talk) 15:02, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * People using this page for article feedback is also see  [//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive_2013_07#The_easiest_way_for_a_new_editor_to_ask_anything_about_wikipedia_is_this_page] which describes why the user interface design actually encourages this behaviour.  --Salix (talk): 17:38, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * This isn't an unusual level of wrong-forum posting. The Help Desk gets more misplaced comments.  Eventually, I assume that the beta label and the link to this this page will be removed from VisualEditor, which ought to end this minor problem. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:58, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Unable to save edits or review changes while editing
This is likely a transient problem, but wanted to at least squeal "ouch" as I've been unable to review changes or save changes via Visual Editor over the past 30 min or so. --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 15:26, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't think anyone has reported this before today, I can still count 27 VisualEdits among the last 500 on this wiki. I also managed to test in my sandbox, and it threw in some nowikis as well, so I'd say everything's nominal :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:35, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I restarted my computer and browser and still had this problem. Thus, it is either some problem with my editing environment locally or some problem with the article I've been trying to edit, that being Renault.  I'll try some different things later. --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 17:30, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi Ceyockey, I can get to "Review changes" in that article (I made a minor text change to the lead) but didn't try to save it. It was rather slow; I think it was ten seconds to open the page in VisualEditor, but a bit more than a full minute to get "Review changes" displayed.  Were you doing something more complicated?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:09, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * One useful first step is to try making the edit while logged out, if that works and your account doesn't then it's likely some gadgets or custom js/css that is at fault. If it doesn't work with either, then its unlikely to be any of those things. Thryduulf (talk) 21:31, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Thank you!

 * I was working on an article for a few hours last night and I realized that I've now become faster in VE than I was using wiki syntax -- yay! Here's a quick summary of some of my VE writing observations so far FWIW:
 * +Cite book is much faster now that I don't need to manually select the parameters every time I use it (thanks Erik).
 * -But, I still very much look forward to the VE team reproducing the functionality I used to have with wiki syntax, in which I could paste in a book's ISBN and have the rest of the fields autopopulate. That was *amazing* -- it saved me about 90 seconds of tedium per citation.
 * =I would also recommend that as you revamp the cite tools, please let the user see all the fields and their contents at the same time. Currently I find myself skipping back and forth among fields multiple times, checking to be sure I filled everything in -- which is wasted time. Also, I suspect that the way it's set up currently (separate fields, populated separately) makes it feel to the user like it's more work than it actually is. I think that's because we're used to tasks being broken down into bite-sized chunks, and these chunks are very very tiny bites. (I am writing quickly here -- if that doesn't make sense and someone wants me to try to articulate it better just let me know.)
 * +The ability to reuse an existing citation is saving me tons of time in article writing: yay and thank you :-)
 * +But the one major advantage VE has over wiki syntax IME so far, which I expected but have still found remarkably pleasurable/useful, is this: back when I was writing articles in wiki syntax, the actual *act of writing* was impeded by the syntax. What I mean by that is that the mark-up obscured the actual text you were working on, which made it hard to scan for typos, to control pacing and flow, to essentially do any vetting or refining tasks, at all. And, the need to continually distinguish between mark-up and non-mark-up imposed a tiny cognitive processing burden, which was a distraction from the actual work of writing. So, I used to compose and refine in a text editor, and just paste into the editor to add mark-up as a final step. That was slow and kind of painful, and although it worked okay with new articles, it was pretty messy and problematic for existing articles. Now with VE, I can finally compose and refine in the editor and actually *see* the text, not obscured by wiki syntax. This is easier and faster, but I think the real gain is that it enables me, and presumably other writers, to actually *write* better. Yay! and thank you :-)
 * No need for anybody to respond to any of this: just use it to the extent it's useful :-) Sue Gardner (talk) 15:48, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi Sue, thanks for your feedback. I actually think that some of your notes might be usefully added to existing bugs/features requests or VE-related pages, since there are a few remarks that look pretty new to me. I promise you, in a while you'll need VE for almost everything, I am finding out that I often don't seem to be able to add (wiki)links the old way anymore... --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:54, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I completely agree with your third point – and with all templates, not just citation ones. It's like filling out a tax return, but every line is on its own page. -- Ypnypn (talk) 16:37, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Being a pedantic sort I checked your edit and following bot edit  which fixed some minor problems introduced. The main one being the use of origyear rather than year in cite book. This was due to an error in the template data, with origyear being marked as "required", really it should be either year or data marked as required but to be even more pedantic neither are actually required just recommended (see ).--Salix (talk): 17:05, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Change Summary
I had the Problem that while I was writing my Change Summary after editing the page I wasn't able to delete what I had previously written i.e. couldn't use delete or backspace. Tathbelin (talk) 20:27, 30 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Hi Tathbelin, and welcome to Wikipedia.
 * Did you have this problem in Henning Wehn or on a different page?
 * It sounds to me that you took these steps:
 * Open the article and make a change.
 * Click the 'Save' button.
 * Add information to the edit summary box.
 * Cancel the save (go back to do more editing).
 * Click the 'Save' button again.
 * Tried to change the edit summary, but couldn't.
 * Did I understand that correctly, or did you do something else? Also, what kind of web browser and computer are you using?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:18, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * This is which I've just had to reopen. I hadn't experienced it for a while, James closed it early this morning (UTC) but then I encountered it again a short while before your report here. Thryduulf (talk) 21:26, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * which browser and operating system were you using when you had this problem? Thryduulf (talk) 23:49, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

link color while editing in VE
This one isn't that major, but I've noticed that when editing in VE, the color of wikilinks and external links are the same. While the shades of blue are noticeably different when viewing an article, this pretty much disappears when editing an article. Like I said, it's not a big deal, but it is handy to be able to detect the difference between the links when editing an article.-- &iquest;3fam  ily6  contribs 23:37, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, this is a known issue. is tracking it along with redlinks not being red, etc. It doesn't have a target set, so I can't give you an estimate of when it will be fixed, sorry. Thryduulf (talk) 23:45, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Good for vandalism
Since it's easy to edit, a lot of people who vandalizes can do it more often. Allenjambalaya (talk) 13:30, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi there, I'm copy/pasting from the FAQ here: We think that those who come with the intent to vandalize are probably doing it now because hitting the “Edit source” tab and blanking a page using the wikitext editor is just as fast (if not faster) than doing the same thing with VisualEditor.. Since it takes a while to load and does not allow very fast typing, and this is especially true for large articles, this is not an issue, I think. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:04, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I know that the VE team were monitoring the vandalism level from when VE was made opt-out in late June/early July, to see whether these predictions were correct. I haven't seen any official results yet, but anecdotally I'm not seeing any noticeable increase in vandalism among articles on my watchlist. Longer term, I don't suspect that there will be any significant difference in the amount of vandalism, but the vandalism will be split between the two editors. Given that is easier to do some things in VE than in the source editor and vice versa, it wouldn't surprise me if the nature of the vandalism differs between the editors. This is speculation though. One thing that is certain is that it makes no difference to the revert tool or anti-vandalism bots, etc, which editor was used so vandalism reversion is exactly as easy as it was beforehand. Thryduulf (talk) 21:15, 30 August 2013 (UTC)


 * I think 1) en wikipedians largely put trial and error efforts and deliberate vandalism in same basket.It is like counting apples and oranges together.2) en wikipedians use more of stick than communicate to understand and recommunicate to explain.Obeviously the people who fail to understand others views prefer to use stick rather than recommunicating to explain.Over use of stick than explaining the point is the real reason higher percentage of deliberate counter attacks in form of vandalism on en-wiki.And this form of deliberate vandalism will persist irrespective of the system of edit you use until proper communication takes place.(Please note I do not intend to support vandlisers in any way for any reason).
 * With VE real difference will come in patterns of trial and error efforts.In part wikis need to make edit filters more smarter and effective in part it will need long term studies to understand change in pattern of trial and error and address those issues.


 * Mahitgar (talk) 12:59, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Non-consecutive numeric listing
Is there a way to list things in numerical order but non-consecutively. For instance, the credits of a music producer who only produced certain tracks on an album. Example: Tyshane. Also, it would be nice to be able to tell the editor to write "01" as opposed to "1". In the case of Tyshane, the track which I wanted to add was the first on the recording, but I still couldn't use VE's numbered list because that only lists "1", not "01". I ended up using User:John Vandenberg's switch editor to pull off this edit successfully.-- &iquest;3fam  ily6  contribs 02:59, 31 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't understand your first sentence, sorry. But your second issue isn't possible with the source editor editor either, as VE produces the same wikitext for this - a line beginning with #. It would be certainly be useful to have this, but it isn't (initially) a VE issue I don't think. There is and  which are sort of relevant. I've reported  for this specific issue, but the numbers of the earlier bugs should give you a clue not to hold your breath for this functionality (they were both reported in 2005), sorry. Thryduulf (talk) 10:01, 31 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Forget the first part. I didn't realize you can indent the text and type whatever, which is how this type of numbering is done in the source editor.-- &iquest;3fam  ily6  contribs 12:45, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

nowiki tags
From up above in "Why are we still using this?", the following are responses given to NicoV's questions. --Whatamidoing (WMF)
 * The nowiki tags at the start of the line (Il prit la voie directe allant de Langres à Lausanne...) are a known bug that was fixed in the most recent release (reached frwiki late on Tuesday).
 * The Alésia mess (...une citadelle religieuse celtique,  Alésia. is.

I'm fixing 15-20 articles a day with broken nowiki tags. Bgwhite (talk) 06:23, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * 1) Concerning the supposedly fixed bug.  It is still happening.  (Local humane societies,...)      diff
 * 2) I was going to give examples of what turns out to be .  As the bug is a year old, looks like this won't be fixed and therefore no use in giving the examples.
 * 3) Why are these happening?  (in the American Le Mans Serie s and Park Place Motorsport..) diff  (is an American football wide receive r who is currently a free agent.) diff (*Goa ts) diff


 * 1) That should be 51462. I'll reopen it since I can find it on it.wp as well, but it is, IMHO, one of those cases in which the nowikis actually make much sense, since they are invisible and they prevent text to become preformatted.
 * 2) Thanks for your opinion. I don't think we should actually stop commenting just because something is either too hard to fix or something else has the priority. Providing more comments and examples - instead than just reporting something won't work - is the only way we have to underline how much an apparently trivial thing means to our editing experience.
 * 3) I am afraid that might depend on what users select to be linked, or sometimes on them still using the old markup way to create links - ignoring the warning popup. Also see . There are many requests related to wikilinking, if you believe that some intended behaviours should be, well, different, please read the developers comments to the bugs and feel free to weigh in. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:10, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * How about we just use an edit filter to block edits with , these are always an error unlike legitimate uses of matched pairs. --Salix (talk): 11:54, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately, there are legitimate situations where you can use  : apostrophe before/after bold or italic formatting for example. Of course, other ways exist like '. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 12:35, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I think we should disable using  with the edit filter, as it is mostly caused by VE.  We have  for cases where we need to break the parser to prevent it misunderstanding apostrophes.  There is also  .  However, if we did prevent this with the edit filter, the user probably has no way to know what they need to fix in order to resubmit their edit.  They can't find the nowiki tag, as it is invisible.(is there a bug tracking the invisibility of the nowiki tag?  We can add more edit filters once 47779 has been fixed. John Vandenberg (chat) 14:44, 1 September 2013 (UTC)
 * is there a bug tracking the invisibility of the nowiki tag? I wasn't able to find one, so I've added, but I'm not sure I've explained it brilliantly. Thryduulf (talk) 15:36, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Copy and paste in style editor produces weird behavior
user:WildElf, that is still a bug. VE should detect that you've disabled that functionality, and warn the user and/or gracefully degrade. 52008 and 52089 are two example issues; there are probably others. John Vandenberg (chat) 15:11, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Still looks like VE Feedback to me
User:Markhurd editing while logged out. I can't see where people might think this is article feedback.

But I have seen two issues to note:

1. This "Submit Feedback" form's blurb should end with "your username or IP address, if not logged in."

2. It's grabbing bolded text immediately after an image (i.e. no whitespace in between ]] and ''' ) and duplicating it; not allowing you to edit it and the Show Changes shows it will duplicate it. 121.45.55.242 (talk) 15:23, 30 August 2013 (UTC)(That was me logged out Mark Hurd (talk))
 * Searching for "duplicate" doesn't obviously find existing reports of this.
 * See this edit . I confirmed it is not specific to being not logged in by attempting a VE before fixing the problem using edit source (and avoiding it by inserting a new line).
 * Interestingly this page was immediately previously edited by an anonymous VE 7 hours before and it didn't have a problem. So either you've recently pushed out a new build or it is browser specific (mine's Chrome) or something.
 * I'll report it on bugzilla if I can't find a duplicate there.
 * Mark Hurd (talk) 15:51, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I haven't reported it because it's no longer repeatable! I tried, and and even went back to the original page and  as it was before I attempted to edit it earlier and it worked fine :-(.
 * Mark Hurd (talk) 16:55, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * It is reproducible just edit the old revision and bingo duplicated text. Its a very odd error, I copied and modified the text in my sandbox and it manages to duplicate text which is not actually in the revision being edited. --Salix (talk): 18:02, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

So  results in the bold-face text being removed. This also happens with  immediately after a template. Have you tested those options as well? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:01, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I tried those when I attempted to reproduce it, but they all worked fine. This issue is really finely based upon the rest of the article's content. If you try each of the revisions since, you'll see that one is fine, the next one where the only change is a pair of extra double quotes have been added in a paragraph in the next section has the problem, and it continues until I explicitly put in the sensible line break, and yet it doesn't return when I take it out again (with my SBS correction still in place)! (well that was what happened Friday...)
 * And now things have changed since Friday: Now the problem is occurring in the (and thus  as well) but still NOT in the version where ... This is all originally checked when I'm not logged in, but I get the same results when I am.
 * I'm meant to be working on other things so I haven't put this into a bug report. Mark Hurd (talk) 06:43, 1 September 2013 (UTC)
 * A bug report now .--Salix (talk): 08:16, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

List formatting
So someone added a book to a ==Further reading== section. Book #1 used a citation template. Book #2 did not. Neither had bullet list formatting.

Selecting them was hard. I ended up selecting the header, the template, and the plain-text citation. Then I clicked the 'list' button. Then I went back and repaired the formatting for the section heading. This isn't necessary, but it was easier than trying to figure out the exact stop to place the cursor. Here is the (correct) result.

But the display was odd. While I was in VE, the bullet for the first citation was at the start of the second line of the citation, not the first. It still displays this way now, if you just edit the page in VE. Has anyone else seen this? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:36, 31 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, the display issue is . That's been sat unprioritised for over a month though so who knows when it will be fixed.
 * As for the first issue, is it just that it's difficult to move a template into a bulleted list? Thryduulf (talk) 10:05, 31 August 2013 (UTC)
 * The first problem is that it's hard to select just the line that contains the template. You have to find the magic spot in the middle of "==Heading==  " to select the template without picking up the entire section heading.  I managed it later in testing, but only if I'm selecting text with arrow keys.  With the trackpad, it's still beyond me.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:37, 1 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Ah I understand now. I've genericised and added your comments to, which was about very similar behaviour in a slightly different circumstance. Again that has been prioritised since July though. Thryduulf (talk) 12:16, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Edit source instead of view?
Something is displayed wrong in Template:Infobox rocket and many others and the [view] option in documentation is shown as [edit source]. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:45, 31 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I wonder how long it's been that way. Could this change back in June have affected it?  WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:58, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

I've a feeling its some javascript or css altering the links after the page is rendered. There has been some javascript trickery which changes the labels on things. Examining the source: {{ #if: {{{doc exist|yes}}} | &#91;{{FULLPAGENAME}}/doc}}}|view&#93; {{FULLPAGENAME}}/doc}}}|action=edit}} edit {{FULLPAGENAME}}/doc}}}|action=history}} history [{{purge|purge}}] the first link should show as "view" but because it matches the css rule  it is changed somewhere along the line to be "edit source". This has been done so normal section edit links display "edit source" to distinguish them from the VisualEditor its just that rule has also caught these links which should not be changed. I'm not quite sure yes where the css/js is modified though.--Salix (talk): 07:38, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Incorrect section name in edit summary
This edit by another user has the edit summary "(→Notation) (Tag: VisualEditor)" but the edit is actually to the "History" section. JonH (talk) 19:22, 1 September 2013 (UTC)


 * VE inserts the section name into the edit summary if the edit session begins via a section link, but that doesn't constrain the person doing the edit to just editing that section. VE displays, and allows editing of, the entire page. [An interesting thought: should it? It could display the entire page but restrict editing to the section that was opened.]


 * VE also doesn't track which sections have been edited - that is, it won't change the edit summary information that it posted (regarding the section) if an editor goes outside that section. In theory, this is a bug - but it seems to me that it's quite difficult for VE to track what sections are edited (or even that multiple sections have been edited). And then there would be issues like the edit summary info being changed by the user, then the user does some more editing ...


 * Finally, I note that with the wikitext editor, a person can change the section information in the edit summary, including deletion. And a person can add what appears to be section information - so, for example, to edit a whole page but mark the edit summary as if the editing session involved only a single section.


 * Bottom line: if the user has a pattern of there being misleading section information in the edit summary, it's worth pointing this out to him/her. Or if there is some other reason to suspect malice (as opposed to having opened VE to edit, and wandered off to a different section, or even just to have clicked on the most convenient section link), then one should assume good faith and politely suggest that in the future, he/she should be more aware of what the edit summary should be. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:13, 1 September 2013 (UTC)
 * There are three relevant bugs here. The current behaviour was requested at, the request to base the edit summary on what section was actually edited is and the request to handle single-section editing (as in the source editor) is  although I can't at a quick glance spot that making only section editable has been suggested. Thryduulf (talk) 23:26, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

VE + ULS unicode Devnagari Script input issues
Hi,

With reference to bug no 49569. From my todays test edits at mr wiki, it seems some efforts have taken place to initiate/enable ULS  unicode Devnagari Script input in VE edits.But for practical usage,even for primary begining, it seems to have too many issues yet.Before informing the issues do we wait untill we are officially informed from your side or do we start reporting issues ?

I suppose till now there is no separate bug to track "VE+ULS unicode Marathi language  Devnagari script issues". Would you prefer to start a separate bug for tracking or you expect us to join with some existing bug reports for related issues.

Thanks and regards

Mahitgar (talk) 05:31, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Pinging @User:PEarley (WMF) about the best way to handle this, which I suspect should be splitting the two kind of issues since different teams would take care of them. Regards, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:20, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hey Mahitgar, Elitre. As VE will not be usable on wikis where ULS isn't integrating properly, I'd be filing this as a VE bug, and as a "blocker" to Marathi deployment depending on severity. It is fine to file as a separate bug - if the devs discover it is linked to another reported issue already assigned, they can merge the reports.  Mahitgar, can you give us a more detailed report about the specific issues you are noticing on mr.wiki, as well as the browser and operating system of your computer?  With that, we can submit a actionable bug report, and work to get this fixed before any rollout to Marathi. Can't offer much insight to this particular script - I haven't been working with the Indic languages - Jan and his team are working on this. User:JEissfeldt (WMF) - tag, you're it! PEarley (WMF) (talk) 16:33, 23 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Mahitgar, you might also want to know that the bug related to vowels for that language has been fixed in the meantime. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 18:13, 26 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks, I have the CIS in Bangalore putting together a file on critical bugs for Indian language versions for this product since yesterday and will expand it as necessary. This looks like a solid candidate to me, regards --Jan (WMF) (talk) 18:00, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for all above replies.I will study and list problems for Marathi language VE+ULS environment here in a tabular form over couple of days

Following most required marathi language typing pattern produces marathi sentense as given below in ULS input अक्षरांतरण (transliteration) using roman engilsh "qwerty" key board in traditional wikisource editing; The target for VisualEditor team is the same to happen smoothly for VisualEditor+ ULS input अक्षरांतरण (transliteration) environment.

most required marathi language typing pattern example
 * namaskaara teMDUlkara marAthee Ahe.mahaaraaShTra aaNi akhkhyaa pRthveechaa pravaasa   Jnaaneshvarane KShaNaardhaat kelA paheeje. rrya aaNi rrha akSharaMbaddal saMdarbha sahit nibaMdha have.

should transliterate ( produce) to following in smooth manner.


 * नमस्कार तेंडूलकर मराठी आहे. महाराष्ट्र आणि अख्ख्या पृथ्वीचा प्रवास ज्ञानेश्वरने क्षणार्धात केला पाहीजे.ऱ्य आणि ऱ्ह अक्षरांबद्दल संदर्भ सहित निबंध हवे.

Bugs to watch
 * 51472

Mahitgar (talk) 09:51, 31 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi, I emailed Jan to draw his attention to this. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:37, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks look forwards to - Mahitgar (talk) 11:00, 31 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Thank you, Mahitgar. This is really helpful and will be a core part of the set of issues I will take to the office during a visit mid September. I feel the relation between VE and ULS will stay with us longer than the format of this feedback page permits. Therefore, I suggest to move the topic to my talk page; where I'm automatically notified in case you expand your findings there and we don't have to rely on Elitre for pings - although she does an excellent job in keeping the issue high up my radar :). Beyond Mr.WP itself, I'm also perfectly prepared to take on board issues you find on Hi.WP or generally VE bugs across Indian language projects you see as critical and feel they should be highlighted by me. Best regards, --Jan (WMF) (talk) 15:45, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for very positive response.Your suggession is most welcome I will place this discussion on your talk page and add further aspects there.Besides mr I can certainly bring in info on hi sa and ne wiki over coming week.

Regards

Mahitgar (talk) 16:00, 31 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Added bugs I reported today. Another devanagari bug (not described above) is 53711.--Siddhartha Ghai (talk) 17:25, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

@Siddhartha Ghai Thanks for nice support in reporting the bugs. I wish and request to have a look at bug 53754(not in above list) and please do check for hindi language too.

Thanks Regards

Mahitgar (talk) 02:56, 5 September 2013 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk • contribs)

Simply amazing!!
87.69.232.196 (talk) 21:34, 3 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, thanks :) On an unrelated note, I'll let you know that in my volunteer capacity I participated to School_of_Open_course/Round_3/Week_5 today, where I could briefly speak about VisualEditor, and was actually pleased to get some positive feedback from the students and organizers. I really hope they can enjoy it fully in the near future. --Elitre (talk) 21:58, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

Extracting wikilinks
Not my best section header here :-) What I mean is this: someone tried to change Compton. to Compton, California., but end up with Compton, California. In the visual editor, this is nearly impossible to see. It's perhaps not a real bug, but it's the kind of thing that happened a lot less in the old editor than in VE. Fram (talk) 09:37, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Yeah. That used to be common but that has now been fixed. I can reproduce that by added a space before the full stop and adding the new link there, but that is desired behaviour as far as I see it (if a user splits a link both parts should remain linked unless explicitly unlinked). The problem is that the full stop shouldn't have been linked in the first place, but given that it was the user didn't spot it was linked and didn't unlink it. I don't see what VE can be expected to do differently here? Thryduulf (talk) 11:41, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * No idea what VE can do differently, it's just an aspect where the old editor is superior; the chance of someone by accident changing that original link to 3 links in the old editor is quasi nihil, while it is rather predictable here. Fram (talk) 11:45, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Yeah, it being less obvious that a small character is a link is a side effect of WYSIWYG unfortunately. If you can come up with a way to get around that do say, because I agree it's not optimal but I can't think of how to get around it. Thryduulf (talk) 12:02, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

Removing a section plus header should not result in an empty section header
; when an editor selects a section plus its header and removes it, the section header isn't really gone but gets one of the dreaded "nowiki" tags. When does someone really want an empty section header? Apparently VE is smart enough to recognise the need for a nowiki to separate the left and right sides of the section header, but isn't smart enough to just remove it altogether... Fram (talk) 10:10, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, this is first reported in June and assigned a "normal" priority. Thryduulf (talk) 11:49, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

Differences in VE mode and view mode
The VE has a number of differences between the actual page and the look in VE, most rather minor but somewhat annoying, like the abundance of spaces in and around templates (e.g. in quotes, or before and after notes and references).

A more prominent and for me harder to understand difference exists with reused references. Normally, they are shown as e.g. 1. a b c, but when in VE mode, they become 1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 (there is also a difference between the upward pointing symbols). I can see no reason for this, and for me, the VE version is actually harder to read than the traditional method, because it is unclear that the 1.0 and so on are not a part of the reference, but indicate that the reference is reused a few times. I would suggest that either the same look as in normal viewing mode is taken, or that they are removed (in VE only) altogether, since they can't be used in VE anyway.

These things can e.g. be seen when comparing the FA Pig-faced women in view mode and in VE mode. Fram (talk) 10:38, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * The spaces round templates are slugs that attach a template to a given position on a page and allows them to be better interacted with and requests that it be made clearer they aren't really blank lines.
 * The repeated reference numbering issue is that the 1.1 1.2 format is the default way repeated references appear on all wikis, but some (including the English and German Wikipedias) have chosen to use the non-default a b c format. VE presently always shows the default, but asks for VE to use the local preference format instead. Thryduulf (talk) 11:59, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

log in bug
If you try and use beta to edit a page, but you've forgotten to log in, so you log in directly off the beta page, once you have successfully logged in it takes you back to the edit source page instead of the beta page. Minor, but thought you may want to correct it? Professor Hog (talk) 11:50, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you for that, I've reported it as . I'm not a dev, but to me it doesn't sound like a big problem so hopefully it shouldn't take long to fix. Thryduulf (talk) 12:11, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * , although I can reproduce this in Firefox 23/linux it seems that James F can't. To help identify what the problem is, please could you let us know what browser and operating system you use, and also whether you use any editing gadgets. Thanks, Thryduulf (talk) 16:40, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

Links and accented characters in tables
I'm in the middle of article editing at the moment so this is partly an aide memoir for me when I have time to test it and partly a request to see if it is happening to others.

I'm finding that at least sometimes when trying to wikilink an existing work that contains an accented character, e.g. Marília, Bogotá that the accented characters are getting deleted. When trying to undo that the whole word (sometimes?) gets deleted. All this is in table cells, I haven't tried outside or with characters that are not in basic ASCII but are not accented Latin Characters. Everything seems to work fine when using the link dialog to add a link and the text at the same time.

I'm also sometimes getting strange corruption/duplication of text when adding a word with accented characters in a table cell.

The article I'm working on is Non-stop flight. Please don't edit conflict me on that section though ;) Thryduulf (talk) 23:38, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Just now linking the text "Bogota" to Bogotá, deleting the "a" and typing "á" included the letter in the link as I wanted but when I went to link another word the "á" became a pawn :( Firefox 23 / Linux / Monobook for all of this. Thryduulf (talk) 00:02, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

I deleted the pawn, put "á" there. It showed as "á" but a pawn was saved (4th last change, an in-page search for "Avianca" is likely the quickest way to find it). Thryduulf (talk) 00:15, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

I don't think I've got to the bottom of this yet, but experimentation in my sandbox has shown that it is unrelated to tables, and happens everywhere. It seems that the key thing is annotating or linking words containing accented or non-Latin characters. Doing so frequently causes the accented character to disappear. Re-adding such a character (not necessarily the same one) causes that character to (usually) turn into a pawn when anything else on the page is linked. I've reported what I've found so as but it would be useful to confirm this in other browsers, etc and if possible refine the cause a bit more. Thryduulf (talk) 13:37, 2 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I've been doing a little testing in my sandbox. This is kind of a fun little bug if you want to make a huge mess.  Typing Résumé writing for fün and profít displays like this on screen:


 * (The stray 's' and 'n' appear on their own lines immediately after being typed in the sentence above: it's the 's' from the middle of Résumé and the 'n' from the end of fün.  But the saved results are this:


 * Notice that the letters with dicritics disappear, and that the stray 's' is removed from Résumé and re-appears where the second é in Résumé is supposed to be, and the stray 'n' has been removed from fün and replaces the missing í in profít.
 * I think I'll drop a note about this over at AIV so that people don't get unfairly blamed for a problem that's beyond their control. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:31, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

newline marks in VE
When viewing Marathon swimming im VE the References section has several newline marks (↵). I suspect the VE should have some hovertext explaining their purpose. --Marc Kupper&#124;talk 19:27, 2 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I think the newlines are an artifact of having a reflist template without actually having any references in the body of the article, but I haven't done any testing (such as actually adding a citation) to confirm this. Assuming this is a bug, it's a fairly minor one. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:01, 2 September 2013 (UTC)
 * They're caused by the blank lines between the refs, the categories, and the interwiki links. In my sandbox, they appear even if a ref is added to the page.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:57, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

Messy behavior with page down/up
At any given page, example, as long the edit box is selected (with the cursor blinking) pressing 'page down' or 'page up' takes you to the end of the page. Firefox 23.0, Linux Mint. 177.148.217.222 (talk) 12:45, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * But I cannot reproduce it in Windows, Firefox 23.0.1 177.148.217.222 (talk) 13:06, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hmm, on that article with Firefox 23 on Xubuntu Linux using the monobook skin, I find that pressing page down or page up works as expected once but then does nothing. I then click anywhere in the body and again one of them works once, and then not until I click. However, once I've viewed the end of the page it expected. I see exactly the same at User:Thryduulf/sandbox2. At User:Thryduulf/sandbox it works as expected from the start. At Nigeria I saw the same behaviour as at Jet Lee (your example), but when I returned to the top of the page it went back to working only once. This is very bizarre! Reported as Thryduulf (talk) 13:14, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Maybe a related error occured, while testing in Nigeria, Firefox 23, mono. Enter VE-mode and click below one of the huge (really huge) navbox farms at the end of the article (in the blank line below them). Now i made two tests:
 * Click "Page up" => OK, scrolls up as expected. Now click "Page up" again => ERROR, jumps down to the initial position below the navbox.
 * another test from the same initial position below the huge navbox: "Page up", then "Page down", then "Page up" and a second "Page up" => works OK.
 * If i had to guess (uneducated as always), it looks like VE has problems storing or establishing the cursor position while scrolling through some huge or complex templates. GermanJoe (talk) 11:35, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I've copied those comments to the bug report as it's almost certainly the same issue. Thryduulf (talk) 11:55, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

Tables all messed up
They're all over the place greenrd (talk) 22:40, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Please could you be more specific - which article? In what way were they messed up? What were you attempting to do? I've had a look through your recent contributions and can't spot where VE has messed up any tables. There is one case where it nowikied a + following an  template that I'm about to investigate, but that doesn't seem to have messed up the table or the sorting afaics. Thryduulf (talk) 00:38, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hmm, well I can't reproduce that error in my sandbox or when previewing that article using firefox 23 on linux with the monobook skin. it would really help if you could also give the information I asked for above along with your browser and OS. Thryduulf (talk) 01:00, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I assumed that the feedback form would automatically add which page I was on. It was . Tables are displayed incorrectly, before I edit anything. Scroll down the page and it gets worse. I'm using Chromium 27 on Linux.--greenrd (talk) 07:13, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Ah right I understand you now. I think this is, but I've asked on there for confirmation. Thryduulf (talk) 09:54, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I'd like to have the feedback provide an automatic link to the page, too. That request is now .  Thanks for mentioning it, greenrd.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:06, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes that is a good idea :) As for the bug, it was the one I thought and it's just a rendering issue in VE and the output isn't affected. That's not good exactly, but it's not as bad as it could be. Thryduulf (talk) 16:52, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

Table cells combined
I edited this article in VE. In VE it looks fine, but when saved the table is distorted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contactless_smartcards_on_the_railways_of_Britain Matthew Dickinson (talk) 17:46, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Whatever is causing that it's a different bug from the one above so I've given it its own section. The cause is the linebreaks in the table cells (see. for example). If VE inserted them then it's a bug that needs fixing, but it's not something I've ever seen it do before. Could you have added them? Thryduulf (talk) 18:13, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * The problem is not with VisualEditor. For some reason, if you press the return key to add another line (rather than adding a   HTML code), that table breaks.  It doesn't matter whether you add the line break in VisualEditor or in the classic editor.  On the other hand, if you reformat the wikitext table to have one cell per line, then it works fine.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:17, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

Keish origin correction
It states in the bio that the native Keish is Tahitian. This makes no sense when he was born in the Yukon of the Taglish native group. Thanks, Maja 206.41.91.42 (talk) 20:15, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hey Maja, this page is for feedback relating to the new Visual Editor :) For general help with Wikipedia see Help:Contents and the Help desk. For feedback regarding that specific article, please use the article's talk page, thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:23, 5 September 2013 (UTC) PS: it's Tahltan ;)

Lake
Classification of water body type is not dependent on hydrological links whether present or not. The "great lakes" of north america are great inland seas. Lakes are characterized by being surrounded by land but also by size. 173.17.134.122 (talk) 02:06, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Please see my answer immediately above your thread. Thanks :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 05:58, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

There are no references with the group "" on this page
When a page has, but no actual references, the above text appears in grey at the location of the references template. I think that the part "with the group """ should be removed, as it is confusing and unnecessary (references don't need a group, the group "" is not used on the page, the problem is simply that there are no references with the "ref" style at all). Example: N.O.T.R.. Fram (talk) 09:34, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * A link to some central guide (like WP:inline citations or similar) in the message would also be helpful for beginners in that situation. GermanJoe (talk) 09:44, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree that the message isn't brilliant, but it's not as simple as there just being no references. That message can appear when there are references in a group other than "" (e.g. notes) but none in the default group. Because of bugs it can also happen when there are references inside elements (e.g. a blockquote) and the reftag is outside it (see for example at Waltzing Matilda). Thryduulf (talk) 11:34, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * But at the Waltzing Matilda page (where the cite error and this message are clearly a bug), there is at least a named group, so the reference to "group N" is understandable. When there is no named (or unnamed) group anywhere at the article, there is no reason for the message to mention 'group ""'. Can one even use a group "" in reality? I doubt it... Fram (talk) 11:51, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Group "" is the same as no group, i.e. if you add a reference to a page without specifying a group it is in group "". Saying "there are no references on this page" is true in the majority of cases but not always is my point. Would "there are no ungrouped references" or "there are no references in the default group" be better? Thryduulf (talk) 12:05, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't doubt that your explanation is technically correct, but this is meaningless to editors. Either they know about refs vs grouped refs, or they don't know about grouped refs at all, but in either case, the empty or default group is not something they will ever be familiar with. Of your suggestions, "ungrouped" seems like the best one. Of course, one can argue that no message is needed at all (certainly when it sometimes is given incorrectly), but that's a more philosophical point. Fram (talk) 12:15, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

May I suggest a better translation from tech geek into English? How about replacing 'no references with the group "" on this page' with 'no references on this page from the default grouping'. Other groupings would be displayed as 'from group "X"'. This is a bit more natural language. It requires assigning a special case to the null set, but, really, you should get used to that, after all, even if VE has probably another 6 months before it handles things like tables and templates well enough to really take off with the group, in the long run, this is meant to develop into a tool for newbies, and it's better to think ahead now. Ideally, you should likely drop "from the default group" in the absence of non-default-group items, and, unless there's a good reason not to, I'd go with the ideal. =) Adam Cuerden (talk) 08:10, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Just to be a bit clearer: VE, as it is currently, is not an ideal newbie tool. Template and table editing is a bit rough, it could use a few more interaction methods, since form-based editing isn't ideal for everything, and so on. But you're going to move past those issues in, say, six months to a year. At that point every decision you made where you didn't think to simplify text to make it clear for new users is going to come back to bite you, because, at the moment, VE may be somewhat hard for newbies, but once it's easy, this page is going to light up like a Christmas tree, because all the text that was, at the time, "good enough" is no longer going to be. Better to think ahead now. Adam Cuerden (talk) 08:22, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

Disable VE top doesn't work ?
Hi,

I tried editing Teenage Dream (Katy Perry album) which is using the same technique as Disable VE top and I managed to edit the article in VE without trouble. When I reviewed the changes: my modifications where there and the article was damaged (probably in the same way that made someone put the div in the article). --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 16:49, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * What browser and operating system are you using? Are you using any gadgets? I wasn't able to make any changes using Firefox 23 on Linux. Thryduulf (talk) 17:02, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Chrome 29 and W7. A few gadgets, but not much, I can list them if nobody can reproduce the problem. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 17:11, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Reproduced on a test page, I only typed "This is a test". --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 17:32, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I also tested it on that Katy Perry's page, I basically added a few letters and the preview was pretty messy. Thanks NicoV for reporting it before I did. --151.42.253.105 (talk) 17:59, 4 September 2013 (UTC) (Elitre WMF)

It's apparent that Visual Editor is no longer respecting the protected node. Opening a bugzilla report.&mdash;Kww(talk) 18:01, 4 September 2013 (UTC) . Commentary to assure developers that the ability to protect an article that VE cannot handle from being corrupted by VE is a critical need is appreciated.&mdash;Kww(talk) 18:09, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I can't reproduce this on NicoV's test page nor in my sandbox, so it seems like it might be browser-dependent - it would be helpful if you could note what you were able to reproduce it in. Thanks for the report though. Thryduulf (talk) 18:22, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I've noted it in the Bugzilla: Firefox 23.0.1 on Windows 7.&mdash;Kww(talk) 18:31, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm quite sure the devs will go: "You did wut ??? And you expected that to keep working ??????" —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 19:16, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, the devs know those template existed and that they were being used. --151.42.253.105 (talk) 19:49, 4 September 2013 (UTC) (Elitre WMF)

I tried again on my test page on a different computer running Firefox 17.0.2 (ESR) under XP. At first, it seemed that the protected node was working, but at some point (after clicking, double-clicking, typing, ...) I managed to write in the protected node: the result was an even greater mess than before: still the duplication, quotes added all over the place (they seem correct but unnecessary), pipes removed, space added, ... --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 11:05, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * The quotes all seem to be changing to which is not really a problem as afaik they are meant to have quotes. The table corruption will be no different to what would have happened without the protection. The cause of the issue was fixed on the main article so the hack (and it is just that) to stop VE is no longer needed there. The underlying problem is the way Parsoid deals with malformed tables, which is known but proving tricky to fix (at least partly as there are countless ways to malform a table). Thryduulf (talk) 12:02, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * The main reason for my last report was to say that even with Firefox, it's possible to edit a protected node, just a little more difficult than with Chrome, so the problem is not limited to one browser. After that, I must confess that I didn't really check it the second edit had more things screwed that the first one, but I didn't remember the changes on the quotes, the pipes and the spaces in the first edit. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 21:35, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * We just shifted versions an hour or two ago. Would you mind clearing your cache and trying to reproduce this again at any Wikipedia (that's version "wmf15") and again at  Sandbox (which is version "wmf16"; the Wikipedias should get it next week)?  That will tell us whether the problem persists despite the most recent upgrade.   Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:44, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I cleared the cache of my Chrome 29 (both in the settings and by doing a Ctrl+F5): no change at all, no problem for editing my test page. I won't be able to test on the other computer (FF17+XP) before 10 days. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 21:51, 5 September 2013 (UTC)


 * It might be a good idea to make the hack official for now, perhaps something akin to page protection - a length of time (up to one year) can be set to protect an article from VE, depending on the bug, and an estimation of when it's likely to be fixed by. VE is improving constantly; it would be better if there was a way to turn the protection off after a time, to make sure it's still valid. Adam Cuerden (talk) 21:54, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Where it is known which bug is responsible for messing up a given page then it would be useful to somehow note that so that when the fix for that bug is deployed we can check the page and then remove the VE protection if it no longer breaks rather than some arbitrary time period. I can't remember how of the top of my head, but I know it is possible to generate a list of bugs fixed in a release (although would that cover just VE or VE and Parsoid?) that we could check against. Where the bug isn't known it would be worth checking every release. I'm not sure how to do this tracking though? Thryduulf (talk) 22:09, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Easily enough done when VE learns to respect something. Tag the template with a bug number, and have a bot go through every night and remove all templates related to closed bugs. It looks like the big problem is convincing developers that this is a real issue: that we need a way to keep VE off of an article while we are trying to figure out what the problem is, and correcting the wikitext that drives VE bonkers rather than fixing VE so that it doesn't go bonkers is cheating.&mdash;Kww(talk) 22:35, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * A template system basically means doing it based on page content. Another method might be some sort of metadata that VisualEditor responds to.
 * Realistically, how many articles are involved? If it's dozens or hundreds, then I think that we could manually log the pages and review them every now and again.  If it's thousands or tens of thousands, then we'd need some sort of automated or semi-automated process, even if it was as limited as "protection falls off every three months".  If it was a bot, then I'm not sure I'd bother running it every night.  We're looking at code releases usually once or twice a week, so a weekly run would probably be adequate.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:03, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Is there another template? Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Disable_VE_top doesn't give the results one would expect. Adam Cuerden (talk) 01:31, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I substed a bunch in an effort to get past this. I was fooling myself. Look for Disable VE bottom.&mdash;Kww(talk) 01:53, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Did you subst those as well? Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Disable_VE_bottom gives very similar results. If there isn't another template, then, unless you subst'd hundreds of articles, I think it's safe to say that it can't be that many articles, though said articles are now invisible. To prevent this in future, I'm going to add a Category to Disable VE top.  Adam Cuerden (talk) 06:56, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * New usages now categorise into Category:Pages with content uneditable in VisualEditor. Adam Cuerden (talk) 08:01, 6 September 2013 (UTC)