Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive 2013 12

Nowiki warning doesn't always appear
{{answered|text= {{tracked|53839}} When I add something that VE decides needs "nowiki", it usually gives the warning "Wikitext markup detected". However, when I add ) is not.

What is the desired behaviour here - should comments be nowikied like other html syntax or not?

HTML comments are used widely in articles to give information specific to editors (e.g. &lt;!--do not change this without discussing on talk&gt;), but these are not currently visible or editable in VisualEditor (see {{phab|51603}}). The method of adding or displaying comments in VE has not been finalised so it is not known at this point whether they will be shown inline or not.

It has been frequently requested that wikitext not be nowikied in VisualEditor, and if it were then obviously HTML elements should be allowed too, however that has been firmly and repeatedly closed as WONTFIX ({{phab|51686}}).

I can see reasons both for and against nowikiing this and at the moment don't know which I think is best. Thryduulf (talk) 09:39, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I suspect the WONTFIX of Wikitext may be reasonable enough in the short term, although it probably shouldn't be permanent. The major issue is that, for example,  and &lt;b> &lt;/b> act in fundamentally different ways, which makes the interconverting a lot more difficult.  can be either &lt;b> or &lt;/b> depending in context.
 * The choice of carefully-marked up HTML for Parsoid was, on the whole, a clever choice: It means that the structured markup can be displayed on a browser directly, without a second layer of conversion. But the lack of a direct interconversion between some wikitext and the HTML is an unfortunate side-effect. Further, ''{{template-that-resolves-to-'}} is a nightmare scenario to code for. What does the principle of least surprise call for at that point?
 * I'm of the impression the VE team are at least willing to consider adding the simpler Wikicode that also lacks well-known shortcuts, such as  and {{ }} . I do hope I'm not wrong on that point.
 * One issue, though, is that there is a lot to do on VE, and, in the end, making VE play nicely with wikitext being added probably isn't top priority right now. Adam Cuerden {{sup|(talk)}} 10:02, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes I agree with that, however that was only a tangental thought to the main question here which is should HTML comment syntax added in VE be nowikied? Thryduulf (talk) 10:24, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Rather than support HTML comments in VE, it might be better to design a template (or similar) for in-article comments. Potential benefits include:
 * Comments would be easier to identify and read
 * Comments could contain working wiki-links e.g. to related policies or talk page discussions
 * VE users would not need to use or understand HTML comment syntax
 * Thoughts? - Pointillist (talk) 10:51, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Longer term that is one possible way of doing this. However, {{phab|51806}} will need fixing first as presently templates that display nothing in the rendered page are neither visible nor interactable with in VE. Should VE nowiki comment syntax that is added though? Thryduulf (talk) 11:02, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * HTML comments should be left unwrapped. VE users have no reason to insert them, and if they do, they're presumably sufficiently technically savvy to imagine how they are being treated. Existing HTML comments in the source should not be wrapped, because that would make the comments visible in the rendered article, which is not desirable. It might be helpful to make HTML comments visible in the Visual Editing view, but it isn't desirable to require VE users to understand HTML syntax, so in the longer term I'd prefer an alternative technique such as a special type of template that interacts appropriately with the editing environment to provide the contextual guidance for which HTML comments have historically been used. - Pointillist (talk) 14:23, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * It wouldn't have to be a template. You could tell VisualEditor that whenever it finds a hidden HTML comment, that it should highlight it in orange or draw a little box around it, or something like that.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:00, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Indeed it could (without the being visible), and it could permit VE users to "add comment". But inevitably people will want to add comments that wiki-link to other places, similar to inline templates that point to talk page discussions. I'm just suggesting that a richer comment model should be explored in the longer term. - Pointillist (talk) 17:18, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Sure, it'd be great for templates like {{tl|NoMoreLinks}} to be able to link to guidelines. There's no reason why that would require the use of a template, just like linking to RFC 2119 doesn't require a template.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:28, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hmmm, but what we're talking about here is the replacement of all inline HTML comments with something better. Are you sure that for every use of an embedded comment there already exists a template that offers the possibility of linking to talk page sections and/or policy pages? - Pointillist (talk) 20:58, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

A richer comment model would make VE better than wikitext. That's because in wikitext editing, comments are shown in nowiki format (that is, all the text in the editing window is plain text, not interpreted).

In VE, comments could include formatting, links, and perhaps even templates (but not images or references). That would make hidden/invisible comments potentially much more useful. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:07, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

Links
It would be helpful to be able to navigate though links and potential links by clicking on them in the "Matching Pages" list. E123 (talk) 19:14, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * asks for a ctrl+click or right click on the link in the list to open that page in a new tab/window, and asks for there to a be preview of them similar to navigation popups. Is this what you are asking for? Thryduulf (talk) 12:06, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor messes up table of infoboxes
{{VE Bug | status        = new | description   = Editing the article Whydah Gally with VisualEditor messes up table of infoboxes | duplicate     = Open the article in the visual editor, e.g. by visiting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whydah_Gally?veaction=edit
 * Observe the article now leads with the out-of-place text

class="infobox " style="float: right; clear: right; width: 315px; border-spacing: 2px; text-align: left; font-size: 90%;"
 * try to click "save page" but note that it is not active
 * make a trivial change so that "save page" is active. Click it
 * Click "review your changes", not that it says that
 * {{Italic title}}{|{{Infobox ship begin}}
 * was replaced with
 * {{Italic title}}{{Infobox ship begin}}

{|{{Infobox ship begin}} | OS            = Ubuntu Linux Precise 12.04 | browser       = Google Chrome 30.0.1599.28 beta | skin          = Vector with custom javascript: importScript('User:Smith609/toolbox.js'); | resolution    = Manually edited the source to fix it. | bugzilla      = }} ★NealMcB★ (talk) 15:18, 8 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I can see why the page confuses visual editor. The page starts with:

{{Italic title}}{|{{Infobox ship begin}} {{Infobox ship image }} {{Infobox Ship Career
 * Ship image=Whydah-model.jpg
 * Ship caption=The Whydah Gally (1716–1717)
 * A Table start tag {| followed by {{t1|Infobox ship begin}} which has some css styling for the table. This must be hard to parse correctly, it needs to evaluate the template to find its info which would needed by the table start tag. Things would be easier if the nowiki>{| was actually inside the template, like {{tl|Col-begin}} still better would be to use standard infoboxes but that would be a major change as there are 26839 transclusions. Basically I think currently all articles on ships are no go areas for VE.--User:Salix alba (talk): 19:41, 8 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Makes {{phab|55767}} seem even more important, doesn't it, Salix?&mdash;Kww(talk) 20:21, 8 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Indeeds, but it does deserve its own bug report as its a tricky situation for parsoid to deal with. {{phab|55927}}--User:Salix alba (talk): 20:59, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

Does anyone know why the ship infoboxes are constructed this way, rather than being a single template? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:18, 9 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Good question, probably best asked at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ships. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:40, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

A comment I received in an email
I was told that "I was having a lot of trouble with the references in the visual editor. It kept duplicating them instead of reusing already listed references." This from a person interested in being a Campus Ambassador who I've been introducing to Wikipedia in case anyone is wondering. I'm not sure if a bug/feature request for this is submitted already. Thanks. Biosthmors (talk) 16:55, 8 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, this is the annoying . Unfortuntely it hasn't been prioritised yet, so I don't know when it is likely to be fixed, sorry. Thryduulf (talk) 11:44, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Links
Blue links: [an icon that's supposed to represent two links in a chain]. When this is clicked on, the name of the article linked to is editable. Is this intuitive? I doubt I would have understood it with-out my experience with trying to edit footnotes and the explanation I got here.

Red links: "empty text"  Short of writing a note (a la 'This is a link to a Wikipedia article that has not yet been writtn'), this seems like the best way of handling these. Kdammers (talk) 07:16, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Regarding your first point, asks for there to be separate boxes for link target and link description, which I think should help. I don't understand your second point, sorry. Thryduulf (talk) 11:42, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
 * My second point was that I think the message for red links is pretty good.Kdammers (talk) 00:05, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Another problem re editing links: The link to the author William F. Nolan was red in the article on Sam Space. I started a new article on Nolan, only to discover in doing basic research that a Nolan article already existed. So I went back to the Sam Space article and tried to correct the faulty link. The link had the name repeated, separated by a bar (pipe), but I couldn't see this in VE. I saw that instead of 'William' the link had 'WIlliam' (i.e., the first I was capitalized). I corrected this using VE, but this did not correct the LINK, only what was visible in reader mode, Only when I went to source editing did I see what the problem was and why my VE edit was in vain.Kdammers (talk) 05:26, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Force toolbar to remain visible
Hi! When you edit a long page, you need to scroll it down. The visual editor toolbar remains on the top of the page, and it may be far away from the part of the page you are editing, so that you may need to scroll up and down to use it. I suggest to anchor the toolbar to a fixed position of the screen when the user scrolls page down. 8.8.8.8 (talk) 13:23, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
 * It should be doing that, and indeed it does for me (Firefox 23 on Linux). What browser and operating system are you using? Which page were you trying to edit? Thryduulf (talk) 13:33, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
 * This may be the allegedly resolved . Would you please open two or three long articles (ideally pages you've never read before), and first—before typing or clicking on anything else—scroll down and see whether the toolbar stays in place?  Also, it might be worth clearing your cache to make sure that your browser isn't trying to use an older version.  Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:34, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Also, do you have a touchscreen? That's believed to be a problem at .  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:43, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Samuel Cole
The Three Mariners was the ordinary founded and run by Isaac Gross. Crumelbow (talk) 04:43, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi, 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 a specific article, please use that article's talk page, thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:37, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Heading Police Department
Please correct last sentence under Police Department. As of April 2013, Chief Schrader has retired and the new Chief is Aaron Jimenez. Thanks! 24.207.138.54 (talk) 12:29, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Please see my message above :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:38, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Way too slow!
I tried to make a correction to MC Hammer, and it took at least 30 seconds after I hit the edit button until I could change the page, and a minute after I clicked save before the change took effect. It needs to be much faster than this before it is on every page. 50.96.217.175 (talk) 14:36, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
 * That page is over 146kb (feat. 271 references), so I am not surprised it takes a while to load. There's a bunch of known bugs about slowness, while some improvements in this field were made lately. Thanks for your feedback, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:44, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Sandy Dennis
She did not appear in "Indian Runner". 98.69.135.160 (talk) 00:06, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Information.svg Thank you for your suggestion. When you believe an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the  link at the top. The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes—they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills.  New contributors are always welcome. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons why you might want to). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:37, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

BLP edit notice
The edit notice for BLPs and dab pages is not displayed with VE. This has been discussed before 1, but no action was taken and no bug raised.

For BLP's and dab pages the edit notice is provided through the Editintro system using mw:Extension:InputBox and some code in MediaWiki:Common.js. VE does not work with Extension:InputBox so the edit notice is not displayed. It might be worth filling a bug to this effect.

Another way of providing the edit notice would be to edit Template:Editnotices/Namespace/Main so the it transcludes Disambig editintro or BLP editintro. Thoughts.

P.S. An edit notice might be a way of warning about pages VE can't edit.--User:Salix alba (talk): 19:07, 11 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I filed the bug report. I hope that it will get fixed soon.
 * I have previously recommended using Editnotices for that purpose, and also for repeating information that we'd normally add in .  Not everyone has appreciated the recommendation, but I agree with you that it's a useful approach.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:07, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for bringing this up again, BTW. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 21:09, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

Testing
I hate to ask it, but what are the VisualEditor team's plans for testing with newbies? Because I can't imagine you're going to get a really good interface for newbies to use unless you can try out different interfaces for different tasks, see which ones newbies like for each task, and see how intuitive things are for them. I mean, I realise you might want to develop a bit longer first, so you actually have a variety of options ready to test, but, at some point, you're going to need test data in order to get things right. Adam Cuerden (talk) 08:26, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, one way we have (and we are taking advantage of it) to find out what works best for unexperienced users is reading this page, analyzing the feedback, which sometimes does take that factor into account, and use that as a starting point to improve something. But if you mean a structured round of tests like this one, I am not aware that is going to happen again, or soon. I suspect the devs will want to reach some specific stage before those tests, like you said. I can ask, of course. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:11, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Not exactly like that, actually. This is the sort of project where you need to ask questions like "Do you understand what this icon means?" "Here's our interface. Can you use it to do X without being given further instructions?" "Which of these two interfaces do you like best for this task?" "Can you find our help page?"
 * I mean, eventually, a test against source might be justified, but that sort of testing's needed to find out what works and what doesn't for newbies. This page won't help you identify people who get so frustrated with the interface that they never get to here. Adam Cuerden (talk) 22:15, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I asked Philippe about it. He said that they ran a formal test with totally inexperienced users back in June.  The test was a regular editing session, with defined tasks like changing links or deleting things, in a head-to-head comparison of the classic wikitext editor to VisualEditor.  (The test did not involve using any features (refs, images, etc.) that were not available in VisualEditor at that point.)  All of them had some problems with VisualEditor (think about the speed back in June), and still almost all of them preferred VisualEditor to the source editor.
 * I have the impression that setting up the tests was a much bigger hassle than it should have been, and that the results were of the "prove what everyone already knows" variety. I'm not sure that they felt like the information they received from this was worth it, since it basically repeated what they already hear regularly from people who regularly deal with newbies (e.g., in the education programs, where the three most common complaints from university students are:  (1) Wikitext is too hard, (2) Why don't we edit like in Microsoft Word?, and (3) Why can't Wikipedia be normal like everyone else on the internet?).  Since that round didn't seem to be as valuable as they had hoped, I'm not sure that they would be receptive to repeating it on a larger scale to test multiple options for each interface issue.  It would probably be more valuable to do what they are already doing now, which is to put out small changes every few weeks and see which ones get used more or complained about more.  They are tracking user behavior, which allows them to notice things like VisualEditor users originally being ten times more likely to add an edit summary, but now—after a few changes to the Save dialog—being only six times more likely than classic wikitext users to add an edit summary.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:57, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I really don't think you can expect to get a good user interface without direct user questioning, frankly. For example, I don't think the help icon looks at all like a help icon. Adding the word "help" would make this clear. We've discussed elsewhere how the bookmark icon looks more like a floppy disc. These are the sorts of things you need tests for. For example, asking 20 naive users "What do you think this icon does?" and 20 others "Can you find the way to do [X]?", where [X] is what the icon does, will let you know if your symbolism is clear.
 * This doesn't need to be a big statistically-significant test; however, user testing is how you make sure that you get user-friendly interfaces. Frankly, anyone working on software is far, far too close to that software to ever know what's intuitive. It's like... if you've ever made a moderately complicated device for your own use, you may well get something that works for you, but which is so dependant of the shape of your hand, or arm, or exact way of gripping it that seems natural to you that noone else can use it. Software is like that, but for brains. Adam Cuerden (talk) 12:28, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hey, I am not sure if it is relevant here, but the team is looking for a QA Manual tester based in SF now. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:53, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Can't edit 1st paragraph
I got a blue rectangle with a jigsaw icon when I tried to edit "This article is about the Sinchon subway station. For the subway station under the same name on Gyeongui Line of the Seoul Subway, see Sinchon Station (Gyeongui)." This is the first paragraph (after a sentence a bout 'not to be confused with....') of the stub about Sinchon Station. The blue rectangle totally blocks any efforts to edit. I saw no warning that this was a protected text or any other explanation as to why I couldn't get any-where. Kdammers (talk) 23:59, 9 September 2013 (UTC)


 * What you think is the first paragraph is actually a template. When you click on that blue rectangle, you should see an icon that looks like a jigsaw puzzle piece. Click on that, and you'll be able to change the text of the template. It has three parameters - click on each of these to see what text is in each. (For more info, see WP:VE/UG.) -- John Broughton  (♫♫) 03:06, 10 September 2013 (UTC)


 * What a puzzle! VE is supposed to be easy to use. How is some-one supposed to know all these ins and outs? It is really unrealistic to expect people to figure out stuff like that.~ (If I go into source-edit mode, then I can see the mark-ups and know what's what.)Kdammers (talk)
 * Luckily, reading the guide helps a lot, I do recommend that :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:36, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
 * It might help if double-clicking on the blue box opened the template inspector, rather than doing nothing. I think it would make sense to most people if double-clicking opened it.  IMO requiring people to click on the icon is not quite as intuitive.  What do you all think? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:49, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I think I am going to file a request for your suggestion, and not just limited to that inspector. Thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:54, 10 September 2013 (UTC) PS: Better yet, it already exists! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:56, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, given that the WMF's Vice President of Engineering and Product Development filed that enhancement, I think we have reasonable odds of eventually getting what we want.   Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:44, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Elitre (WMF), what guide? Go to any regular Wikipedia page, after having perhaps heard that it is the encyclopedia that any-one can edit.  If it is not protected, you will see a tab that says Edit ^Beta and that might open up a short note describing it as editing in VE.  Click on the tab.  After a wait, you will again see the page in what looks like the original form (but with a note about not being signed in if that applies and a box of symbols  with no text that are meaningless to the uninitiated and will probably be ignored as irrelevant by  a great many (novice) editors unless that are a bit geeky) but in fact can be edited by simply clicking on a place in the text and typing -- except for problem items such as the topic of this thread..  That's all I see.  I don't see a guide popping up or being referred to. (I'm being the devil's advocate here, since I edit the source normally; but I'm trying to help in the development of VE.) 211.225.33.104 (talk) 05:05, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
 * VisualEditor/User guide. You can find the link by clicking on the help icon (which looks like this:  [[File:VisualEditor - Icon - Help.svg]]) in the toolbar.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 06:09, 11 September 2013 (UTC)


 * John, I went back and re-tried the article. Yes, there was the jigsaw piece "hidden" down in the right-hand corner.  But when I clicked on it, I got an "information" screenthat was simply a technical page, far more obscure (to me at least) than any-thing I've encountered in source editing.  It's almost as if it is designed to scare off non-insiders.  What, for example, does the "parameters" stuff mean?  I think a naive use would see this page and think, 'I came here to edit in more-or-less WYSIWYG mode, adn I've landed in some techie's back-yard; good-bye."Kdammers (talk) 02:26, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree with you, and happily for us, so do the devs. They're trying to completely re-do the reference system to make it less horrible.  (Maybe it'll even be pretty good in the end.  )  It will likely be a while, though.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:40, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

RFC closed
The English Wikipedia community RFC on the Visual Editor has been closed, a summary of the consensuses may be found at the top of the page. NE Ent 02:49, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the note. It's all-staff week at the WMF offices, so it might take a while to get a response.  However, I believe that James F hopes to be able to carve out some time for a reply within a day or two.  In the worst-case scenario, it'll have to wait until sometime next week, when things will allegedly return to normal around the office.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:40, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
 * As expected, WMF has responded by telling us that they really don't give a rat's ass what we think.&mdash;Kww(talk) 16:33, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree but this is the sort of response I for one expected from day one. This shows without a doubt what I have been saying for some time now. The WMF has no respect whatsoever for the volunteer community. They do not care what we say or what we think and the perceive us as an expendible commodity. I for one think the projct manager and several others who worked on this disgraceful application need to look for a new job and I don't really care if that hurts their feelings or if people are angry with me for saying that. The development, support and implementation of Visual editor was an absolute disgrace. Kumioko (talk) 16:45, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I realize that James F did not simply say, "Sure, I'll blindly do whatever you said you wanted: whoever shows up at an RFC is totally in control of absolutely every decision, and I completely refuse to use any professional judgment or even think about this issue", which might have been preferred by a few people.
 * But I don't understand why you believe that engaging in a civil dialogue and proposing a compromise is evidence of "no respect" and "not caring". To me, "not caring" would look like not spending hours of his limited time to read editors' comments, think about the concerns, and engaging in the conversation with suggestions for a path forward.  To me, "no respect" would look like posting a simple reply that amounts to "I control the server, and I refuse to consider changes, or compromise, and furthermore I have no interest in wasting my valuable time discussing your unimportant concerns".  You didn't get that kind of response.  Instead, you got a thoughtful evaluation of your concerns and a request for a compromise.
 * Is there any response, other than brain-dead implementation of a simple majority vote, that would have felt respectful and caring to you? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:06, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
 * It's not a "brain-dead implementations of a simple majority vote" to recognise that you are insisting on doing exactly what you were told is unacceptable: making VE readily available to novice editors. In fact, James's rejection is based on the fact that his life is made easier if he uses novices as guinea pigs, because the more novices that trip over his bugs, the more likely it is that we will become aware of them rapidly. The problem is that WMF is thinking of VE as a goal in and of itself, not as simply an optional tool, and prioritises it above Wikipedia.&mdash;Kww(talk) 17:19, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
 * They have already implemented five ways to reduce the use of VisualEditor by editors. These methods halved its use here.  James F now proposes four more methods of substantially reducing VisualEditor's availability.  Does offering a total of nine different ways to reduce use really constitute "insisting on making VisualEditor readily available"?  Does anything short of completely hiding it for all users unless they (magically?) know that it exists and how to enable it constitute "insisting on making VisualEditor readily available" in your mind?  Is there no space between "hide it completely" and "insisting on it being readily available", in which it could be somewhat or partly available?  Is there no room for building a compromise with you?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:29, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
 * The problem is that WMF is thinking of VE as a goal in and of itself, not as simply an optional tool, and prioritises it above Wikipedia. <- This. Begoon &thinsp; talk  17:31, 11 September 2013 (UTC)


 * There's nothing "magical" about expecting a user to achieve the level of competence necessary to find his preferences before he begins the task of debugging complex software. Sure, there's a compromise: work on it with established experienced editors until they tell you that it seems to actually work and can completely edit the vast majority of Wikipedia articles, then ask the community whether it is in good enough condition to make available on a widespread basis, then release it widely.&mdash;Kww(talk) 17:34, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
 * That still sounds like "completely hide it now" to me. How does this differ from "completely hide it now"?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:45, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I have to be honest, this whole process has gotten me to the point where I don't want to do anything at all for the WMF. I realize you are a paid employee of the company and I understand that you have obligations to it and to justify its actions. But there is no justifying what the WMF is doing here. Not with Visual Editor and not with WP:FLOW when they release that and destroy virtually every WikiProject and a lot of the support infrastructure we have build over the years. The WMF is callous and uncaring and these comments from James just help to reflect how low the community is looked upon by the WMF. Almost 500 editors voted to Turn off Visual Editor and almost 800 different editors voted. That may seem insignificant but on here that is huge. That is unprecedented in fact. So for the WMF to come down and say essentially Fuck you where doing it anyway just shows that they don't want or need us.
 * Honestly at this point I would rather see Wikia take over Wikipedia. Even if they start running it for a profit. But then maybe that is really the strategic longterm goal of the WMF. To drag this project down, to allow the Wikia for profit side to take over and make money from the number 5 website in the world instead of lose money. That doesn't sound so crazy to me to be honest. Sounds like a pretty solid business plan actually. But what do I know, I'm just a stupid volunteer with 2 Master's degrees (one in business). I'm an idiot.Kumioko (talk) 19:11, 11 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Until it works, there's no reason to do anything with novice editors but hide it.&mdash;Kww(talk) 20:21, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

But for most edits that most novice editors want to do it does work and works well. Yes there are still bugs, but they get fewer with each release - for example compare the edits over time and monthly edit counts for this page in July and August. Ultimately isn't possible to make it work 100% of the time for novice editors without long experience of edits by novice editors. The WMF's goal is to make it easier for everybody to edit the projects, including Wikipedia, and VE is just a means to that goal that matches what all the feedback the Foundation has received from surveys and people on the front line have been asking for for years. Wikitext is not going anywhere, and the existence of VE does not impact anybody's ability to use wikitext if they want to, nor will it. Some of the comments in response to James' considered response have been frankly juvenile. I'm not saying which ones, and they are not necessarily on this page, but the adult way to deal with someone who tells you "It is not possible to give you exactly what you want, but if you are prepared to compromise then you can get some of it. Here are some suggestions for what is possible as a starting point for negotiation.", as James has done, is to discuss and compromise not rant about how you are being ignored. You also need to remember that VE is for all projects in all languages, not just for one project in one language. Thryduulf (talk) 23:29, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
 * The problem with that logic is that it is completely possible to conform with the RFC ... it just makes James's job harder.&mdash;Kww(talk) 23:54, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thryduulf, With respect I don't care about edit percentages right now. And it only works for those novice editors because you have experienced ones going behind the and checking their work. We cannot trust the software yet, that is a Fact. What I care about is the WMF's failure to properly test and implement this software, the WMF's refusal to accept a community consensus (like they accepted for the German Wikipedia), that the Visual Editor continues to break articles (although admittedly less) and the WMFs continued stonewalling. Those are the things I care about. We need to hold the WMF accountable or they will continue to push off half finished and poorly thought out projects. We as a community cannot survive without the WMF and they cannot survive without us, so its time they accept we are a team and stop ramrodding crap down before its ready because they wanted to rush it out for Wikimania. It is getting better I agree, but its still at least three months of major programming away from being ready...and that's after the last few months. Kumioko (talk) 00:07, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
 * There is a simple solution which everyone will hate: Mark all VE revisions as unreviewed, regardless of editor status.  (With a special mode for an editor to view their own edits, even if he/she cannot view unreviewed revisions.)  There is still entirely too much unintentional "vandalism".  That way, VE can be tested, but the revisions do not appear in the "real" encyclopedia until reviewed.  — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 15:40, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
 * So your solution involves placing every article under PC1 protection? That sounds like a cure that's at least as bad as the disease.&mdash;Kww(talk) 15:48, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Actually that's a very interesting idea. "Articles" wouldn't be protected, the VE (which is beta software) would. Any editor could auto-review their own edits using the stable wikicode editor (or using the review interface), so this is nothing like PC1 protection. But naive editors that aren't aware of the potential errors in their edits will not break any article, and their edits only will go live when someone has reviewed them, looking for problems with a critical eye. I think that's a reasonable workflow for a tool that introduces random, silent errors with a very high probability. It's more or less what the community is doing now to review VE edits, anyway; so why don't add an additional layer of protection? Diego (talk) 16:01, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Error in trying to edit a section
I tried to edit a section of an article using VE, but I got bumped all the way up to the start of the article. This did not happen when I used source edit. The article in point is List of archaeologists, and the section is the letter P. Kdammers (talk) 03:07, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't get that behaviour, but something odd does happen. If I click VE edit on section 'S' it will actually scroll to section 'R' and have /* R */ as the edit summary. If you remove the compactTOC8 template things work fine.--User:Salix alba (talk): 06:12, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Problem seems to be that Compact ToC puts the Content label inside tags. This confuses VE as there is now a miss match between sections and headers.--User:Salix alba (talk): 06:40, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Should work fine now.--User:Salix alba (talk): 07:01, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I tried "P"; worked fine for me. But removing CompactTOC8 from one specific article doesn't address the underlying problem - that template is used in more than a thousand articles.  Either VE or Parsoid or the template itself needs to be changed. -- John Broughton  (♫♫) 23:28, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I've fixed the template to remove the which was causing the problems.--User:Salix alba (talk): 23:55, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

VE at Wikimania
The video is now ready! Ping Adam Cuerden, who's been waiting for it for a while. You can find it here, the slides are linked in the same page. Since there are many native speakers here, I'd ask if someone can help with adding subtitles - once the English ones are there, it will be easier for others to translate to other languages. By clicking the [CC] button in the toolbar of the wikimedia html5 media player, you can [...] open the Subtitles editor to create subtitles for the video. (from commons:Commons:Timed Text). Thank you very much, and enjoy. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 07:20, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Heh. You can actually see my slightly delayed (I got lost) arrival. Green shirt, with black beard, walking right in front of the camera a few minutes in. Adam Cuerden (talk) 09:39, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Still easy to delete infobox by mistake
I know this has been raised before, so this is by way of a bump to say it's still a problem: I deleted a PROD template from the top of a restored article, that seemed to leave a spare blank line at the top, but deleting that took out the infobox. JohnCD (talk) 09:19, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I think it was 47790? Yes, I don't see much progress after you wrote there; do you want me to add your new note? Thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:54, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, that was it, thanks. I see I made the same remark there in July (Comment 10). I think this is a worrying one with quite a high risk of losing information, but it's already rated "High normal" so I don't know if anything more can be done now. JohnCD (talk) 12:57, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I updated the bug anyway, since a French wikipedian just complained about the same issue. Regards, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:55, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Media in references, and updating references not WYSIWYG
Ignoring the highly disappointing reply to the RfC for the moment (why is it, do they think, that of the newly registered editors, 80% of the edits are made with the wikitext editor and only 20% with VE?), and continuing with the long list of remaining issues: why do we have a "media" option in the reference dialog box? When, if ever, are media (files) added to references?

More in general, why are the references not updated when you change them? The reference box at the bottom doesn't reflect the changes made during a VE session. So much for WYSIWYG... Fram (talk) 10:26, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi, for the first part, I am not sure either if that is really useful (does anyone else know more? :) ), but they are going to revamp the references part, so I guess the icon might be removed then. For the box, can you point to the article where this happens? When I edit my sandbox the condition is met), but if you put this on a page:


 * Two
 * Three
 * Three
 * then it suppresses the first (empty) bullet point. Actually, it seems to suppress all empty bullet items.  This:


 * Two
 * Three
 * Three
 * Three

produces exactly the same results as


 * Two
 * Three

I'm not sure if this is actually desirable behavior or not (what if you really wanted a blank bullet item, maybe to indicate where the next editor's name should go in an RFA !vote?). Additionally, even if this is desirable for displaying the page, I'm not sure that VisualEditor should match it, because suppressing it means that you'd never know that there were stray blank list items there. What do you think? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:44, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Template documentation access
The trasnluction dialog should allow to easy acces to the template documentation. Maybe, we can add a button with link. --Rezonansowy (talk &bull;&#32; contribs) 21:23, 12 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your suggestion. One of the devs (Rob) has already been assigned to do this.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:35, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

list badly outdated
Election on October 24th, 2012 created many changes not reflected in this list. 108.60.190.232 (talk) 00:44, 13 September 2013 (UTC)


 * You've posted at the wrong place. If you see an error in a Wikipedia article, the proper place to post about that (if you don't want to fix the error yourself) is the Talk page of that article. (At the upper left of every article are two tabs: "Article" and "Talk". Click on the "Talk" tab.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 04:19, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Editing a footnote
I was unable to edit a footnote (at Mongolian Theatre Museum). The footnote appears as a footnote at the bottom in beta edit mode, but it is a blue box that I cannot enter.Kdammers (talk) 13:28, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * This list at the bottom is automatically created and cannot be edited (atleast as of now). If you want to edit a specific reference, click on its number within the article, then a small symbol appears to the bottom right of the number. Click that symbol to enter the edit window for the selected reference. "Apply Changes" will update your changes in the current edit session (you'll need to save the article later to keep all changes). A VE user guide is available at VisualEditor/User_guide for more information. GermanJoe (talk) 14:39, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * GermanJoe correctly explains the current behaviour. is asking for VE to give a popup message explaining this, and  requests that footnotes be editable in the reflist at the bottom as well as where they appear inline. Thryduulf (talk) 14:49, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I was under the impression they were editable at the bottom for a while? Adam Cuerden (talk) 10:08, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't believe that tags ever were, but I definitely want them to be directly editable in the future. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:54, 6 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Maybe it's because of my age, but when I clicked on the footnote number and the icon (of a computer disk?) appeared, I certainly didn't think that I should then click again (having read GermanJoe's explanation but gotten distracted and not gotten back to testing it for some time). And then when I did click on it out of frustration or curiosity, nothing happened.  I waited and started to leave; only then did the footnote open up.  In any cas, I agree that the VE definitely needs to be editable at the bottom.  How many people -- especially those chosing VE because they are avoiding source editing because of fear or lack of knowledge -- are going to think to click on the footnote number?  Kdammers (talk) 06:09, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Hi Kdammers,

The icon shows a book with a bookmark. Being able to edit refs directly in the list at the end of the page is.

However, I'm seeing something different. If I click once on the little blue number, VisualEditor immediately opens the reference dialog. I don't need to separately click on the icon. What's your browser/operating system? Are you generally finding that VisualEditor is slow for you? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:23, 9 September 2013 (UTC)


 * That's not a very clear icon, I fear, particularly at small size. Adam Cuerden (talk) 22:19, 9 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Quiddity created about this issue and also produced this image with two suggested alternatives. My initial thought is that although they are clearer they don't fit the style of the other icons. Thryduulf (talk) 23:32, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Note: Iamnotadesigner, but (per xkcd!), the superscript blue bracketed numbers are the most recognizable visual representation of a "reference".#|[42] I believe that needs to be part of any icon design. –Quiddity (talk) 23:42, 9 September 2013 (UTC)


 * [Repeat entry] I am using Mozilla Firefox on XP. 211.225.33.104 (talk) 23:36, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hey Kdammers, I tried as well and had no problem with that reference. Can it be some account preference/gadget or even browser's plugin that slows you down or makes it so difficult for you to edit? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:40, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
 * VE is generally slow, taking a while to start. I don't know if any of the things you suggest are causing the problem, but I try to keep away from plug-ins etc.  Let's see if any-one else has the problem.  If it's only my problem, it doesn't matter, since I am only using VE to see how it works so it can be improved.  For my own purposes, I'll stick to source editing. Kdammers (talk) 12:30, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
 * We'd actually love to help, since it can not be improved without people like you willing to test and report. Can you log out and try that passage again? Thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:32, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

To me the current reference icon looks like an industrial landscape with two chimneys one with smoke coming out. Not quite sure what this has to do with references, perhaps a nod to Fahrenheit 451?--User:Salix alba (talk): 12:25, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Image options
Any idea if and when image options (thumb, left/right, ...) will be enabled in VE? Now, when you have an image with e.g. the "left" option indicated, you can't move it properly in VE (ignoring that you can't position any images in a decent way in VE of course). If even moving images can't be done correctly in a WYSIWYG editor, it makes no sense to insist on forcing it upon new editors... Fram (talk) 10:29, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Remember that 90% of the code is just making a visual editor work at all. The actual making it easy to use is, once you understand the scope, a secondary, much more easy task.
 * I look forwards to the day when you can just drag images around the screen, with smart positioning of left, right, or centre depending on where you lift the cursor, and a small note explaining what's happening. That'll need some new interface options added. But those interface options are relatively trivial compared to what's been done.
 * And that's probably the best way to look at VE: a grand technical achievement that, now that most of the biggest bugs are fixed, needs a lot of work on the user interface. Constructively setting out how you think features should work is probably the best thing to do just now. Adam Cuerden (talk) 12:13, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
 * The images can be only moved vertically, right now. The relevant bug is 51293. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:15, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
 * If I might suggest, if dragging isn't possible, why not just make it that when you select an image, you have a few buttons. A left arrow to move it left, a right arrow to move it right, a menu button between them that'll give you the chance to edit image properties (and to set the rarely-used centre), ideally a way to directly edit the caption without entering a menu, and perhaps a little drag bar at the top for moving it vertically? (Having a standardised place to grab and drag would be an excellent idea, by the way.I'd suggest adding a little bar at the top of an element when it's clicked on.)
 * As an additional suggestion, how about + and - buttons, for resizing? They could add 10 or 20 px per click. If you want more precision, use the menu interface.
 * Using Guided Tours, this should be relatively simple to teach people. You are aware of Guided Tours, I trust? Adam Cuerden (talk) 12:22, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi there, I definitely want to add your suggestions somewhere. Not sure if 51665 is a good candidate for that or I'd better create a new one. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:31, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
 * If memory serves, someone told me about a month ago that the planned improvements for images might appear sometime in October. I don't think that I've heard anything more recent.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:14, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Is there any publically available roadmap giving a rough indication when features such as this one will be implemented? Everything I can find here and on the wikimedia pages seems to be outdated. --WS (talk) 13:06, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hey WS, unfortunately no, the only "roadmap" I know about is the one about the general software rollouts at mw.org. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:49, 13 September 2013 (UTC) PS: Sorry, I forgot about mw:Roadmap, my bad. We are asking James if that can be updated soon :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 17:49, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
 * They are re-thinking the system for tracking projects. It's not clear whether this page will be updated from the official source (a Google spreadsheet) before it is superseded entirely.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:33, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

What's the right place to perform unsafe tests?
Hi, I'd like to experiment with the template data descriptions for some citation templates, but I don't want to mess with the production system. I've tried MediaWiki but that doesn't have any of the usual CS1 templates. I also took a look at http://simple.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org (supposedly a clone of simple Wikipedia), which does have the citation templates but doesn't seem to have the latest templatedata versions. Am I missing something? What's the right place to perform unsafe tests? - Pointillist (talk) 13:41, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
 * According to the WMF, the live English Wikipedia is the place to perform unsafe tests. If someone complains, just add "Beta" somewhere (e.g. in your edit summary) and you should be covered... Fram (talk) 14:00, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm sure I'd end up being covered, but in what, exactly? Call me old fashioned (mumbles into slightly foxed copy of K&R) but I assume all this "don't write a spec" stuff wouldn't save my hide if I trampled all over the docs for cite web etc... - Pointillist (talk) 14:58, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
 * With normal templates, I just clone the templates in userspace. I'm not certain if that works for Lua templates. If it doesn't, you can still create parallel templates with new names and make your changes in the new templates. How does this relate to Visual Editor?&mdash;Kww(talk) 15:36, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, it relates in that TemplateData is needed by templates in order to work with VE, I guess. The "cloning" suggestion is the one I would have given as well: in general, mw.org always has the newest version of VE, sometimes with features and bug fixes that will only reach the Wikipedias after some days. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:52, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
 * @Kww, that's an interesting suggestion: I just tried adding your cloned infobox person template to an article using VE and yes it did work (it's the lower infobox in this version of the Roma Downey article). Many thanks! But as you can see, this is messing up a production page. I reverted it immediately but that's not a comfortable way to experiment. I'd prefer something more sandboxed if possible. - Pointillist (talk) 16:06, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
 * @Elitre (WMF). Thanks for the quick reply. MW gets the code earlier, but it doesn't have the template content. I just wondered which is the preferred place. - Pointillist (talk) 16:08, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Pointillist, VE is active in the sandbox. Once you have your cloned template, test your changes using references from sandboxed articles.&mdash;Kww(talk) 16:21, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Kww is right, you can use sandboxes to test templates and articles! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:31, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Fair enough, if I clone articles and templates into my sandbox, I can do what I like. But then, if I'm going to clone templates, I might as well do that on MediaWiki so everyone can try them too. Anyway, thanks everyone for the feedback. Signing off this topic now - Pointillist (talk) 16:34, 13 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Problem...
 * OK, I've cloned cite web and its docs to User:Pointillist/Template/Cite web and User:Pointillist/Template/Cite web/doc, and I've cloned the SVG article (full of web citations) to User:Pointillist/sandbox/SVG. I then changed the first sixteen citations to use the cloned template rather than the original. It does work, but the bad news is that the template data descriptions aren't being seen by the transclusion dialog in Visual Editor. So I expect I'll have to clone the templates to MediaWiki in any case. - Pointillist (talk) 17:20, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hey, when you update a template with TemplateData, you then need to do a null edit on the template page, and then Template Data will be working. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 17:24, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
 * What confused it was you had rather than  (no initial colon). Changing this and the template data works fine.--User:Salix alba (talk): 17:42, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
 * @Elitre (WMF)&mdash;Darn! I had cloned it so I didn't think of the null edit, but you're right: that did the trick. Just FYI everyone, I was wrong in my earlier comment about MW getting the code earlier. According to http://simple.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:Version it's in fact running today's master. So I think my original question is now comprehensively answered. - Pointillist (talk) 17:54, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
 * @Salix alba&mdash;Thanks. Actually the leading colon wasn't the problem after all: I just add it back to the first citation in the Development history section and VE is still getting the descriptions. But it is so kind of you to help: I really appreciate it. - Pointillist (talk) 17:54, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
 * No, MW does get an earlier VE than other wikis: for example see the advanced toolbar there which is not available here yet. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 17:57, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Yup, MW is ahead of enwiki, but you'll find the new toolbar on the simplewiki labs site too (e.g. browse http://simple.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/SVG?veaction=edit). Perhaps the labs site is running the "nightly" alpha code, so maybe a week ahead of MW and a couple of weeks ahead of enwiki? - Pointillist (talk) 18:05, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't know about this, I'd use mw.org. :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:19, 14 September 2013 (UTC)
 * This last week was the mandatory all-staff meetings, so the schedule was a little odd and people weren't available nearly as much. I pinged one of the devs because a couple of the allegedly present new features were missing.  It sounded like they had a bit of a problem with something in the deployment process this round, so the Wikipedias might have gotten only part of the upgrade for VE last week.  They might just wait until the next regular update (Thursday).  Anyway, yes:  it looks like we've got the new toolbar here but not quite all of the pieces that belong in it (like subscripts and superscripts).  More relevantly, when they get this fixed, we'll be able to tell exactly what VisualEditor version you're working with, simply by clicking the "Beta" button.  Right now, it unhelpfully says "Version false" here and at Mediawiki.  It's Version 019a6f8 19:26, 15 September 2013 at Labs.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:10, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Template "spaced ndash" does not display correctly
When editing, for example, Kathleen Richards, the template shows a space before, but not after, the dash. In the actual article spaces show on both sides of the dash, as they should. VE makes it look like a space needs to be added though no change is needed. Chris the speller yack  13:25, 15 September 2013 (UTC)
 * According to spaced ndash the template is supposed to be used like Salt – Pepper . VE works fine if you se that syntax. I guess this does count as a bug as VE is not rendering correctly. The trailing space is actually there in the html code but for some reason its not displayed, perhaps something odd with the css. It might be a browser dependant bug.--User:Salix alba (talk): 17:16, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Infoboxes
Is VE still allowing users to easily delete infoboxes by mistake? I see a couple of these every few days. I thought this was supposed to be fixed? -- Neil N   talk to me  14:37, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
 * No, although it is assigned (to Trevor). Thanks for bringing it up again, I am also going to try to improve that title. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:11, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Template data with no parameters
Hi, it seems not to be allowed to add templatedata without any parameters. However, some templates don't have parameters, but it would then still be nice to give a little template description on what it does, no? -- Stratoprutser (talk) 17:07, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Is TemplateData necessary for this? Isn't this something the template inspector might/should somehow do on its own, grabbing text from the template documentation? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 17:14, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes you can have TemplateData with no parameters, but you do need the parameter block. The tutorial has an example with no parameters.--User:Salix alba (talk): 17:21, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

{ "description": "Displays a tick mark and the word fixed. It takes no parameters.", "params": { } }
 * It's better to have TemplateData even with no parameters (for example, the editor can then warn you if you add parameters when using the template). I requested 2 months ago that TemplateData with no parameters should be dealt with more nicely (bugzilla 51429). --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 17:41, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Also, then it shows this weird empty table:

TemplateData
{ "description":  "I take no parameters but I do start the table.", "params": { } } -- Stratoprutser (talk) 19:28, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

What kind of feedback, redux
Here, back in May I asked about what the goals of the development of VE were. The word then was that it was a goal that editors would be able to make edits in VE as fast as or faster as they can in the text editor. I also remember asking about this in IRC afterwards, and the word then was that this was no longer a goal. What is the case now? -- Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 01:51, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Atethnekos, I would imagine the goal is have people not freak out by seeing a wiki-markup code and feeling intimidated. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. ) when u sign ur reply, thx 13:38, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
 * You might find the video of the talk at wikimania has some hints to the direction of the project.--User:Salix alba (talk): 13:55, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks. At ~39:40 there is a mention that a goal is to make things which are too slow, faster.  I guess my question is with regards to that:  What is "too slow"?  If a task in VE is 50% slower than in wikitext, is that too slow?  25% slower?  10% faster?  Because then we can give feedback that is relevant to the goals, rather than feedback which is not relevant.  -- Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 18:09, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't think that "fast" is limited to how long it takes to open a page, or measures like that. This kind of list formatting is faster to do in VisualEditor because the process is different (select the list and click the button vs individually remove 15 blank lines and type 15 asterisks).
 * No one has told me of any specific stopwatch-type goals. If 25% slower doesn't produce complaints, then that's probably fine.  If 20% does produce complaints, then that's not good enough.  I think they're looking for something more like the subjective perception than exact numbers.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:26, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't think of the amount of time to open a page, actually. My first measures that I reported in IRC concerned  the number of keystrokes required to make a link in VE versus in wikitext.  Those of the sorts of measurements on which I would imagine giving feedback.  But I'm not sure what is worth reporting, because I'm not sure if there is actually a goal to make things as fast as wikitext, or 25% slower, etc.  I can certainly produce lots of feedback concerning my subjective perceptions (it would be really easy to do that), but is that really what is wanted?  "My subjective perception is that making a link to cat with an anchor "cats", is slower in VE than it is in wikitext."  I could write dozens of reports like that in an evening.


 * In order to have a complaint, it would seem one would need to know the goal. If it is 25% slower, and there is a goal to make it as fast, then I could complain; but if there is no goal to make it faster than 25% slower, then I shouldn't complain, since it does what I should expect.  So what you seem to be proposing is that as a user I get to set the goal myself as to whatever I think it should be able to do, and give feedback based on that.  Is that really what is wanted?  "My subjective perception is that making a link to France with anchor "France" is not 50% faster in VE than it is in wikitext."  Would feedback like that actually be welcomed here?  -- Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 19:03, 16 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I don't think the developers are looking for feedback on "fast" or "faster", at the moment. It seems to me that the developer priorities are (a) fixing the known error-producing bugs (including those that slow editing speed by unacceptable amounts of time); (b) expandng the functionality of VE (e.g., being able to add a row to a table, being able to left-align an image), and (c) making the user interface less cryptic (more intuitive). If there is any goal, it is almost certainly to significantly increase the percentage of edits done using VE (currently about 5% of all edits).


 * The other reason that I doubt that "fast" or "faster" is a goal is because it depends on what you compare that to. An editor who is very experienced with wikitext will almost certainly be faster at adding than someone using the VE template dialog to select the cn template and then add a parameter. The real issue is with inexperienced editors - if they struggle (or can't figure out) how to do (whatever), then making that easier to do in VE compared to wikitext is, almost by definition, making editing faster using VE.


 * I do think that eventually the developers will turn to making VE the choice of experienced editors (I, for one, hate working with wikitext for tables; a full-fledged table editor would mean, to me, using VE whenever I have to deal with table editing other than, say, changing a single cell). And at that point, raw speed is going to matter (even then, tools like Twinkle and Huggle are always going to be faster than VE editing). But at the moment, pure speed is distinctly a fourth priority, I think. -- John Broughton  (♫♫) 21:03, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Okay, thanks. It seems strange to me though that a goal would be to increase the percentage of edits using VE, but not also have a goal of making VE edits as fast as wikitext.  For some set of edits, if VE takes more time to make edits, and you increase the percentage of VE edits, then you have consumed more of editors' time, with no increased production, i.e., productivity would be lowered.  If VE does take more time to make edits, in order to justify increasing the percentage of VE edits, you would also have to increase the number of VE edits while preventing the number of non-VE edits from being lowered to such an extent that net productivity production is not lowered.   -- Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 21:32, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Actually, speed has been a significant focus for the devs recently. They've made good progress on some parts of it.  But I don't believe that they have set concrete benchmarks like "If it takes 125% of the time to do ____ in VE compared to doing that in wikitext, then that's good enough".  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:30, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * It wouldn't have to be absolutely concrete, but (if it is indeed the case that a goal is to increase the percentage of VE edits), it would have to be relatively concrete in order to not lower net production (i.e., it would have to meet a certain level of speed relative to a function of the number of VE edits, number of non-VE edits and speed of non-VE edits). -- Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 21:54, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Subscript levels
Start with One01 2 which appears as One01 2. Select "1" and press subscript. The result is One012 which appears as One012. Start with the same thing but instead select "0" and press subscript. The result is One012 which appears as One012. In the first case the subscript levels are preserved, in the second case they are not. -- Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 20:13, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Strikeout, subscript, undo
Start with OneTwo which appears as OneTwo. Select "Two", press subscript,and press undo, the lower strike through "Two" disappears in VE, with no change to code. Start with the same thing. Select "Two", press subscript, and press subscript again. The result is One Two. -- Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 20:39, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Cursor selecting an image, blank caption dialogue
Go to a page with an image, enter VE. Put your cursor down before the image, hold select and move cursor until image element is selected, but do not include any text after the image in the selection. An image icon will appear outside the image element. Clicking on the icon will produce a Caption dialogue which is blank. Clear the selection. Selecting the image element in the normal way by clicking on it and then pressing the image icon will no longer produce a Caption dialogue at all, not even a blank one. FF 23.0.1 Win 7. -- Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 21:46, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Bulleted list, image caption, also reference
Start with SometextOther text. Place cursor at start of "Other", press backspace, press bulleted list. Bulleted list appears in image caption, but disappears on save.

Also, I saw a claim at Bugzilla which said "It is currently not possible to add a reference to an image/media caption". But if you start with same, place cursor at start of "Other", press backspace, press reference, you can indeed add a reference to the caption. -- Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 22:57, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Error loading data from server: error. Would you like to retry?
I tried making a really long image caption at User:Atethnekos/sandbox8. If I try to VE the page I get a grey dialogue which says "Error loading data from server: error. Would you like to retry?" with "OK" and "Cancel" buttons.

I can edit this revision, where the string of As are not within an image caption. However, VE will not display all the As, but cut them off without making a horizontal scroll bar.-- Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 23:39, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Moving links on the page from outside the VE surface into the VE surface
Open up a page in VE. If I click/hold (click but do not release the click) on a link which is outside of the VE surface, I can drag it to the little bottom area of the VE surface (beneath any page content) and the link will appear in the page as a bulleted item. Each new link dragged into the surface will be a new bullet at a higher level of indentation from the last, up to 6 levels. Will take on the formatting of lines before it too. For example, if I drag the bold "edit source" link in, and then the non-bold "talk" link, the "talk" will appear bold as well. I cannot change the formatting of any of this text. Saving does not save any of this stuff. However, if I select some of this of the text, try to change some formatting, and then place the cursor above it all and then type stuff I can get a ♙ to appear. FF 23.0.1. Win7. -- Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 02:27, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm running Chrome on XP, and here is my experience attempting to reproduce this.
 * 1)start with non-existent page 2)type letter 3)drag external link to after character (nothing shows for me) 4)hit enter (move down like expected) 5)hit enter (move down again like expected) 6)hit enter (cursor is now immediately to the right of the letter you typed, not as expected). Also at this point: if you and, nothing will seem to happen no matter how many times you hit delete. If after step 6 you hit enter a few more times, and then try to delete everything as above, it won't work. If you try , then it will trim blank lines and then the character, but two blank lines won't go away. (I suspect what displays for Atethnekos might be hidden on me) Chris857 (talk) 02:45, 18 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I can move images in the same way as well, which seem to take the alignment that they already have, until I add so many that they become jumbled at least. -- Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 06:05, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Media(replacing images) in Visual Editor
When we talk about 'replacing a image' in VisualEditor, should the replaced/original image still be there or should it be deleted? If I have a Image1 already, I select it and select a Image2 from Media, now should both Image1 and Image2 be there or only Image2 should be there?


 * If one replaces an image, the original image shouldn't be visible in the article. If you want the original image to remain visible, then you are adding an image, not replacing it. As for how to add an image, versus replace an image, see WP:VE/UG. -- John Broughton  (♫♫) 03:26, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

nbsp and link
Start with a page that has One&amp;nbsp;Two, which shows up as One Two. Select the non-breaking space, try to turn it into a link to France. Instead, an anchor with text "France" appears and space is not part of anchor. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 06:28, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Are these tracked in Bugzilla?
I'm guessing that is from a tracked bug? Biosthmors (talk) 16:44, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

And that as well? Nowiki tags were added somehow with my edit. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. ) when u sign ur reply, thx 13:36, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hey Biosthmors, the second one is, see here. I think the first one is different though. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 17:25, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
 * It's not clear whether he wanted to change the label on the link, hoping to produce surgical emergency, or to repoint the link to the article surgical emergency. But whatever he meant to do, I think that VisualEditor assumed he wanted to change the label without changing the link.   would likely solve the problem.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:18, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Whatamidoing (WMF), I think you misread the first diff: VE didn't just change the label, but it produced an empty, invisible link, very difficult to edit again with VE. I think VE should prevent creating internal links with no displayed text (white space or nowikis or comments or ...), or at least warn users. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 19:37, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I reproduced that, and it wasn't easy at all, but as you said, that can be solved when VE does not allow creating such links or warns against them - I can't honestly remember if I already filed this, going to check. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:01, 18 September 2013 (UTC) PS: now at 54266, Biosthmors.

Issues I've just experienced with VE
DK  qwerty     02:26, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for trying VE, DKqwerty, and showing up here to give your feedback! I do appreciate it. As for the first issue, I added it here. About HTML comments instead, 49603 is assigned, I guess this proved to be a thougher thing to do and I don't have a deadline for it. Be sure to add yourself to the CC list to learn about changes to that bug in real time, though. Regards, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:00, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * And thank you for your attention to my concerns. I wish WMF only the best with VE. I won't be using it (I love raw markup), but I do think it has potential for those with basic computer skills. As long as you're listening to and addressing the concerns of established users as above, I'm sure it will turn out fantastic.     DK   qwerty     02:50, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks DKqwerty, I appreciate your approach. Make sure you try it again from time to time: if you're in love with the code VE can't possibly do anything against this :), but I bet it can prove itself useful for you as well for a few tasks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:18, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

tag management
Consider the following source:

H ∈ F(x)

That is, an "emphasized" 'H', a plain ' ', a plain '∈', a plain ' ', a "strong" 'F', a plain '(', an "emphasized" 'x', and a plain ')'.

With the new, non-source-based editor, there is a tendency to tag various characters improperly in the "background". For example, it is easy to accidentally write the following source:

H ∈ F(x)

which contains a non-plain ' ' -- which can look ugly, depending on the viewer's the computer system -- and a non-plain '∈' -- which, again, can look ugly. 157.181.161.111 (talk) 09:43, 17 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Hi there, I am not sure I understand this correctly :) This "tendency to tag characters improperly", is this something the user does or is it VE erroneously triggering this? Why should it be easier now for someone to accidentally write something improperly? It is my understanding that while you can forget a ' when source-writing, you should know if you really want to add bold or italics to some word in VE and make sure that doing so makes sense. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:26, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * As I've rarely used VE, I can't tell if it is really more difficult to "tag characters properly" (that is, as intended; I can confirm that you can't see if you've tagged characters properly (or as you intended), especially for invisible characters. I can also report that I would not attempt coding that in Microsoft Word unless forced to; WordPerfect's "Reveal codes" makes it easy to see what you're doing, even if it didn't allow you to edit the codes directly.
 * This may also relate to the reported (a while ago, so it may be fixed) VE change from the (probably improper Parsoid, but certainly something which should be allowed in any editor) fi0 to fi0 rather than fi0.
 * — Arthur Rubin (talk) 15:48, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * One think I often see in edits done by VE is that bold/italic is also applied to the surrounding space characters, like  which is ugly in wikitext (you would rather do  ) but the difference is not noticeable visually in VE (an italic word, an italic word). I think it would be better if bold/italic were not applied by VE on space characters at the beginning or the end of the selected text. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 16:05, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Subscript and superscript are on their way (you can already see them in the toolbar at mw.org), so VE must handle them properly now ;) Thanks NicoV for the explanation. If the problem above can be solved by just requesting this, I can file a bug - I don't think I recall an existing one about this. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:53, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * (ec) Arthur, yes the specific maths bug was fixed. The more general problem is a tricky issue, which affects all visual/wysiwyg editors, I've certainly had similar problems in Word. Without some special smarts quite what is italicised depends exactly on the selection region. It might be an idea to run something like html-tidy after an edit to clean up possible mistakes, but this could also change what was intended.--User:Salix alba (talk): 17:08, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I filed this. Regards. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:13, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

What is this all about?
On editing an image, I noticed that under the "more" option, you now have "computer code" with a curly bracket; I first thought this meant that I could add wikitext, but that turned out not o be true. I searched the help, but couldn't find this under images.

Looking further, I noticed that the help (the question mark" creates a popup with at the bottom: Version false, where false is a bluelink to this page. This seems like a fair description of the current version of VE, but I have anagging feeling that it was not intentional.

Going back to the help page, I see that it doesn't resemble the actual VE editor. "Getting started: the VE toolbar" shows the old version of the toolbar. It seems that when installing the new version, the WMF forgot to update the help pages... Fram (talk) 12:43, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Looks like it wraps things in . It appears on the main toolbar not just for images.--User:Salix alba (talk): 14:09, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * You might want to suscribe to VisualEditor/Newsletter, recent issues explained that a redesigned toolbar is on its way - although it is very temporary yet, and I think not all of the features now live at mw.org reached Wikipedia yet - so taking a screenshot each week to reflect these "tests" in the interface did not seem necessary, but of course anybody can do that if they feel it is needed :) The Version false issue is a known bug and it's patch-to-review already. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:35, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I asked about the "Version: false" problem, and was told that there was a problem in how Platform configures our servers. I have no word on when it will be fixed.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:39, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Elitre, I'm not interested in that Newsletter at all. I try to approach VE as a new editor would do. You also seem to have the misapprehension that this happened to me in a testwiki, when it actually happened here. r are you actually saying that they are still doing "tests" in the live English Wikipedia, and can't even be bothered to document these for the editors? Has trhe WMF actually learned anything from the RfC at all? Some basic respect for the editing community and the encyclopedia as it is, for starters?

Anybody can do that if they feel it is needed is an immensely stupid thing to say. Sorry to be blunt, and in general you are one of the few WMF people involved in this who has my respect, but this is beyond the pale. The help pages don't reflect the current VE environment at all, but no one at the WMF thinks this is a problem? I'm not talking about some minor error or discrepancy, but a rather large overhaul of the editing toolbar. If they feel the need to present us with a different toolbar each week, they can at least update the basic help page (insufficient as it is) to reflect this. Pointing to newsletters (or any other channel) is not sufficient at all, as that will only reach a select few established editors, not the vast majority of editors, and certainly not the newbies who are probably most in need of decent help pages. If the WMF wants to get back some support for the VE on the English Wikipedia, starting to drop the attitude and think from an editors point of view may help... Fram (talk) 07:57, 18 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Fram, I'll quote myself here. That's not what I meant, also because as a matter of fact, well, staffers did write/translate a lot of documentation for VE (I did that for it.wp, so I should know). But in the end, VE related pages (except maybe for FAQs, where official answers are needed) are not different from any other page here in that they are community-maintained (and the feedback page is a great example of this, since many amazing volunteers are now correctly handling it). So if someone finds that, say, the part about the toolbar should be updated, he/she can definitely do that as he/she would boldly do in other cases or ask someone to do that, but I don't think taking a different screenshot each and every single week is really that useful (given that, as many complain, "noone ever reads the guides!"). We would definitely update that part when we get some message from James that, except for minor cosmetic choices, the toolbar is now going to look like this for a while - which I believe will be the case this week - but we would of course have done that before if someone had requested this as a fundamental passage that would otherwise prevent the comprehension of the guide itself, rather than doing so only to imply WMF people suck at their jobs! Anyway, thanks for pointing out that you feel the pages should be updated soon - I'll look into this ASAP, I think I'd appreciate a different way of underlining that, though. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:40, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I'll update the help page. No idea if the WMF will like it though. Fram (talk) 11:03, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Fram, the help page needs to be, well, helpful. If you add helpful content, like an updated screenshot, it will be fine, and everybody will be grateful. If you are going to add a detailed explanation about how/why this all sucks, well, I'm afraid that's going to be reverted :p There's plenty of warnings about what does not work well in VE in all the related pages. The guide instead should only be about what should be done in order to achieve a certain result, and possibly, workarounds to avoid some tricky situations (like, the order in which you should add formatting to words, since it matters). I am confident this is not news to you, though. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:08, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Feel free to readd an updated help beneath my text, if you (WMF plural) are willing to keep it up to date. But users should be informed about the position of the English Wikipedia and the alternatives they have (and why) before proceeding. Fram (talk) 11:50, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * FYI, Fram is referring to having removed all the help content from that page (diff). - Pointillist (talk) 12:02, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, what I removed was largely incorrect, and what I added is correct, so that's an improvement in my book. Like I said, anyone is free to add an updated, correct help beneath the introductory text (perferably someone from the WMF, they should be most aware of what they have made and what it is supposed to do, and probably have documented their software anyway). Fram (talk) 12:08, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Fram, I don't want to be the one who rollbacks that. Please respect other Wikipedians, and ultimately, my work here. Feel free to add at the top of the previous version some kind of template warning the content is outdated, that can be removed as soon as the text is updated. But please let's not engage in pointless edit wars. Community liaisons' time is limited, and I really can't and don't want to play games while other users here deserve attention for real issues. Anybody reading this, please act accordingly. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:17, 18 September 2013 (UTC) PS: I really, really can't understand why you would engage in such a behaviour. Someone might call that vandalism, and that does not really help with anything.


 * (ec)Elitre, it is nothing personal against you (you are IMO one of the better of the WMF people in this whole farce), but please: "Please respect other Wikipedians" is a sentence the WMF should not use for the foreseeable future. Everyone's editing time is limited, and a whole lot of people (including me) have spent countless hours in correcting VE errors and in identifying errors and probable causes on this page. The respect the WMF has shown for this has been zero (not the few WMF people who have responded here, but the WMF in its actions wrt VE and the RfC). I have readded the outdated help below my text, for what it's worth. Please don't remove the text about the RfC and the preference for Wikitext editing, since that is the wish of the English Wikipedia community which you (WMF plural) should respect. (And no, it wasn't vandalism. Introducing a very buggy software which causes thousands of errors is vandalism; describing a current situation more correctly is not vandalism at all) Fram (talk) 12:28, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Fram, pages have purposes. That page is a guide to use the editor and nothing else should be included given it's already been added everywhere yet. Exactly like this is a page collecting bugs reports and feature requests, and everything else is simply misplaced and/or can't really help toward its goal which is ultimately improving VE, not removing/disabling it. This page and the guide ones are simply not the right places to discuss anything, and should only provide technical details (and viable solutions, of course, those are really welcome). Please fix the page as I suggested before. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:35, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't agree with you, I think telling on the page that is visible to VE users what is the current consensus is normal. I put back Fram text, changing some sentences to make it more neutral. I hope it will be kept. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 12:43, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * (ec)"its goal"? A page doesn't have a goal. The WMF has a goal, which isn't necessarily the same as the English Wikipedia's goal. The User guide doesn't have a goal, but the purpose should not be to improve VE, but to correctly guide the editors towards the best editing environment for them. Succinctly but correctly sttaing the current situation is not contrary to the purpose of that page. Please consider that that page is the first one new editors will encounter when they have questions about VE. The situation, the RfC, the alternative (Wikitext) should be given there and then, not on some more distant page. Fram (talk) 12:51, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * These are pages about the current status of technical things! Can we please just keep pages for what they are intended for? There are prominent notices about related, non technical information everywhere else yet. I'd appreciate any help in keeping "politics" out of this, guys. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:49, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * No. The User Guide is the first page new editors will encounter about the VE, and some background and status, as determined by the English Wikipedia community, is necessary there and then. That VE is barely beta and should only be edited if you want to be a tester is the conclusion of the English Wikipedia. Either the WMF provides the user guide, keeps it up to date, and tells us to stay the fuck out of it, or they expect us to update it, but then it will reflect the consensus of the English Wikipedia, not what the WMF wants it to be. But don't expect us to do your (WMF) dirty work. Fram (talk) 12:54, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

This is getting surreal. It is the responsiblity of the programmer to write the code, test it and to document it. It is the responsiblity of management to see this has been done. Documentation includes the user guide and help pages. Even if management do sign off a data structure for the code that can never work, it is still management responsibility to ensure their programmers document the current version before it goes live. Once they have done that they can release this to the community in the form of a wiki, and the community can improve on the wording.

Fram is totally correct in raising the issues here- the page is called Feedback which it is- it would work better if every constructive comment weren't answered by a rebuttal or an attempt to belittle the writer, feedback should lead to change. But, if management can't accept their responsibility to commission and ensure the developers are testing and documenting their work, they do need a page to collect bug reports- and this wrongly is where they hope to find it. That is feedback- and I don't need to be belittled- you are welcome to contact me by email to help sort out the structure of the project. -- Clem Rutter (talk) 13:20, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * We are not talking about documenting "code". We are talking about updating existing documentation about features that do not need explanation from the devs side, but just a new screenshot, that everybody can take, upload and explain since the related pages are community maintained after the content is pasted from the original page on mw.org. And we are talking about features that just appeared and that are changing every day - as I said before, it did not seem necessary to me (and probably, to my colleagues as well) a real-time updating of that specific part of the page. But since this was asked, well, of course we can update it, and I had already said we were going to, except this all was not really meant to have a real improvement of that page, as I had already sadly foreseen. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:44, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Actually, thanks for for the AGF, my intention originally simply was to indicate that the user guide wasn't updated, and that that didn't surprise me. After your dismissive responses here, I decided to update the page after all, but contrary to your conclusion, my changes were an actual improvement of the page, which was not helpful in providing any necessary overview for the editor, but went straight to the details. Oh, and features never need explanation from the devs side, they developed them. By the way, the original page is equally outdated... Fram (talk) 14:03, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, it is (that's why it's good to have a wider, solid community here). And if we go and update both now, chances are we'll have to do it again tomorrow, since Thursday is usually VE update day :) (but that's ok, of course). --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:08, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Mh, I also get a weird error message when I try to edit MediaWiki. I need to investigate this later today. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:23, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * @(WMF): Thanks for the instant rebuttal, which I predicted in my very constructive post. To quote you " We are talking about updating existing documentation about features that do not need explanation from the devs side" Exactly- that is why you have to manage programmers and insist they have tested and documented their work- thoroughly, this is management. You have to point out that user documentation is targetted at the user. When doing rolling releases, code is frozen and the management team supervises the testing, it is a pain but you must insisted that a paid documenter within the team copyedits all known user guides and help pages. As the best coders will never be programmers, the best programmers and coders will not have sufficient language skills to copyedit. Let alone make themselves understood in Italian, Spanish, German, English and French (the easy languages)- dyslexia is a common attribute of a superb programmer. When the documentation is complete it is dated (especially in the case of a beta) and the senior dev, signs it off, the manager checks and releases the new version to the community for comment.
 * When I taught undergrads documentation thirty years ago there was an easy to find help guide that explained to them as potential computer professionals how to manage and produce user documentation- and I can' t fremember what it was called now. Today a simple google search produces a tsunami of dross. Reference: Tryggeseth, Eirik Report from an experiment : impact of documentation on maintenance in Journal of empirical software engineering. Kluwer Academic 2: 2, 201-207 1997 ISSN 1382-3256 Tryggeseth has produced some interesting metric, finding many projects do neglect the documentation at a cost to themselves, and WMF can concurr with that. On own article on Documentation barely scratches the topic, so perhaps a starting point in discussing it with WMF would be to the compulsory documentaion module at an accepted university. I found one in Oz, Australian Doc Course.
 * WMF reveals a great flaw in the management structure if it believes they should release undocumented code- but the last response along with using the wrong data-structure for the buffer does help to explain why so much time has been wasted. Training newbies to use this software is impossible if there are no help pages. A persistent chorus you use when training is-- and if you forget what I have told you just look at the help pages. With a room of 30 newbies, you answer so many questions without referring back to their screen-- saying highlight the text and press the 5th button from the left Oops its changed doesn' t make a good session. Features that have just changed are the ones that need most documentation to prevent this from happening. So if you would like to take all this on board and get the WMF to formulate a considered response: one that starts to implement the management changes I have highlighted. -- Clem Rutter (talk) 18:39, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Strike, underline, super, sub
If I write "One1", select the "1", set it to strikethrough, and then set it to subscript, the strikethrough appears above the number. Mutatis mutandis for underline and superscript permutations. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 18:45, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I realize now: Sometimes that is the expected behaviour, but sometimes it is not.  It depends if you want the strike code within the sub or super code or not. It doesn't seem like VE has a way of controlling if the strike tags occur inside or outside the sub and super tags. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 19:33, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I am unable to replicate this in Safari on a Mac. I am unable to replicate this for subscript in Firefox on a Mac.  Superscript works correctly if superscript is applied first, but not if it's applied after strikethrough and underline.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:00, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

References, subscript
Say I edit a page with Claimsubclaim It looks great in VE to start. If I put my cursor between the ref and "subclaim" however, and add another reference, it doesn't add the new reference at the same subscript level as the old one. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 19:06, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * It assumes that you want a regular ref. You can select the new ref and set it to subscript, at which point the code is exactly what you want.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:07, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Subscript
Say I start with SomethingOneTwoThreeFour. In VE I select "twoThree" and then press subscript. The result is "TwoThree" becomes second-level subscript. Pressing subscript again makes it normal script, pressing subscript again makes it first-level subscript. Mutatis mutandis for superscript. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 19:18, 17 September 2013 (UTC)


 * If you have SomethingOneTwoThreeFour, and you click a subscript button on the selection "twoThree", what do you think it ought to do?  SomethingOne TwoThree Four?  Or SomethingOneTwoThreeFour or SomethingOneTwoThreeFour (toggling the formatting)? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:12, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * If that action were considered by itself, I think the action does what it ought, or at least doesn't do what it oughtn't. The issue I see is that it is inconsistent with other aspects. If I select just "Two" in that example, and press subscript, it would become normal script.  It seems strange to me that selecting "Two" by itself and pressing subscript makes it normal script, but selecting "Two" along with a normal script "Three" and pressing subscript creates a second-level subscript for both of them.  Also, this creation of second-level subscript is so tricksy, in that this seems to be the only sort of way to create second-level subscripts.  If you don't select a string which already contains texts at two different levels, then there is no way to make a second-level.  I'm not a designer, but I imagine sub and super would be better implemented like the indent buttons.  Selecting a next and press the "down level" button would bring it to lower level and pressing the "up level" button would bring it to a higher level.  So if you select "Two" in that example and pressed "down level", you would end up with "Two" at second-level subscript.  If you pressed "up level", it would be at normal script.  If you selected "twoThree" and pressed "down level", "Two" would end up a second-level subscript, and "Three" would be at first level subscript. Etc. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 19:37, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Actually, my idea there is no good. There would have to be a way of setting the order of the tags as well, not merely the number of them.  Maybe a little pop up that can be extended horizontally for a number of positions.  And at each position one could set super, sub or normal. So you could create things like  x1 23 as well as x12 3 -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 20:37, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Unexpected underline
Start with a page with One</nowiki>TwoThree<u>FourFive, which appears as One</nowiki>TwoThree<u>FourFive. Select the entire text, press subscript. Looks fine. Save, I end up with what appears as One TwoThree FourFive -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 19:50, 17 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Realistically speaking, when would an editor encounter this situation? Or is this just of academic interest? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:23, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure when an editor would encounter this situation. I hope it is not just academic, but maybe it is. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 20:40, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Space link
Type in "One". Select "One". Press the link icon. Press delete. Press space. Press enter. The result is One which displays as One. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 06:54, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * One part of the problem: the search for possible links seems to use the same algorithm as the regular Wikipedia search function (test: enter "One" in the upper right search field of Wikipedia itself, "One Day International" will be shown as first possible match. "One" itself is only second place). It would probably be better to display more similar (aka shorter) strings first. GermanJoe (talk) 08:51, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Copy/paste a non-breaking space within VE
Edit a page with One&amp;nbsp;Two which displays as One Two. Select the entire text, copy, past at end of the string. Displays in VE fine at first. Saving however produces One&amp;nbsp;TwoOneTwo which displays as One TwoOneTwo. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 07:01, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Reproduced, tracked.--User:Salix alba (talk): 08:44, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Pasting into Wikipedia search field will paste into VE as well
Start with a blank page. Type "France". Select "France". Copy. Click on Wikipedia search field, paste. Will paste into search field and VE surface. Tried in Monobook and Vector. Doesn't work with copying text that is outside of VE surface, even if from another VE surface. FF 23.0.1 Win7. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 07:45, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Does the same with the "Language search" field under "Display languages" after clicking the "..." button in the language settings dialogue. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 08:08, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Same with Twinkle boxes, like the xfd and rpp "reason" text fields. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 08:14, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * OT: you really like France, don't you? :D --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:56, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * That's why the issue above is so important. If the links were the other way around, I wouldn't have even reported it.  -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 15:42, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * And I wouldn't have written to you earlier if I did not appreciate what you are doing. Today is really not my day if I am not even allowed to write a little joke. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 18:57, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Maybe I'm misunderstood. That last thing I wrote there in small was a joke as well. I facetiously imply that the reason I thought the issue was worth reporting was just because the link to France disappeared, as if I think every such link is important because I so "really like France".  I'm not very good at humour. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 19:21, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Probably, neither am I, so it is very good that I am not paid for this. Anyway, there are some fr.wp editors here that certainly appreciate those mentions :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 19:30, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Well they better not become complacent or Chad may come roaring up from the rear and take their place as the most well-recognized country named with a single syllable. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 20:20, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Image resizing proposal
Summary: all image resizing in VE should be either (a) prevented, or (b) should use relative measurements rather than pixels.
 * (a) VE currently provides convenient grab handles for resizing images, and in the proposed image property dialog (bug [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38129 38129]) there will be a feature for setting the image size manually. I question whether we need to support this. It is just making it easy for inexperienced users – i.e. people who don't know about the Forced image size guidelines – to do something they shouldn't be doing. If an experienced user has a valid reason for using a non-standard image size, they can edit the source.
 * (b) If however we do support this feature, the resulting wiki-code should express the size in relative terms rather than absolute pixels. That is, any attempt to re-size an image using VE should convert the pixel-based width into the equivalent upright parameter, using the contributor's current or default thumbnail size preference to determine the ratio by which the image should be enlarged or reduced. This approach would transparently promote best practice rather than undermining it. It would also help with bug [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47804 47804].

Either way, this proposal modifies bug [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50379 50379]. Thoughts? - Pointillist (talk) 12:52, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I think that in article namespace, most images are photos or schematics that should be displayed using "thumb". VE should encourage to respect that, which is a common requirement on all wikis I believe, so it should rather use relative size than fixed size (and not a directly accessible option because by default you should only use the default "thumb"). I believe other kinds of images (icons, flags, ...) should be generally displayed using a fixed size, but I don't think they are often used directly in the main namespace (rather through templates): so it should be an option in VE but requiring more manipulations to access it. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 13:22, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Deployment to other wikis
Extract from VE Newsletter: "the next group of Wikipedias to have VisualEditor offered to all users is being determined at this time [...] The current target date is Tuesday, September 24 for logged-in users only". Sad, and unbelievable... VE development team doesn't manage to cope with the flow of bug reports generated with enwiki and a few more wikis, articles are still damaged by VE, ... but they plan to release this to even more people so that even more people have to fix the damages. Great. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 13:29, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi, NicoV. I believe the developer team is hoping for feedback from other language projects as well, as editors there may have different behaviors and observations that can help influence the development of the VisualEditor's general function. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 15:12, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I understand that, but there's currently about 800 open reports on bugzilla just for VE... Don't you think that fixing the bugs/implementing the enhancements to help stop the degradations of articles/fixing and enhancing the existing features/developing the new features should be done before looking for more and more feedback ? If you want feedback from other wikis, do some advertisement there to find beta testers, but please stop releasing this to unexperienced users. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 15:28, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I think that getting perspectives from people whose projects have developed very differently from the ones already in use is pretty important. For instance, there's a really nice conversation above about the order of the toolbar. There's no reason that people in other projects shouldn't get a chance to use VE and help weigh in on that organization and what makes sense for them. I have no doubt that developers will continue working on the listed issues at the same time. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 15:34, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * And what is the problem with trying to get volunteers by advertising VE on other wikis, which won't result in damaging many articles with VE ? I understand that WMF won't fix the damages on articles, so they don't mind... --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 16:11, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I have mixed feelings about another early release. On the one hand it runs a risk of alienating another batch of editors, this may actually be bad for VE's long term future as its going to be harder to turn alienated editors back to VE. On the other hand if you watch the wikimania video you see one member of the team Timo Tijhof is actually focussing on i18n and l10n issues, which are the sort of thing you will only find by testing on many languages. So really it depend on whether he is twiddling his thumbs or not. --User:Salix alba (talk): 16:28, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure but I wonder if "Generally speaking, languages that depend on the input method editor are not going to receive VisualEditor this month" means that it's not going to be tested on languages more difficult than the existing ones... And again, if you need tests on specific issues like i18n and l10n, why starting with volunteers is not a first step before going again to "all logged-in users" when VE is still damaging articles for simple languages like English ? --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 16:38, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Wow. That looks like yet another route to disaster: even more roll-out into even more complex internationalization edge-cases, annoying even more editors in even more languages, most of which the dev team are unlikely to be able to communicate with except via translators, when the basic core of the software isn't working properly yet. For goodness sakes, if the WMF can't yet make the VE work correctly in the easy case of the Latin-alphabet languages, why spread its scarce resources out on premature internationalization, when it would be far easier/quicker/cheaper to concentrate its efforts on getting the core right first, then internationalizing later, when the internationalization task will be much easier and the software far easier to support, because i18n and l10n issues won't be confused by having to be fixed at the same time as mystifying core bugginess? -- The Anome (talk) 19:39, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Ability to sign posts
I can't sign my posts with Visualeditor! Guru-45 (talk) 14:11, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * That's ok! You shouldn't need to :) but there's 51154 for that. Have a nice day, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:16, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

The Link button
The Link button does not provide an easy way to convert the URL into clickable text and this still has to be done in the source editor. That is unless I'm missing something but I certainly could see anywhere to attach a 'label' to links. MagikGimp (talk) 14:26, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * When you type a word, use the linking tool and paste a URL, that should create an external link. Doesn't this work for you? Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:31, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Please take a look at WP:VE/UG. If that isn't clear, suggestions are definitely appreciated. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:05, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Kevin O'Brien Sandymount
Kevin O'Brien is FROM sandymount, not just a resident 83.71.59.251 (talk) 15:55, 18 September 2013 (UTC)


 * This page is for feedback about the new VisualEditor software. Comments about an article should go on that article's Talk page. In this case, that page is, I believe, Talk:Sandymount. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:10, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Unicode template
Take a page with [Frnce], which displays as [France]. In VE the entirety of "France" becomes an uneditable element.

Take a page with Frnce, which displays as France. In VE what is displayed is a blue "France" as an uneditable element. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 17:38, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

I could do the same things with other such templates as well. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 17:51, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Other template trickery.
In wikitext editor create One Two  Then open this in VE. Select all, turn into a link. VE will show "Two" as part of anchor, along with "One". Save, only "One" is part of anchor. I can't seem to reproduce this if I create the text and template first in VE, however. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 18:03, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Keystroke template link
In wikitext I can write Ctrl, which displays as Ctrl. In VE there doesn't seem to be any way to do this. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 18:36, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * It was hellish to get there, but I did it. Required steps:
 * Click the transclusion button
 * Type in "key press" for the template name
 * Then it will take you to the "add parameters" screen
 * Type in "1" for the name of the first parameter, then "Ctrl" as its value
 * Type in "2" for the name of the first parameter, then "Alt" as its value
 * Type in "3" for the name of the first parameter, then "Del" as its value
 * Click "Apply changes"
 * Now, since it's not possible to make a template into a link, you have to do the following workaround:
 * Type some text in immediately after the template (for example, in this case I typed the string "jsfdh")
 * Select the text that you just typed AND the template itself (so holding down the mouse button and then dragging from the end of the text all the way to the beginning of the template)
 * Then click the link button, type in "Control-Alt-Delete", and hit enter
 * Note that now the template is a link (and the jibberish text is too, but we'll take care of that)
 * Finally select the jibberish string that you added and delete
 * Voila! ...Long story short, VE does not allow for positional arguments in templates at the moment (I think) and also does not let you turn a template into a link without following the above workaround. Bugs, yummy.  Theopolisme ( talk )  20:44, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I thought I tried that, but I must have did something wrong. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 20:53, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * - Nice work; I did the same, except I didn't surround the template with text to be later removed. So yes, it would be nice if VE allowed you to turn a template into a link. But one question - What do you mean by "VE does not allow for positional arguments in templates at the moment"? I ask because Template:Key press has no templatedata at the moment, and I think that's the only thing preventing there from being parameters 1, 2, 3, etc.. -- John Broughton  (♫♫) 22:06, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, ideally templates like (and others that allow for a flexible number of parameters -- so for example something that generates, say, a bulleted list of all given parameters...ignore the uselessness of that example that I got off the top of my head) should have some sort of automagically expanding list:

__Parameters__ 1: _______________ (+) 2: _______________ (+) [this row initially hidden; appears when the above plus link is clicked]
 * As I write this I realize how infeasible it is, at least for now. But in the future there could possible be some sort of new "flexibleparameterlist" option in the templatedata that, if set, would be an integer declaring the maximum number of parameters that the template would accept.
 * I feel ridiculous reading over this, but it's my vision nonetheless.  Theopolisme ( talk )  22:51, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * There is a bug for specifying auto-numbered parameters which is kind of related.--User:Salix alba (talk): 23:43, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Indeed it is. Thanks for the link.  Theopolisme ( talk )  00:04, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Pawns added
Pawns are still added,. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 20:51, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

&lt;div id="myEventWatcherDiv" ... &gt;
added at the beginning and the end of the article:. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 20:54, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Tracked by filter 345 and . Seems to be caused by a DivX plugin.--User:Salix alba (talk): 23:25, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

adobe in design
very bad 175.101.15.18 (talk) 00:35, 19 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Sorry, that section heading and comment are not at all clear. Are you saying something about an article? (If so, you're on the wrong page; please post on the article's talk page.) Are you saying something about VisualEditor? In that case, please add some detail. -- John Broughton  (♫♫) 03:58, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Duplication of &lt;references&gt; element
Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 11:37, 15 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I tried to duplicate this and got something different. Are we missing something? Are these 2 different, unrelated bugs? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:58, 16 September 2013 (UTC)


 * It looks to me like VE is trying to be "helpful" by putting quote marks around all of the reference names in the entire section, as well as the reference groups. (1) This totally baffles the diff'ing tool, which reports extensive differences even though you only intended a minor spelling change. (2) In addition, you replicated the reference group duplication issue.


 * So yes, you've uncovered two bugs, since allowing the tool to perform such extensive text modifications is highly undesirable. Among other things, overly "helpful" editing programs that make such extensive modifications to files make change-tracking an onerous chore. If our desire is to achieve HTML5-compliant markup, we should write a dedicated robot to perform this task. This is not something for VE to attempt. Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 03:26, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I was able to reproduce that exact behaviour earlier today, so I am going to add this later to Bugzilla, thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:54, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Now at 54265 for your convenience. I think the "helpful" edits are known behavior yet. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:30, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Erica! Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 18:10, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Does it work?
A random sampling of the 30 most recent VE edits in the mainspace gave me this (next to a number of good edits, and some vandalism and spam, not directly VE related, assuming that VE doesn't have a higher vandalism rate).


 * 1) Nowikis: these are still being added, e.g. here and here (note that the second one was corrected in VE by the same editor)
 * 2) Internal URLs, and URLs as non-working wikilinks: here. VE has made it much easier (or visible) to add URLS straight into the text, even though this is usually not wanted; but the difference between external link and "new page" isn't always clear to new editors apparently (also because a redlink doesn't show up red in VE, another VE stupidity)
 * 3) Difference between reference section and plain text: here, after sources 1 - 24, an editor adds in plain text source 25, again a straight URL (see above).
 * 4) Correct positioning of links: Stuff like this is still common
 * 5) Underscores in links: here. Why? This works, but goes against what has been practised for years. Why does VE add these?
 * 6) Infobox removal: here, in a series of edits, you get the whole range of problems, including infobox removal, incorrect wikilinking; mistaking text and headers (later corrected)

Note that I have not corrected these: after the RfC and the WMF reply to it, I no longer am interested in correcting VE errors, since they are obviously not a worry to (at least some people of) the WMF either, who are actievly encouraging newbie testing of their beta code in the mainspace. They can clean up their own mess or find another sucker to do so. I'll stick to reporting the problems their software and attitude causes. Fram (talk) 10:33, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * You're probably mistaken, because VE can't cause any problem: as was said recently on the RfC talk page, almost all of the page corruption issues are now fixed !!! I tried to ask about how this statement can be true, when you see the number of problems still present, but no answer... --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 11:22, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, in that case, all the above are probably considered improvements, and it is a good thing I didn't "correct" any of them... Sarcasm aside, there have been improvements (the most important being the lower number of edits with VE), but that's the advantage of releasing very prematurely of course; there are so many things to improve and so few things that actually work that any new version is better than the last one... Fram (talk) 11:35, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

You can add to that above list of typical, recurring, VE problems things like this, the moving of images inside words. Of course, this list doesn't include the opposite, things people want to do but can't, since these won't show up as errors but as Wikitext editors (best-case scenario) or editors that return to being readers (worst-case scenario) since they can't find a way to do whatever they wanted to do (which was, ironically, the reason VE was created; so people wouldn't be scared off by a too difficult editing enviornment...). But on the plus side, the use of edit summaries has (allegedly) skyrocketed with VE, so what are we actually complaining about? Fram (talk) 12:13, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

And of course, the reverse of adding URLs as wikilinks, the addition of wikilinks as external links:. It is obvious for everyone who has looked at VE edits (or who has actually used VE) that the interface to add links is not clear to new editors at all... Fram (talk) 12:30, 17 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Discoverability is one of the biggest problems with the current state of the VE. Wikitext, although gnarly and complex, does at least give new users an example they can copy, modify and learn from to produce new articles. The VE has no problem whatsover in its functions as a rich text editor, where the functionality is familiar to anyone who has used a word processor: the problems start when attempting complex operations for which there is no intuitive visual metaphor and no obvious example to follow. The VE's designers should look at the state of the art for visual editors for TeX, where in spite of decades of visual editor development, most TeX users still choose to edit the source directly. In both cases, the complex notation is the result of a complex data model, not syntactic obfuscation, and the data model can't be made less complex without removing the ability to do the very things the system is designed to do in the first place. I don't believe these problems are insuperable, but I do believe that solving them is an open research problem with no obvious solution or solution strategy, and not something that can be forced to fit a software project development schedule. Hence the VE's current problems. -- The Anome (talk) 12:48, 17 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I said along time ago that using the current data structure just will not work, and years of effort will be put into fixing fixes that fix fixes. It is a kindness to the devs to stop using this code base and start with a far more appropriate model. The edit buffer needs to be separated from the screen display buffer and the wikitext display buffer ( and may be other edit buffers could then be added (TEX .html5  .doc?)). The devs will have built up an immense dossier documenting wikitext/ foibles and this is more valuable than the code base anbd will make the datastructure conversion a lot easier.
 * The concept of a VE if fine- this just isn't a VE. We need to seemlessly move between infoboxes, lede and subsections. We need to start by making {- { sfn }-}{- { efn }-}s and then prompt the {- { cite for the antomatically generated /= = Bibliography. We need predictive text to detect double brace, double square brace and flip into a template editor. I suspect that WMF has failed to understand that the user base is a couple of generations ahead in in their requirements for a VE, and WMF sees considered rejection of the current VE experiment as Luddism.
 * WMF needs to get the research proposed by The Anome started, and talk to some of the more prolific contributors to this page either in person, Skype or regional meetups. I await the invitation email. -- Clem Rutter (talk) 14:51, 17 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Correct. The learning experience from writing the VE so far, and the underlying structure of Parsoid, is the most valuable thing we have from the whole exercise. While it's not completely impossible that the current approach can be yet be made to work by sheer force of will, if this was my project I'd be starting to re-architect the thing now, while still keeping the existing VE code base going until the "new VE" was ready. Using HTML as an internal data structure is a hack that only superficially makes the problem easier, while actually making it much harder. There is a no need for a visual GUI editor to be a WYSIWIG editor, and the current emphasis on WYSIWIG using invisibly "decorated" HTML, as opposed to showing a view that visibly shows the true hierarchical structural "guts" of the page, templates and all, allowing the user to make a real mental model of the way pages are built, is a huge handicap to making a visual editor that is actually workable. The current problems of invisible "slugs", and the fact that loading a page takes over a minute in some cases, show just how broken the current VE design is, at more than one level..  -- The Anome (talk) 18:32, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * (Changing Fram's list to a numbered one, so I can answer more easily. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 21:41, 17 September 2013 (UTC))
 * So, first, thanks for reporting diffs, although much of this stuff has widely been addressed here before :) so I'll focus on some of these points. I am not sure why we should blame VE if some users can't use it with confidence yet. Just for example, I would not blame it if users deliberately add markup ignoring the warning message, or if they don't precisely select the words they want to link, or if they don't know how to add a reference, or if they choose to add internal links in the text, or even if they realize they made a mistake precisely pasting URLs, and then managed to auto-correct but forgot to change the underscores to spaces (it's the only way to replicate that, it's not an old bug reappearing). What we can and should do here is asking that red links are clearly recognized as such, or that VE does not accept URLs pointing to Wikipedia (I asked for it myself), or that it does not include spaces at the beginning or at the end of the word you are formatting, and that it makes it reasonably difficult to accidentally delete infoboxes. And this is all being done. I recognize VE may not be as intuitive as we want it to yet, and that's why, well, we wrote a guide so that editors can learn more about how it works. But those points (IMHO) do not really justify much rage against VE, given that many mistakes (and we are not considering vandalisms here) can (and do) happen very frequently with the old editor as well, and that, as you noticed, people are also learning how to revert themselves or fix their edits anyway. I'll welcome - and report on Bugzilla - any advice about how to furtherly improve the current state of the editor or about bugs we haven't heard of yet. Thanks a lot, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 22:08, 17 September 2013 (UTC)


 * 1) Nowikis: For intentional additions, I believe there's a request for a bigger, more intrusive warning.
 * 2) Internal URLs, and URLs as non-working wikilinks: I'd say that approximately none of those URLs were wanted, so it really wouldn't matter if they had been perfectly formatted. But when a user asks for a link to " ", there isn't any realistic way for software to distinguish between the user wanting a link to Apple.com vs wanting a link to [//Apple.com Apple.com].
 * 3) Difference between reference section and plain text: This happens regularly in the wikitext editor, too.
 * 4) Correct positioning of links: I thought that had been fixed. (They had a couple of regressions this last round.)
 * 5) Underscores in links: VE only adds the underscores if the user does.  To replicate this, you must paste the name into VE with the underscores present, and then change something in the link label (capitalization, in this case).  If you paste the underscores into the link inspector but later remove them without making any other changes, then it works correctly.  NB that this would have been piped regardless of the underscores:  there is no other way to get a working link with that odd capitalization.
 * 6) Infobox removal: This is on the list. It can't get fixed too soon as far as I'm concerned, but I believe it's going to be at least weeks from now.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:30, 17 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Some of these happened in the Wikitext editor as well, but not as often, and anyway, the VE was supposed to be better, easier to use; if the same errors are made, and then some, and simultaneously it isn't really widely useed at all, then what is the actual purpose or benefit of it? Fram (talk) 07:27, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * That's precisely why there's a prominent "beta" notice on it, and users are also getting a nice message now (the first time they use it) about it possibily being buggy. For everything else, if we want to be fair we should give it a significant amount of time even after this beta stage so that people can actually give it a fair try and decide whether they find it useful or not. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:19, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Any indication on when this beta stage (which only became Beta after complaints from the community) will be considered to be done? And any indication why beta software isn't shown to some editors only, instead of everyone on every large wiki version, even against the wishes of those communities? Fram (talk) 09:33, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * We have received no information about when the beta stage will end. I have told James that I believe any answer involving "2013" is the wrong one, but it's his decision, not mine, and he has not provided any information about his current thinking on this.  I infer from this lack of information that the answer is "not soon".  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:46, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

More importantly, Whatamidoing: "Nowikis: For intentional additions, I believe there's a request for a bigger, more intrusive warning." No, there has been a RfC which has requested that intentional wikimarkup additions are supported, not that the user gets a bigger, more intrusive warning. Please respect the results of the RfC instead of ignoring it. Fram (talk) 07:27, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Let me re-phrase: "I believe that  exists and is relevant".  The request to support wikitext has been closed as WONTFIX.  It is my impression that the devs are fully committed to their position on that.  If you have other ideas for managing this (perhaps automatic removal of wikitext markup symbols?), then please share them.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:46, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * We can change the tag that warns about nowiki edits to one that disallows nowiki edits in VE. We can change the FAQ and User Guide to reflect here, on the English Wikipedia, what the English Wikipedia community thinks about all this, instead of reflecting mainly or solely what the WMF wants us to think. We can disable VE through technical means. We can reurge all people to tell the devs that whether they are committed to their position or not is none of our business, and that we won't support software that doesn't support our requirements. We can stop correcting any VE errors or edits and let the problems slowly increase until the WMF decides that perhaps ignoring community wishes isn't the smartest move. There are probably enough other possibilities. Bugzilla bombarding? Fram (talk) 07:13, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * We can't change the nowiki tag warning to disallow, as there are a number of legitimate uses for nowiki. We could potentially disallow &lt;nowiki/&gt; as thats almost never used on purpose. I'm not sure quite which bug is the main nowiki one, but it should really be the put to highest priority. If they could get VE to a state where it "does no harm" that would ease a lot of the angst here. I'm pinging on this as the mangling of text is such a big issue. Errors like  which changed   into   really should not be happening. The nowiki are occur at such a terrific rate already 50 this morning . --User:Salix alba (talk): 07:55, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, the devs won't disable the automated nowiki to "allow" such markup, even though there are a much larger number of legitimate uses for it. So I don't see why we couldn't do the same in reverse. Fram (talk) 09:04, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Two links with no space between anchors.
If I write "OneTwo", select the entire text, make it a link to France, and then select just "Two" and make it a link to Germany, the result is that the entire text becomes an anchor for the link to Germany, and the link to France disappears. FF 23.0.1 Win7-- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 18:20, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * This is probably desirable DWIMmish behavior. If you had a link to French and wanted to pipe it to French language, you would not want slightly sloppy selection of just "rench" to result in  .  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:54, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * The same thing happens if you have a string like OneTwoThreeFourFive which appears as OneTwoThreeFourFive and you select "Five" and make it a link to Five. It seems strange to assume that what is meant is to change "Four" to Five as well. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 19:11, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Copy paste from bulleted list
Take a page with: Three
 * One
 * Two

Four

Select "Two", copy. Place cursor at end of "Four", paste. No bullet is added, result is last line being "FourTwo" Start again. Select "Two Three", copy. Place cursor at end of "Four", paste. A new bullet is added. Result is:

Three
 * One
 * Two

Four Three
 * Two

-- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 01:22, 18 September 2013 (UTC)


 * This is pretty typical behavior for word processing documents. I'm not sure what else you would have expected.  The paragraph formatting belongs to the end of the line.  When you select "Two Three", you are selecting "Two", the end of the paragraph (with the data that defines it as a list item), and "Three".  When you select just "Two", you aren't including the end of the line.  You can reproduce this by copying the entire paragraph/list item.  The "Three" isn't necessary.
 * I think that most users will not be surprised by this, but is there something that you'd rather have it do? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:03, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hmmm, I'm not sure. I would personally rather the cases be the same. I.e., either 1) when one copies just the "Two" it copies the formatting; or 2) when one copies both "Two" and "Three" together it doesn't copy the formatting. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 23:01, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

More report:

Take a page with: Three
 * One
 * Two

Four

Select "Two Three", copy. Place cursor at end of "Two", paste. Result is as expected. But keep cursor in the very same spot and paste again. Result is:

Two Three Three Three
 * One
 * Two
 * Two

Also, going back to the VE after saving produces some ↵ -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 01:39, 18 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I get the same results, except with blank lines interspersed if "Three" includes the whole line instead of just the one word. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:09, 18 September 2013 (UTC)


 * What I'd like is for a formatting tool to be available so that we could mark the list and then paint that format onto the following text (like the MSW paintbrush occasionally does). Kdammers (talk) 07:58, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

The new toolbar (does anyone do any user testing?)
So there is now a new toolbar, and - bizarrely - the icons for media, reference, reference list, and transclusion are no longer visible. They are now under the "More" menu.

Okay, one could argue that these four are, somehow, advanced editing options (no matter how critical they are to editing articles). But I'd love to hear from someone as to why Bold and Italic (the first in particular rarely used in articles) still have icons visible on the toolbar, while five other formatting options are now under "More". It really, really would have been better to have a "Format text" drop-down menu that had all seven text formatting options on it, and to leave the media, reference, reference list, and transclusion icons where they were, visible on the toolbar. Or, worst case, leave them under the "More" menu [one more click, and thus one less reason for experienced editors to use VE, because this makes it more cumbersome to use those four things]; at least then they wouldn't be paired with formatting options with which they have little in common.

At the moment, I'm sufficiently astonished at this butchering of the user interface as to not be inclined to revise the VE user guide to reflect the new toolbar. Others are welcome to jump in and make the somewhat extensive changes that are needed. Until that happens, we'll all live with a prominent link within VE that goes to an outdated user guide, which is the majority of existing documentation for VE. (And don't even get me started on the sequence within the new "More" drop-down menu - apparently the least important choices are at the top because that's the way that no one else does drop-down menus, so obviously everyone else is wrong?!?) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:52, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Which answer would you like? My sardonic one, my sarcastic one, or my world-weary one?&mdash;Kww(talk) 05:05, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Bold formatting is not rarely used. It is used in all articles right at the beginning to emphasise the name of the topic and any synonyms.  But this usage is quite specialised and subject to the conventions of our manual of style.  The VE should understand this.  Either the use of bold text should be handled by a style sheet/template/wizard approach to article creation.  Or the appearance of the bold option in the toolbar should be context sensitive so that it only appears when editing the lead of an article and warnings appears if it seems to be used incorrectly. Andrew Davidson (talk) 08:49, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi! On mw.org James wrote "In new features, we have changed the toolbar to be simpler, shorter, and to have the ability to have drop-down groups with descriptions. At least initially, we have moved all but the most basic tools into a single drop-down, including inserting media, templates and other transclusions, and references & reference lists. As part of this, the controls to add (underline), (subscript), and (superscript), (strikethrough) and (underline) annotations to text will now be available to all users in the drop-down." I know this is not how VE is going to look in the end, so please do comment about the new usability, I'm opening a related bug if there isn't one yet. Thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:54, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * One problem I get is the toolbar frequently splits into two lines. If my browser less than 1100 pixels then the toolbar wraps leaving lots of white space which could be usefully filled. I'd be happier either with single line with more drop downs or two full lines, just not empty space.
 * I guess different editors will want different things on a toolbar. Doing inline maths you would want italics, sub, and sup to be easily added plus greek symbols eiπ. Other editors will have different requirements. Tooltips would be handy to get shortcuts for each action, (no I will not read the help page). The wikitext editor's toolbar manages to make a lot of things easily accessible. --User:Salix alba (talk): 12:26, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * 54271 was created for further suggestions on the topic. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:22, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Toolbar button priority proposal
I'm boldly moving this to its own page at VisualEditor/Feedback/Toolbar, so we can have as long a discussion as we want. Please join me there, and invite as many interested people to it as you would like. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:34, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Link anchor ending in ; or :
Type "France;", select this text, turn into a link to France. Put cursor between "e" and ";", type in "z". Result is that the "z" is not in the anchor, producing France&lt;nowiki/&gt;z; which displays as France z;. Similarly if ending in ":" instead of ";". -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 07:27, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I had reopened 51442 yesterday and added the semicolon example today. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:11, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Multiple spaces before ":"
It's really bothering to see again basic problems coming back and damaging many articles like that (note the many spaces before the ":" on line 465, where VE continues to add more...). Are there any tests before release? --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 18:03, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Other examples just by checking the recent changes on frwiki:, , , ... --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 18:12, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I just checked the last 20 edits with VE on frwiki: 5 of them had this problem (among other problems). So, basically, we have about 25% of edits on frwiki that are adding spurious space characters before ":"., , , , . --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 20:47, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * This bug has been fixed and awaiting review, rt-testing and deploy Gerrit patch here. As for your comment about testing, we definitely do rt-testing on 160K articles regularly, but there are lot of subtleties in parsing wikitext (with all its complexity), recording enough information to transform html back to wikitext, detect edit changes and only change what was edited, and in many cases, make sure broken wikitext/html does not trip us up. We have come a long way but we cannot discover them them all with rt-testing unfortunately. Thanks for your continuing and patient reporting of bugs. Ssastry (talk) 01:03, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, I'm quite surprised that a bug happening so frequently (5 edits out of 20 on a random check) has not been detected if you're testing on 160k articles... This is clearly not a subtelty in wikitext, just a simple situation. You should definitely review the way you're testing if basic bugs happening so frequently like this one are not detected before deploying to a large wiki. Do you do any manual testing also ? because given how frequently the bug is triggered, it should also have been picked up in manual testing. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 04:10, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Please take a look at the HTML generated by the existing parser on this page (colons and spaces). If you notice, there is a non-breaking space character inserted before the colon in all cases so that the space renders as a whitespace when viewed in a browser. Parsoid does the same but wraps it in a span (we could investigate whether the span wrapping could be removed, but that is a different issue). (1) So, there is special case handling of the space before a colon -- it is not regular handling. (2) In order to avoid dirty diffs in unedited segments, Parsoid maps segments of wikitext to DOM subtrees so that it can use original wikitext for unedited segments (this process is called selective serialization). This is a non-trivial problem -- I am happy to explain this to you in as much detail as you want (please hop onto #mediawiki-parsoid any time and ping us). The bug that manifested here is a problem with selective serialization. (3) Parsoid is not solely targeted at VE. Parsoid will serve other clients as well (Kiwix, Flow, mobile later on, Google crawler, etc.). So, Parsoid's handling of the HTML it receives from clients has to be robust -- Parsoid has to deal both with excess whitespace and too little whitespace in the HTML it gets. Now, the bug with the whitespace before the colon was because there was a subtle error in the selective serializer because of the interaction between (1), (2), and (3). We already do a lot in how we test (parser tests in 4 modes wt2html, wt2wt, html2wt, html2html, randomized edits on these parser tests, roundtrip testing on 160K pages), we are continually improving our testing setup as well (and we've more than doubled the existing php parser tests to model edge cases in wikitext handling). We could improve more for sure. As for manual testing, this bug will only show up when the paragraph where the colon is present is edited. This bug is not a common case scenario (in terms of the set of conditions when the bug gets triggered), but once it gets triggered, it will continue to show up on that page as long as that paragraph is edited. And, it did show up repeatedly in recent edits as you point out above. As soon as I noticed the frequency of the errors, I got on it and fixed it yesterday. Hope this answers some of your concerns. Feel free to ask for more clarifications. Ssastry (talk) 07:47, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, for what I understand, you answered about Parsoid tests, but I don't see anything related to VE tests: my concern is with VE tests. As I said, a bug that is triggered on about 10% of normal edits on frwiki should have been seen before deployment: the fact that it has not been seen shows that there's not enough manual testing (acting an editor on real articles) and probably a lack in the automated testing (if any at VE scope). --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 08:15, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * (About manual testing, I'd notice there's an open position at WMF in SF as QA Manual Tester for the VisualEditor. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:28, 19 September 2013 (UTC) )
 * Manual testing on real articles does happen. Unfortunately, it happens mostly in English, and the text that was needed to trigger this bug (" : ", that's space colon space) is something that's rare in English text but happens to be common in French text. Furthermore, because the bug was on Parsoid's end rather than VE's, VE's corruption detection couldn't see it, so the "VisualEditor: Check" tag wasn't applied to these edits. As for automated testing: Subbu's commit summary mentions that his fix fixes 11 previously failing tests. But because of the specifics of this bug, I would guess that the test failures probably weren't clearly related to how the bug appeared in practice. Subbu could speak more to that. We also do full-stack automated testing using dirtydiffbot, which right now unfortunately only runs on English Wikipedia. I'll talk to Krinkle about extending that to other wikis. --Catrope (talk) 17:55, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, beyond a point, our automated selser failure reports can be a bit noisy because of the pecularities of our testing setup (and difficulties of simulating edits and absence of an oracle to give us authoritative wikitext for the edited HTML - see ). So, at this point, those test results are, for the most part, useful (and used) for catching regressions. Ssastry (talk) 18:51, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

So, you're almost testing only with English language (one of the easiest language), your automated tests are mostly only useful for regressions, not even catching troubles in places that were already causing previous bugs (problems with space characters before ":" seems to be recurring), but you plan to keep rolling out VE to more wikis in only a few days ? Wonderful :-(

I fail to understand the logic in this will to roll out more and more before stabilizing VE and having a testing framework solid enough to be confident on releases on various wikis. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 19:17, 19 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I was not clear there. The regression bit applied only to automated-randomized-edit-simulation on parser tests (at this point when a lot of bugs have already been fixed and we have a lot of confidence in our selective serializer (edited HTML -> new wikitext)). All other testing areas (rt-testing on 160K pages on pages from 16 wikipedias, automated parser tests, manual testing) catch old/new errors and regressions. Ssastry (talk) 19:55, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Wide imageframe
When viewing a wide enough Template:Imageframe will extend over top of the side menu in Monobook. In VE, it becomes hidden underneath it. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 18:21, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't think I can reproduce it: if the image is way too big it will overlap the side menu, but when I VEdit the page it is resized and appears to the right of the screen. It also happens when it's surrounded by text, as I tested later. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:36, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Disappearing divbox
Open a page with  Click on the divbox, open the template dialogue. Click on "apply changes". Divbox disappears. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 21:08, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Added to 54315 linked below. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:47, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Existing references when references in templates
References will not show up in the list of existing references if those references are defined in templates like divbox or imageframe. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 21:36, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Also when in blockquote. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 23:06, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * For blockquote, 51009, 52398. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:17, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * For imageframe, is this related to the edit mode? Because here I can see the references I created. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:22, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Even on that revision that do not show up in the list of existing references for me. It won't even show up in the Reflist when in VE, it just says there 'There are no references with the group "" on this page.' -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 16:40, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

divstyleamber etc.
VE a page with <div style="">Content. . The element is uneditable. If the content includes a reference, the reference will not show up in the list of existing reference. Also, reference numbering will be broken. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 21:49, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Now at 54315. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:32, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

doubled
Hi, reported recently on frwiki (same kind of problems reported 2 months ago by other user ). gets duplicated. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 07:31, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Table editing in new interface
I could not understand how I can edit sortable table(add row for example in new interface) if there is an option, please make it more obvious Gleb.svechnikov (talk) 08:13, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi, what you can do right now with VE is adding content to/editing cells in some cases, but you can't change the structure of the table yet. 39596 is the tracking bug for related issues. Regards, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:35, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Case edit
Here is what happens as I edit (on MS X-Pro, running Firefox, in Korea):


 * 1. I clicked on the Beta edit.
 * 2. The screen got grayed over for about 30 seconds.
 * 3. A block of slightly different white appears, covering up the top part of the article (Chas Smash). This block hass faded out curved arrows, akin to MSW undo and redo arrows, then a large empty space in the same line (I reported this before), then a black triangle pointing down, the  B, I, the link icon (not at all intuitive to me), and a greyed out circle with a diameter line (like a no entry traffic sign).  Below that are icons for numbered and bulleted lists, two grayed out blocks that seem to have to do with lists but I have no idea what they could be) and the word More with a black triangle with its aped pointing down, indicating a pull-down menu for some-thing, presumably tools). The third line has some more stuff that I'll get to later.
 * 4. Out of curiosity, I click on the More triangle and see some word-processing-like terms.
 * 5.I try them out by first marking a bit of text and - wow - suddenly on the first line of the block (the block remaining visible, covering the top of the article) the word "Paragraph" appears to the left of the triangle and the no-entry sign and the undo icon become ungrayed.
 * 6. I play with the strike through, and it works; I try computer code, and the marked text changes font (Some-one wrote about this above), but that seems pretty meaningless to me, so I'll try to undo it.
 * 7. The undo grays the no-entry sign but doesn't affect the word "Paragraph," and the changed font is set back to the original.
 * 8. I click on the picture. It goes blue with corner circles to the picture but not to the blued text below it.  There is an icon.  From an answer to a previous question, I know to click on the zig-zag icon.
 * 9. I click on it, and my screen fills with a work page ("Caption") with a few icons and the text from under the image (in a slightly different-looking font).
 * 10. I click on the return button (because I want to compare teh font)and am asked if I want to leave with-out saving changes.
 * 11. I hit yes and am bumped out of the beta edit mode.
 * 12. I return to the caption in edit mode. I try clicking on the blue-link text, but nothing happens except that the weird link icon appears.
 * 13. Remembering being told about it, I click on the icon.
 * 14. I get rectangle with a < sign, the link icon, the word "Hyperlink" and a trashcan and below that stuff a rectangle that says "Lee Thompson (saxophonist)." Is this hyperlink to a Wikipeda article or to a place within the current article, or to some-where else on the Itnernet, I think a novice editor might wonder.
 * 15. so, presumably, I can't edit what is above the rectangle but should edit what is in the inner rectangle.
 * 16. When I start editing it, though, there is a ckeck followd by "Matching page" and then "Lee Thompson (saxophonist)." That is pretty opaque.
 * 17. Out of curiosity, I try the no-entry icon, which is black now even though I have now undone the active editing. After I click on it, it goes gray, but I can't see any other change.
 * 18. Worried that I might have made some bad change, I search for a cancel button, but there is none visible.
 * 19. I try the undo button. It brings the no-traffic icon back, so I hope I have undone what I didn't know I did.
 * 20. I hit "Save changes." Ahhh, there is a Cancel button on the edit sheet (Who was to guess/have noticed/remember?).
 * 21. Would like to edit the rest of the article, but I need to cancel what-ever I did in the picture editing, so I choose to leave the beta editing mode for now, since I don't see any other option.
 * 22. I go back into the beta editing to try to figure out what that cog wheel icon is about.
 * 23. I click on the cog wheel, and the "Page settings" gets underlined and I wind up at a new editing page, with categories activated.
 * 24. I click on the triangle beside a couple fo the categories, but what comes up -- some-thing about sorting pages -- makes no sense to me.
 * 25. I click on "Languages" and get a clear sentence telling me I would have to go to source mode (assuming the editor understand what source mode is, which at this point I think is reasonable) to edit language links.
 * 26. I click on page settings, but nothing happens. I click again.
 * 27. I give up on "Page settings," not sure what they are any-way.

Okeh, that has been my experience as some-one who has used source code a lot but only at a surface level. Mostly I was just doing what came naturally to me; where I simulated a novice user, I specifically noted it. Maybe my chronicle will help in improving VE. Kdammers (talk) 09:05, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I made this a list, in the meantime, it was very difficult to read. Thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:10, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Point 14 highlights quite a confusing part of the interface. The dialog boxes all have leftward < or upwards ^ arrows. Its not at all clear to me what these do, what the difference between the left and the up is, or why the well established X in the top right hand corner for close is not followed.--User:Salix alba (talk): 11:59, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I strongly suspect these are misplaced idioms borrowed from the mobile editor interface (which is also at an experimental phase, but much less talked about, BTW). There it makes sense, sort of, to have an arrow at the top left to close a dialog - mobile follows the iPhone idiom of opening new menus and dialogs to the right, and the arrow simulates the "back" browser button, closing the dialog which covers the whole screen. Suffice to say that this idiom doesn't make any sense at the desktop, when the dialog is a small box floating above a page. As for the "up arrow" button, I have no idea where it comes from; it's not common anywhere. Diego (talk) 13:09, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Nowiki problems chase new editors away
The purpose of VE is to attract new editors, basically. But if we look at e.g. the nowiki edit filter log, we see the opposite. IP 62.150.172.104 tried to make an edit to Kodungallur, but got the "nowiki" warning before saving his work. He hasn't saved the edit, and hasn't made any edit (and no other IP or logged in user edited the article either). Similarly, 72.91.124.5 tried twice to edit Battle of Chickamauga, and then stopped editing.

Other editors start in VE, encounter problems (like the nowiki), and turn to Wikitext editor; this means that they have to learn two different editing environments, and that they end up at the old, bad editor anyway. For example User:Mankt.

These are just some random, recent examples. Have the WMF made any study of the number of editors that try to edit with VE and simply stop editing, and the number of editors that started in VE but moved to Wikitext afterwards? I know that according to the WMF statistics, 80% of the edits by new editors is made using Wikitext, and only 20% using VE, but are there many that start in VE and move to Wikitext in the next few edits? Fram (talk) 09:15, 19 September 2013 (UTC)


 * The problem with doing such an analysis is that VE is a changing thing. If WMF concludes that VE drove away editors in August, it's difficult to impossible to justify the same conclusion for the version of VE that is fielded in October, with (presumably) fewer bugs and more features? [Moreover, WMF can't do a random test of VE versus wikitext editing; maybe people who click on the "beta" version are more curious but less committed to Wikipedia editing, for example. Who knows?]


 * In addition, one can argue that labeling VE as "beta" sends a message to editors that the powers-that-be are trying to provide an easier editing interface. So even if someone decides that VE isn't for them, today, it's quite possible (arguably) that they've said to themselves "Okay, I'll take another look in a few months and see if this is out of beta, or at least not causing me the same problem."


 * So yes, it's frustrating that the nowiki and other problems persist, and the WMF is unlikely to see a significant increase in VE editing (as a percentage) until they fix those. But we're past the point where the WMF is going to voluntarily withdraw VE from new editors, and it's quite unclear that any kind of analysis is going to change the priorities of the WMF developers. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:01, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I also think that WMF won't go back on enwiki, they have clearly shown that encyclopedia quality and editors respect is not their priority. But, maybe they could postpone the deployment to even more wikis ? But they probably won't do the analysis, because they don't want to postpone more deployments. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 19:22, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Italic wikilinks
Why does VE produce complex code like here when much simpler code can produce the same effect?
 * A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (VE code)
 * A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (Human code)

Note how I could (inadvertently!) change the code, through VE, to create this, which is wikicode nonsense (a piped link where front and back are the same), but which now has the italics outside the link.

If I then try to shorten my link to "''A Supposedly Fun Thing...", I either get the ... outside the link, which I don't want (if I type the change directly into the VE editor), or I seem to be unable to make the change;


 * Click the hyperlink editor (the chain symbol)
 * Click inside the "blue" text: suddenly the "matching page" appears below it
 * Change the text: suddenly the red "New page" appears, and beneath that, the matching page remains:
 * How can I now make the editor take the short text I typed, and the "matching page", to make a piped link? If I just hit "enter" twice (once isn't sufficient apparently), I create a piped link, but with the text I typed as the front, not the back part, so exactly the opposite of what I wanted.

Instead of this terribly confusing interface, what one should get is a "text displayed: XXX; Page linked to; YYY" interface (which works, preferably)

Note, it gets worse: if, for some reason, I want more formatting inside the link, I can e.g. change it to A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Nothing extreme there, just unitalicize the "Never" to stress it. Now, click the link button (the chain), click the text, twice enter, save. VE can't understand it's own code any longer, and messes up things. This last situation won't happen a lot, but mixing formatting and wikilinking is apparently never a good idea in VE, and piping links is hardly straightforward either. Fram (talk) 14:03, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I believe this is covered by 50098. The suggested workaround is also featured in the user guide. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:09, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I may have missed it, but I don't see that workaround in the User Guide: "You should first select (highlight) text, or place your cursor on a word, then click the "Link" icon, to insert a link for that text or word." It doesn't discuss formatting to be done before the linking. Fram (talk) 14:18, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * That's because I was looking at the Italian version of the guide, where I had added that tip -_- I'm not 100% positive that it was also in the en.wp one and got lost recently, but I think I added it now. Thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:28, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I'm pretty certain that I didn't remove it with my recent changes, I only worked on the intro of the guide :-) A ral solution would be batter than such a workaround, but that is not something you are responsible for; changing the user guide (and pointing to the bugzilla) is the next best thing, so thank you. Fram (talk) 14:37, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Nowikis around plain old spaces?
Has anybody else seen this? Nowiki tags were added around a space after a hidden HTML comment. It looks like the editor didn't change anything in that paragraph. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:31, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm in the middle of re-writing a bug for Ed, so I can't test, I assume it is not that kind of nowiki that would just prevent

this situation? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 17:03, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * This is . Ssastry (talk) 19:01, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

More references
Editing this example page will not produce the right numbering of references while in VE. Attempting to reuse a reference as in this edit then created conflicting reference names. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 18:27, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

References in different groups, same name, later merged
VE this revision. Go to the reference dialogue for "x2 2", change the "Use this group" text from "x2" to "x1". Apply changes. Result is that the list under "References 1" disappears and what was "x2 2" becomes "x1 0". -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 19:02, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Can't copy and paste templates anymore
I can't seem to copy and paste within a VE surface any templates anymore, even if selecting text on either side of the template. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 19:21, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

E.g., this revision. Select from "text" through the template to the end of "Other". Copy. Go to end of "Another line." Paste. Result is "text Genesis 1:1 Other" appended but no blue, link, or template element. FF 23.0.1 Win7-- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 19:26, 19 September 2013 (UTC)


 * You no longer need to select any text either side of a template, that much works! As for the rest of it, I can reproduce it with templates that already on the page, but not with ones added this editing session. A similar thing is happening with images - only the caption (sans any links or formatting) is being copied. Reported as

A good example of what is too easy with VE...
... but shouldn't because its against manual of style in almost every wiki. A list of problems in an edit with VE (actually 2):
 * Entire sentences put as title
 * Bold and italic put everywhere (in some places even 8 apostrophes in a row '' !!!)
 * Underline put in many places
 * Internal links on part of sentences, like many titles (obviously non existing because it's not a subject): if I'm not mistaken, links are not displayed in red in VE, so user doesn't he added a stupid link
 * Images in the middle of a sentence
 * nowiki at the beginning of paragraphs
 * Formatting inside internal links rather than around the internal link (bold, italic, underlined, ...)

Result: a big degradation of the article, but probably made in good faith. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 05:31, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Link between &lt;pre&gt;
VE a page that has France. Select "France", press the link icon, press enter. Displays as a link in VE. Save, link is gone. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 16:54, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Similarly, I can add a reference after "France" in the normal way. Displays normally at first, turns into code after saving. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 16:59, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * The wikilink is gone but you get France, right? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:44, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * That's right. -- Atethnekos <font face="georgia" size="1">(Discussion, Contributions) 16:42, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, here it says that with this tag "HTML and wiki markups are escaped and spaces and line breaks are preserved, but HTML entities are parsed". This said, I am not expecting a wikilink or a ref anchor there to work after I saved the page. What would be the desired behaviour here? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:36, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what is desirable here, other than that VE shouldn't show it as working if it wont work after saving. Thryduulf (talk) 16:02, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Roger that, filing it right now. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:12, 20 September 2013 (UTC) PS: it's now at 54382.

Restore page
The "restore page" button is not explained in the user guide, and isn't really intuitive. When you edit an old version of a page, you get the "save page" at the top of the page, but a "restore page" button instead of the "save page" button at the edit summary page, even if you have made changes in the older version (and thus aren't simply restoring it). Why we have two different buttons (save and restore), when we have only one name otherwise, isn't clear. Beneath the "restore page " button, the small text says "By clicking the "save page" button, you agree...". It doesn't indicate what I agree to by clicking the "restore page" button though... Fram (talk) 14:08, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Added to 54329. Regards, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:01, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Personally, I don't think that that information on how to edit old versions of a page should be included in the VE user guide. That's not something that novice editors should do, at all. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:46, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, in this case, we might want to think about different guides, like "basic features" vs "advanced editing". I think this is definitely something that can be done at a later stage of development, though. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 18:49, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Why is it even called restore page? I opened an old version, started editing that one, pressed "save page", then looked at the diffference with the current version, saw it was good, and wanted to save it. But instead of "save", I'm confronted with "Restore page". Restore to what? The last saved version? The older version I initially opened? I don't want either of those, I want to save my changes. "Restore page" is a very confusing label at that moment. Fram (talk) 07:50, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Incorrect link
The link on this page to Actor "John Williams" (in the 2nd paragraph) should be corrected. It takes you to the Composer John Williams. 108.83.2.120 (talk) 20:37, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Our IP editor put a note at the top of this article; I've made the change recommended by the IP. John Vandenberg (chat) 07:39, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Minor changes hard to see in preview mode
I used VE to make a minor edit (add a comma) to The Bondwoman's Narrative. When I previewed my change, I noticed two things. 1. Instead of showing a WYSIWYG preview, I got a side-by-side presentation (in? source font)with a cryptic source marking ( a plus and a minus sign ) and no direct indication of the change I had made/proposed. Since the text show was quite long and my change quite small, it was a pain to try to find it. Why couldn't it be highlighted (e.g., with a colored background and/or a marker at the line(s) where the text has been changed) if it's going to be presented in this format? 2. The two columns showing the last accepted version and my suggested changes have titles that are not the best.Kdammers (talk) 01:14, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * The "Review your changes" option should give you coloured highlights. When you look at the diff of you last edit you will see the same as with "review your edit". The left hand side has whats removed (marked with a "-") and the right hand side has whats added (marked with a "+"). The text you added should have a coloured background, a light blue, if you can't see the colouring of this text then you may need to adjust your monitor.  --User:Salix alba (talk): 05:20, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * While I've seen some (high-level) mention of a WYSIWYG "difference", it's not at all clear how that would work in practice. Let's say, for example, you replaced one image with another - would VE show you a flickering image (old/new/old/new)? Or if you made some text changes, what would a "visual" representation of that be? (If you turn on Microsoft Word's change tracking feature, you'll see just how gnarly a visual representation of text changes can be.) In short, the wikitext diff does a reasonable job of showing differences, although - as is too often with Wikipedia, it is both more complicated and less self-explanatory than it could be. (Specifically, when summoned as part of an edit, the left column of the diff screen should be titled "Before your edit" and the right column should be titled "After your edit", and neither should allow you to change the version of the page that is being compared.)


 * With regard to coloring, the light blue is known to be difficult to see. There are a number of scripts that modify the diff to provide different (and presumably better) coloring to highlight differences - see the "Enhancing the differences in diffs" subsection of WP:EIW. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:26, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Lost function buttons in VE top menu (beta, settings, cancel, save)
Editing Little Tich with VisualEditor (FF 23, Windows XP, mono) i don't see the last 4 functions of the menu bar: " ? Beta, Settings, Cancel, Save", only a blank area with nothing to click in. Editing another article Otto I with exactly the same settings works fine. Tried to refresh browser cache with Strg + F5, no change. GermanJoe (talk) 07:38, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I experience the same bug on that article (and only that article) on FF/Windows 7/Vector and FF/Linux/monobook It doesnt happen on Safari/Windows or Chrome/Linux. John Vandenberg (chat) 07:47, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Same for me with FF 17 (esr)/Windows XP, vector; nothing after "More". --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 09:11, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * The cause appears to be having a <center ></center> tag, or a with any horizontal alignment set in the caption of an image on the first line of a page. Curiously it doesn't occur when  is used to set the alignment. I've reported this as  and removed the centering from the article's image caption. Thryduulf (talk) 14:55, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Still problem with categories inside tables
Visual Editor insists of adding categories when editing tables. -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:57, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Bug is related to VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive_2013_2. -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:29, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Timeout on saving Neuro-linguistic programming
No timeout on review, but it timed out on save after 100 or so seconds. (Complicated article, lots of references.) Should this be happening at all any more? - David Gerard (talk) 09:46, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hey David. Did you get an error message? I copy/pasted that article into my sandbox and tried to edit it. It took, as you said, almost 100 secs, but it saved and I got the related message. (Of course, this is not optimal). --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:44, 20 September 2013 (UTC)


 * "Error: unknown error" or something equally unhelpful - David Gerard (talk) 15:18, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Yeah, that's what I feared. I shall add there that in this case we got a different experience, though. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:20, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Complete article becomes a template in VE
Please check 1987 Hills Bros. Coffee Kings season. It looks quite different in view mode compared to VE mode, which puts all of the article inside a template. It's this version, in case someone corrects the problem in the meantime. You can edit the whole article through the template, but, well, you have to know wikicode to do so, making the VE rather superfluous here. Now, if only we could get this effect on all other articles... Fram (talk) 10:33, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Well the problem is with as every article that uses it also has the same problem. That template notes it is derived from, but articles using that work fine so it is something in the PBA template not in the NBA one (or vice versa) that is causing it. The templates are way too advanced though for me to spot what the issue is. Once we identify what the problem is we can ask the VE team to deal with it, but obviously we should also fix the template. Thryduulf (talk) 13:52, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Sounds like something to post at WP:VPT if no one responds here as to the underlying problem with the template. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:58, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

VE creates problems even after it is closed?
Random page, Royal Academy for Overseas Sciences. Title copied before editing it.
 * Open it in wikitext editor, use "back" button of browser, copy title: Royal Academy for Overseas Sciences
 * Open it in VE, use "back" button of browser, copy title:

??? No idea why this happens, but it's not good of course. Apparently some "things" from VE persist even after the editor has been closed. Fram (talk) 11:56, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * It's slightly more general than that. You can't copy anything from a page you've loaded in VE onto the clipboard until you refresh the page. It seems this is a new bug today caused by one of the changes to the copy/paste functionality in the latest version. Thryduulf (talk) 13:34, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Puzzle piece far from actual table
Why is the transclusion "puzzle piece" located at the right side of the page instead of at the top right of the template? It makes it very hard to find the piece at e.g. Cheney, Kansas (the "historical populations" template at the left middle of the page). Fram (talk) 12:03, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * VE seems to assume that all templates are aligned to the right margin, and as the icon always appears in the top right corner of this box it can be far away from the actual template. This is covered in, it looks like the devs hoped a patch for a related bug would have fixed this but it turns out it didn't. Thryduulf (talk) 13:11, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Deleting of images?
Is deleting of images with DEL and/or backspace on a highlighted image supposed to work? I know, that this change was discussed, but am unsure of the current status. Whatever the case may be: it doesn't work at the moment. (FF23, mono, Windows XP, article Otto I and others). However, pressing DEL to the left of the image deletes the image, but leaves the caption as corrupted regular article text (??). GermanJoe (talk) 13:41, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't know what the official line is, but it is exactly the sort of thing that people expect to work. I've found which is relevant but contains no discussion. The caption issue sounds like / (the two bugs overlap but nobody answered the question about whether they are duplicates). I can't find any significant discussion about this though - can you remember where it was? Thryduulf (talk) 14:07, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * The user guide for this function was added on 20 July and there was some discussion in the feedback area. I could have sworn (almost certain), i tested that and it worked before the latest update. No exact data though, sorry Thryduulf. GermanJoe (talk) 14:17, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * It shouldn't be so easy to delete an image, because that removes both the image and its caption, alt text etc. Typically, a specific image is removed because the contributor thinks there is a more appropriate picture that could go into the same position. It would be better to have a sequence like:
 * User positions caret next to/on picture and clicks delete/backspace/cut
 * Dialog pops up offering choice of "remove image and caption", "change image and/or caption", "cancel"
 * When "change" is selected, a media dialog appears (like bug 38129) that allows the image to be replaced. This permits the same caption etc to be used for the replacement image.
 * I suppose I ought to get a bugzilla account and make this sort of suggestion there, really.... - Pointillist (talk) 14:53, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Removing an image should start with clicking on the image, not "next to" it. "Next to" an image is blank space, or text, or something else that should be handled in its own right. Clicking DEL to the left of an image should absolutely not affect the image. I have to believe that the user manual [which says select the image, then delete or backspace to remove] did in fact describe how VE worked at one time, given the way user manuals are read (and reviewed), and that we've not had a report of this issue until now.. So there has been a regression in the VE functionality, here.
 * More generally, when a user clicks on a image, an image icon appears. That image icon (and not the one on the toolbar) is where the user should go (click on) to specify that the image is to be replaced (retaining the caption). And that image icon is where (in my opinion) the user should specify that an image should be deleted. That would mean that in a the case where a user selects/highlights and tries to delete both text and image(s), a dialog box should ask if he/she really wants to do that. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:36, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I raised the same issue at Wikipedia talk:VisualEditor/User guide. if this is a regression rather than plannned change, it also affects templates and references. John Vandenberg (chat) 01:21, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

Section heading blank except for nowiki
It's a new one on me, see the last newly-added line in. -- Red rose64 (talk) 15:46, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Not new, it's 50100. Thanks for stopping by, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:49, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks, but 50100 seems to be concerned with blanking/deletion of existing headings. This was a newly-added heading. -- Red rose64 (talk) 19:29, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * That you add, and then try to remove: the result does not change. Or does it? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:14, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't know the full sequence of events; I'm reporting on what another editor apparently managed to do. -- Red rose64 (talk) 21:33, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * The only way I can think of that might produce this would be to add a section header and then delete it. I reproduced it that way but only when backspacing the line so all the text was deleted but the line itself was still there. I was using an L2 header so the line was still visible, but you wouldn't get that with L3 or L4, etc. headers. I think that a fix of  will also fix this scenario as the backend parser will see the input. Thryduulf (talk) 22:59, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Visual Editor Reference Dialog improvement - design mockup for comments
The design team is working on improvements to the VisualEditor Reference Dialog. We would appreciate any feedback! Check it out here on mediawiki.org at VisualEditor Reference Dialog. --KHammerstein (WMF) (talk) 19:30, 20 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I've posted a long list of suggested changes at the Discussion page, and encourage others to weigh in on the proposed redesign of this extremely important dialog. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:39, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

Reference numbering wrong when editing OpenOffice.org
On OpenOffice.org, the reference numbering starts in the infobox, which is before the article text. The reference numbering in the body then starts again! (Though at [2] as I look at it just now, not [1].) I noticed this when I was going through the references, looking for bare URL references to wrap in a nice cite web.

Also, when I fixed a reference in the infobox (turning it from a bare URL into a cite web), this wasn't reflected in how it was displayed in the reference list in the editor.

(Saving took 90 seconds, which I'm recalling is slower than it was doing, but at least it did save.) - David Gerard (talk) 12:33, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
 * This is old behaviour that had been fixed, but it seems to have returned (verified at Bristol as well) so I've reopened . Thryduulf (talk) 19:06, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

Red Links displayed as Blue links
I was going to remove some red links on a page with the Beta editor. But unfortunately it displayed the red links with blue links so I couldn't tell which ones to change. And I know that I could have just the source editor I just didn't because I would be way harder to. Just saying so the people who are in charge of the beta editor could fix it.ZSpeed (talk) 16:26, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
 * This is looks like its getting some attention.--User:Salix alba (talk): 17:02, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

Manager of the Australian Hockey Team is suspect
The team has a few managers for the 2012 Olympics it was Andrew Smith, for the 2014 World Cup it is Joshua Burt. I think Martin Ferrari Managed the team for the 2012 Azlan Shah Cup which is only a minor tournament and not worth ranking points.

The Olympics and World Cup are by far considered the two biggest events on the Hockey calendar and therefore the title of Manager should really fall to Andrew Smith & or Joshua Burt 114.77.16.130 (talk) 22:26, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
 * This page is for feedback relating to the new VisualEditor. For general help with Wikipedia see Help:Contents and the Help desk. For feedback regarding a specific article, please use that article's talk page. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 07:27, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

The new editor is not possible to create a table and can not
The new editor is not possible to create a table and can not draw diagrams 79.164.219.120 (talk) 22:29, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
 * That is correct. Creating a table is something that will be coming in a later version, see . I don't think that VisualEditor will ever be able to draw diagrams, you'll want a graphics editor for that (or have I misunderstood you?). Thryduulf (talk) 08:25, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Apparently, one should "When possible, use tables rather than diagrams to present simple tabular data, and use mathematical markup to produce formulas.". I am not sure if the math tool in the VE toolbar now at mw.org can be used for this. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:50, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia has an instrument - a pie chart. An example of the tool pie chart: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%B3%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%B2_%D0%A0%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%B8#.D0.9E.D0.B1.D1.89.D0.B5.D0.B5_.D1.87.D0.B8.D1.81.D0.BB.D0.BE_.D0.B2.D0.B5.D1.80.D1.83.D1.8E.D1.89.D0.B8.D1.85 You need to add it in the visual editor — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.164.219.120 (talk) 20:24, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * That pie chart is done using a template, which works in Visual Editor, it's just likely we don't have that exact template on the English Wikipedia. ~ Charmlet -talk- 20:28, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * See Graphs and charts; Commons:Commons:Create charts and graphs online; and Template:Pie chart. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:57, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

In the visual editor, you must add menu the "Templates".

The diagrams should be displayed in graphical form, as they are displayed correctly by any viewer, and properly indexed by search engines.

It is not present in the editor uses - who knows. templates:


 * Pie_chart
 * line graph
 * [|bar chart]
 * vertical bar chart
 * horizontal bar chart
 * a column bar chart


 * radar chart
 * donut chart
 * area chart
 * scatter plot
 * combination chart — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.164.219.120 (talk) 05:35, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

Section edit links get cut off
When templates or pictures are on both sides of a section heading, constricting it, the links get cut off (in monobook, FireFox 24, Windows 7):Jay8g [ V•T•E ] 00:33, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I added this here, although it is not a VE problem. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:24, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * In the bug I explain this is a display problem: for me, that occurred when I heavily resized the window, but I did not get the overlap - the link was just barely visible or gone at all. Does it happen to you when navigating normally? Thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:37, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Part of the problem in Stratford International station is that the positioning of File:Stratford International DLR stn east entrance.jpg goes against MOS:IMAGELOCATION in at least two ways:
 * avoid sandwiching text ... between an image and an infobox or similar - on the right-hand side we have, which is an WP:RDT, and (to my mind) falls within "or similar"
 * An image should generally be placed in the section of the article that is most relevant to the image. - the image concerns the DLR station, but it's in the section titled "Domestic high-speed services"
 * There is another guideline (which I can't find) that says (IIRC) that headings should be left-aligned, and when there is the possibility that a left-aligned image might protrude into the following section, should be used to ensure that the heading gets a left alignment.
 * So, at Stratford International station, we can start by moving, which primarily concerns interchange between lines and platforms, into the "Access and interchange" section. This will free up space on the right-hand side, so that File:Stratford International DLR stn east entrance.jpg may be both moved into the relevant section (Docklands Light Railway) and right-aligned, to avoid the sandwich issue. -- Red rose64 (talk) 09:17, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

Version false
In the 'beta' notify we have text "Version false" with link to the disambiguation page. What does it mean? --Rezonansowy (talk &bull;&#32; contribs) 06:29, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * There will be a VE build number there once bug 53050 is closed. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 07:53, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

Some ideas for 22 Sept

 * 1) Insert wikitext option. I think mixing visual and wikitext advantages may be very useful.
 * 2) Make VE edit bar recursive. The <tt>string</tt> object doesn't allow us to use VE edit bar, so we should add a new object to the <tt>type</tt> parameter, I suggest <tt>string/wiki</tt>.
 * 3) The <tt> </tt> tag. I see, that this would be necceseary, some users have tried to do this by the templates such as Disable VE top, but that's not it. This tag should mark its content with these beautiful green stripes.
 * 4) Find some way for setting the syntax highlighting in the <tt>


 * 1) This is number 1
 * 2) This is number 3
 * 3) This is number 4
 * 4) This is number 7
 * You only need to use on those list items that are out of progressive sequence: subsequent items carry on counting from the new point, as shown with the third item, numbered 4. -- Red rose64 (talk) 14:33, 22 September 2013 (UTC)


 * So is this workaround for VE, or Wikitext? I'm looking for a VE solution. Thanks for the tip though.-- &iquest;3fam  ily6  contribs 22:01, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, the "old style" Wikitext editor, actually. There are a lot of little workarounds that are not (yet) possible in VE. There is a full-scale working example of the above at The Sun Shines Bright (book), where I used it for the first numbered item after the second and subsequent bulleted items. -- Red rose64 (talk) 23:28, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

Error in "save form"
The save form does not allow for a keyboard backspace or to highlight text using Shift+Arrows. The only way to edit your description of the changes is to highlight the words you wish to replace with the mouse and retype. BerotBurns (talk) 02:45, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
 * This is which is marked as having a patch to review so it should be fixed soon. The bug doesn't seem to occur all the time, so to give the devs an easier chance of tracking it down if the pending patch doesn't fix it, please could you give some details about your system (OS, browser version, skin) and the sequence of actions that you did. Thanks, Thryduulf (talk) 08:12, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

What happens to hidden comments?
Since they are invisible to VE editors, they end up at unexpected or unwanted places, instead of staying where they belong or being deleted when no longer wanted. See e.g. where the invisible comment after the full name gets (of course) ignored by the VE editor, and gets placed at the end of the paragraph eventually, where it is meaningless (or worse, incorrect). is another example from the last 50 or so VE edits. Fram (talk) 10:02, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hey Fram, I just did some testing and this did not show up. Reading those diffs I am inclined to believe that users rephrase some content elsewhere and then they paste it where they see fit (or a similar process), so of course this right now might lead to shifting those invisible comments. If someone manages to reproduce this as a bug instead, please let me know, thanks. (I also haven't checked Bugzilla yet, this sounds new to me). --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:20, 23 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Oh, it's very easy to reproduce (and without any copy-paste). Take e.g., add a line at the top, and then select the current lead sentence and remove it. The result is this diff, where the hidden comment in the lead remains, even though I have deleted the text before and after it in one go! (I also had a harder to describe bug, with the edit summary that got "stuck"; I couldn't add to it, I couldn't use backspace; I eventually could select the latter part of the summary, remove that, and then continue as normal) Fram (talk) 10:34, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I need to read your comment more carefully, because I see this as a consequence of the comment being invisible; if I am not mistaken, it's not that you edit a completely different section of the page, and VE then moves the comment randomly - that would be a bug. I added your remark to 49603, in the meantime. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:40, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, it doesn't seem to get moved randomly, it just isn't considered as part of the code by VE, so when a line with a hidden comment in it is removed, the hidden comment gets "orphaned". Random moving of hidden comments would be even worse of course :-) Fram (talk) 10:45, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Ok, I made this clear in that bug. Of course, shifting was the result of my tests as well (and I could have gotten the orphaned comment as well, if I had tried), it was random moving that I was afraid of, and since it did not show up, I think it's safe for us to say that 49603 covers pretty much everything right now. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:52, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

User:Adam_Cuerden
The text "85% Loaded" looks much, much larger in VE versus the page itself. This may be due to VE supporting markup Wikipedia does not. Adam Cuerden (talk) 15:05, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

2 problems with edit beta
It seems that an editor using edit beta cannot change the location or content of a box such as the one on the right portion of P-type calcium channel.

Also, in this bug reporter, an editor wishing to file a bug report is unable to paste any copied text into the reporter box. It will end up on the top of the wiki page instead. 71.233.26.50 (talk) 17:18, 23 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Regarding the first problem, the box is a template. You can edit it per WP:VE/UG.


 * Regarding the second problem, I can't duplicate that. Are you trying to paste text that you copied (or tried to copy) from a page while you were editing that page with VisualEditor ("edit beta")? I think copying from such pages is a known bug. If not, then what text were you trying to paste, and where did it come from? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:24, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Accents
So I just wanted to change "facade" to "façade" and couldn't see how to. Is there a special characters panel yet? Is there a way and it's just not obvious? - David Gerard (talk) 09:21, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I think there's currently only 3 ways to do that (feature has been asked a long time ago for VE...) :
 * Have a keyboard with the special characters
 * Use the wikitext editor
 * Run a external program to copy/paste it into VE
 * --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 09:26, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * You can also setup dead keys on many operating systems but even where available this doesn't always work. is the request to add MediaWiki:Edittools.js (or equivalent functionality) to VE. Despite lots of comments that it is one of the most important missing features it has been marked as lowest priority. Feel free to add your voice in favour if you wish :) Thryduulf (talk) 14:20, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Is there a general purpose plugin model for VE? If not, why not? There would be less pressure for extra features etc., if the core functionality could be extended with third party code. - Pointillist (talk) 14:26, 20 September 2013 (UTC) Aha, might be [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50514 bug #50514], some details [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/75271/ here] - Pointillist (talk) 14:31, 20 September 2013 (UTC)


 * mentions something about users being able to use their browser/OS to insert characters that are not standard to their keyboards. A few of us tried several variations to attempt to "create" an emdash and a "ç" using VE but were unsuccessful. I'm not sure if this is because we were doing it wrong and couldn't find the right instructions, or if this functionality doesn't really exist. Copy/paste worked, but that seems awfully suboptimal. Risker (talk) 01:59, 24 September 2013 (UTC)
 * There are methods like deadkeys and also various input method options (some third-party) in addition to copy/paste from something like character map. However copy/paste is as you note very suboptimal; deadkeys require setting up on some systems, and require you to know how to produce each character (I have a good memory for things like that, and I know things like [dead key] + ' + e = é, [dead key] + ^ + W = Ŵ and [dead key] + o + o = °, but I don't know how to produce ř or Ǖ and I don't think Δ or Д can be produced that way); Input methods are a heavyweight solution if you only need a character occasionally and again you need to know how set it up, enable it and how to produce the required characters - I have set up an input method for IPA but then I do quite a bit of work with pronunciations at Wiktionary so it's worth the effort. An editing toolbar is far more efficient for occasional use than any of these. I'll make this point on bugzilla too. Thryduulf (talk) 09:59, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Bug 53632 -- Cannot paste into edit summary in Chromium -- also applies to Chrome under Windows
Bug 53632, "Cannot paste into edit summary in Chromium", reported 2013-08-31, also applies to Google Chrome, version "29.0.1547.66 (Official Build 220848) m", JavaScript V8 3.19.18.19, running on Windows 7 Home Premium, Service Pack 1. Paste into edit summary works fine on the same machine in Firefox version 23.0.1. -- ToE 14:17, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

Narsampet506132 (talk) 15:32, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you, I've copied your comments to Bugzilla. Thryduulf (talk) 19:32, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I am not sure the same applies to me. As you can see here and in my previous edit, I managed to add headings and sub-headings when pasting, with your same config. I have to note my version reads 29.0.1547.76 (not sure if this is related to language packs?), anyway you'll also notice that I created also two empty headings. That happened because, like you, I did not seem able to paste; I then tried the same operation elsewhere, only to found out there was nothing in my clipboard. So I copied again the word, tried again above, and as you see, it worked. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 21:56, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Things not being in your copy buffer when you expect them to be sounds like . I don't have Chrome installed to be able to test. Thryduulf (talk) 22:37, 22 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure we are understanding each other, Erica. I am able to paste into the article itself, just not into an edit summary.  With the focus in the edit summary window, if I hit Ctrl-V, no text is pasted there, and the focus leaves the edit summary window (so that I have to click back into that window for typed text to be inserted).  (Hmm, the focus jumping may be a big clue here.  The problem may not be in the mechanism of the paste itself, but that VE may be shifting focus before doing the paste.)  In any case, the clipboard is definitely populated, as I can immediately click into another window and successfully paste elsewhere.  I can even return to editing the artice (via the caret in upper right of edit summary window) and then immediately paste into the article without reselecting text. Have you tried pasting into the edit summary under Chrome on your system? -- ToE 23:00, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi ToE, for some reason I had been thinking of the heading instead than the edit summary all the time, although it was clearly pointed out as such. I wish WP could scan my eye and prevent me to edit when I'm too tired :-) I'll test this properly later. Thanks, Elitre (WMF) (talk) 06:21, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
 * ToE, I tried to reproduce this bug correctly, this time. I still couldn't :) My version of Chrome is now Versione 29.0.1547.76 m, and did allow me to do this, and this when section-editing. Can you please try again and/or update the browser to see if it is causing the issue? Thanks! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:12, 24 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi User:Elitre. I've upgraded to Google Chrome: 29.0.1547.76 (Official Build 223446) m, JavaScript	V8 3.19.18.23, and paste into edit summary now works.  Thanks! -- ToE 13:26, 24 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hey Thryduulf, would you mind posting another comment into Bugzilla for me? Something along the lines of:
 * en.wp user ToE further reports:
 * Upon upgrading to Google Chrome: 29.0.1547.76 (Official Build 223446) m, JavaScript	V8 3.19.18.23, paste into edit summary works properly.
 * Thanks. I should open a Bugzilla account, but I've been too lazy to create a throw-away email address solely for that purpose. -- ToE 13:26, 24 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I updated that bug, glad that pasting now works for you as well. I really hope you can find the time to create that email account! Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:56, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Multiplication of table headers
Also reported on frwiki, big damages in 2 edits (+7k of junk): first followed by second.--NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 18:00, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * It's a known one, 53394. Regards, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 18:03, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * In fact, this wasn't the first damages made by VE on this article: here, and here, and here, ... I've given up fixing the article.
 * Since the official word is that almost all bugs damaging articles are fixed (which is difficult to believe given what we see), do you have any idea when the damages will cease ? The bug is still unprioritized for almost an entire month, is someone looking at the bugs to put a priority and assign them ?--NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 18:07, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, user:Jdforrester (WMF) does that. AIUI though this is only part of his role though and he has to make sure he understands what a bug is about, verify that it exists and that it is relevant to VisualEditor before he can asses its severity and priority. Not all bug reports are created equal and some take a lot longer to process than others. I don't know how James determines which order to process bugs in but it isn't strictly chronological. Thryduulf (talk) 19:25, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, I'm just surprised that while he claims that almost all bugs damaging articles are already fixed, it's obvious than he hasn't taken into account many of the reports in bugzilla. This bug, which is already almost one month old, is just an example among many other bugs that are still damaging articles but are not even prioritized in bugzilla, even if opened for weeks. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 19:51, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Just because there are open bugs that cause damage to the article does not mean that most such bugs have not already been fixed. Currently there are 781 VE bugs with the status "RESOLVED FIXED", and 597 open bugs (excluding enhancements, and I think I've just identified one as a duplicate), almost all of which do not cause content corruption. 24 open bugs are "blocker", "critical" or "major" severity (not all of the causing content issues), vs 126 fixed bugs with the same severities. Thryduulf (talk) 12:19, 24 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, there are also 315 reports with "NEW" status" (among 823 open reports), probably most of them not analyzed or prioritized, that's why I say that the 24 is quite underestimated. It's easy to have a short list: don't evaluate the bugs... Some of the requested enhancements are also a reason for people having to fix VE edits (comments, nowikis, ...). For example, when James said that almost all bugs damaging articles were fixed, I asked about 4 bugs (and they are just examples):
 * 53214, Pawns added: unprioritized, normal, 1 month old
 * 47790, Deletion of infoboxes: high, normal, 5 months old
 * 51024, 48570, Extra spaces added: high, major, 5 months old, apparently fixed but not deployed
 * 51932, Chess diagrams: unprioritized, normal, 2 months old
 * ... and so on --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 12:54, 24 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Both pages had buggy wikitext (list inside a table outside a table-cell/heading/caption). HTML does not allow any non-whitespace content inside a table anywhere except table cells, headers, and captions. If present, it hoists them out of the table (you can verify this by looking at a sufficiently old revision of the two pages outside VE, Ex: this one) -- this is called foster parenting of misnested content. Since the browser/Tidy fixes up the bad HTML automatically, it shows up correctly in the browser. Parsoid does the same with the buggy wikitext, but it has to record enough information about the bugginess of the wikitext so that it restores the original buggy wikitext on save. We have been progressively fixing these cases, and thought we had this particular use-case covered -- local tests of the same code gives us the correct results. So, we'll investigate why the book-keeping information about the buggy wikitext failed (it is possible the HTML cache had stale copies, or some other edge case showed up here, or maybe the table was edited which broke our book-keeping tricks). But, I just checked the latest versions of both pages, and the problematic lists are now outside the table (as it should be). So, future edits of the page in VE will not encounter the problem. We do have a bug report for building a wikitext linting tool (which will catch and report many, but not all, of these errors) so editors can fix such wikitext, but we haven't yet gotten around to it. If such a tool is deemed important and useful by editors, we could consider upping the priority of this tool. Ssastry (talk) 17:01, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the answer. Personally, I think the priority should be in fixing VE so that it stops damaging articles (not only this bug, but the many others still open): whether or not the wikitext seems ok to you, it seems to work with MediaWiki, and the result with VE is far worse than the existing wikitext. I don't see the point if articles need to be checked so that they are not damaged by VE. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 17:52, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
 * About the linting tool, I think this would be useful if integrated into VE: it the tool detects something that VE may choke on, edit with VE is prevented and the user is proposed to send a feedback with details about the problem. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 11:00, 24 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I have seen some resistance to the idea that there is such a thing as buggy wikitext and it is better all around to fix it. Syntax and semantic errors are common in all code -- I don't understand why it is not okay to just fix it. As an example, we've noticed this idiom of using This is a [[Bar] website] . Seemingly valid wikitext, it is not. Links within links do not make semantic sense in HTML and are not supported by HTML. Browsers effectively break that up into This is a Bar website. Feel free to try it in a sandbox. We go to great lengths to support bidirectional conversion of broken wikitext, but to me, it seems reasonable to fix broken wikitext rather than continuing to rely on it. Ssastry (talk) 15:30, 24 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I wasn't clear, I think it's good to fix the wikitext (and for the example you give, I've already added this detection quite some time ago to WPCleaner ;-) ), but I don't think that VE should rely on wikitext always clean when editing an article: errors in the wikitext will probably always exist, so having VE able to cope with it is a lot better. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 16:14, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

2 links created by VE when only one by user
Seeing this wrong edit, I tried to reproduce it with VE: I found a paragraph ending with text in italic followed by a dot (exemple, ). I selected both the text in italic and the dot and created an external link: the external link is split in 2. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 20:13, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * The same happens with internal links (the irony...), AFAIK . Looking for the bug I filed back then. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:59, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I think it is 54332, although I'll add your example there since it did not add the nowiki tag. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 21:11, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi Elitre, thanks for the answer. Are you sure it's the same bug? The bug you linked seems rather about inserting text in an existing link, while I just created a link on an existing text (the other way around ;-) ). --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 21:25, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * If I were sure, I were I'd be JamesF. :) I'll wait until someone can provide a second opinion on this. My idea is that the "link-final non-alphanumeric character splits link", as that bug reads, but I'd need to test this to be sure. Thryduulf just filed this, he'll tell us if it's related. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 21:30, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * "If I were sure, I were JamesF." «Le doute n'est pas un état bien agréable, mais l'assurance est un état ridicule» :) - Pointillist (talk) 10:16, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Pointillist, noone before made me notice a mistake while using a nice quote :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:29, 24 September 2013 (UTC)


 * My testing seems to suggest this is, which I couldn't reproduce in late August but can now. All that seems to matter is that part of a link is italic/bold and another part is something different. Thryduulf (talk) 21:32, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks, 51054 seems more like it, even it both seems highly related. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 21:35, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Do not take my word as gospel! I'm just an amateur at this and I make no guarantees that what I say is useful or correct - I am not a reliable source! Thryduulf (talk) 21:40, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * No, no. You have spoken. You shall be right. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 21:45, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

No longer enabled by default or available to IP editors
In accordance with WP:VisualEditor/Default State RFC, VisualEditor is no longer enabled for new editors by default, and is not enabled for editors editing without logging in.&mdash;Kww(talk) 22:30, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Does that mean it is not available to editors editing without logging in? (I can't see because I use IE and it is not supported at all yet for IE, as I understand it, but are you saying I will never see it as an option even when it becomes supported in IE because I am not logged in?) 86.160.211.148 (talk) 02:30, 24 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hello 86.160, right now IP editors cannot use VisualEditor. Most of us hope that this will be a short-term situation, and that the continued improvement of VisualEditor in the coming months will lead to a much better and user-friendly product. I for one have already enabled VE in my personal preferences, and I'll keep poking around with it, even though I'm not doing an awful lot of editing. It's worth the investment of my time.  Risker (talk) 02:50, 24 September 2013 (UTC)
 * OK, sorry, I see now that the thread title does actually say "... or available to IP editors", but I was only reading the "not enabled" phrase. By the way, is there any ETA yet on support for IE10? 86.160.211.148 (talk) 03:11, 24 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Apparently there are a number of bugs still be worked: see here. The WMF VisualEditor teams seems to have stopped reporting overall progress since they said, on June 27, that "We hope to fix these issues and let users of Internet Explorer 9 and 10 use VisualEditor in the coming weeks." (And, of course, the developer preview version of Internet Explorer 11 has been out for about two months.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 02:42, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Every time we fix a bug in Internet Explorer, we find another three bugs it throws up; consequently we've de-prioritised IE compared to fixing actual editor bugs. Testing of Internet Explorer 11 shows a (different) set of complex bugs, so that is not an option either, sadly. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 03:21, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the update. And, for what it's worth, I personally agree with the decision to focus on more global issues and less on Microsoft products. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:34, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor now opt-in only for all users on English Wikipedia
Village pump (technical) MZMcBride (talk) 01:20, 24 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I have a question about that. Not that I use the Visual Editor (it was slow for me and I tried a week or so ago and it still generated an error), but I'm curious. I only see the edit button. So I went to my Preferences, under Gadgets, and then under Editing. I see "Remove VisualEditor from the user interface", and it is unchecked. That makes me think I would be able to see the VE, but I don't. I opted-in early to the VE before it was rolled out, so maybe I'm unique in how I view things now? I don't know. Can I enable VE if I wanted to? Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. ) while signing a reply, thx 16:32, 24 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Of course Biosthmors, please see Special:Preferences and you'll find the relevant box to tick. Can you please tell me if this worked? Thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:35, 24 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Yes, the link at the top of the page, the one you mention, Special:Preferences, took me to the right spot and it works if I choose to use it. Thanks. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. ) while signing a reply, thx 16:37, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Duplicated content when deleting apparently blank lines
David Edgar (talk) 23:26, 24 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks David for the report. I have deleted a stray unbalanced opening table wikitext from the page. This also fixes the bad rendering of the Studio albums table in the old revision. We'll meanwhile use this test case to refine our code to handle such stray opening table tags. Future VE edits of this page should not corrupt the page. Ssastry (talk) 16:47, 25 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I now added to verify/improve our handling. Ssastry (talk) 17:07, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

References Disappear
Christopher Thurber (talk) 17:09, 17 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Hi Christopher Thurber,
 * I'm sorry you lost all that work. The second edit, "Fixed typos and punctuation", is the original problem.  It gave all of those references the same "name" (" "), which convinced the software using for viewing pages that they were all the same ref.  Do you remember what you were doing during that particular edit?  For example, did you to into the reference inspector to look at any of these citations?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:46, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hello...I have the same problem with this article. I didn't realized that it happened while I was editing. I only saw it when I saved the article and the number of the references had decreased. This is the change I was doing when it happened. Could it be related to editing a table with beta? Probably not since I don't see any table on Christopher Thurber's article. After I re-added the references and the new table, every time I click "edit beta" the refs are gone! Before I even do any change! Basically I can't use beta at all on this article! I don't have any issues using the source but, if it's something simple that can be done with beta, I prefer to do it with it. But I can't. Just wanted to say that this is happening to other articles as well. And it's possible to happen and people don't see it. That would be a problem to a long article with lots of references... TeamGale 08:33, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Forgot to mention that I am using Mozilla 21 and Windows 8. TeamGale 05:56, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi, I don't want this to be archived, because it looks like a bad bug. I spent some time looking for the relevant bugzilla page because I am sure I have already seen this, but I was not successful. Will add this tomorrow if noone does it before. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 17:37, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks Elitre! It really looks very bad! Cause if someone don't notice all references will disappear when saved! :/ Hope it will get fixed soon!! TeamGale 03:00, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

References and tables
I don't know if this one was mentioned before, but every time I am trying to add a reference at a table with VE, it changes it and replaces it with an already existent one. This time I saved the edit just to post it here. TeamGale 03:50, 25 September 2013 (UTC) Update: Tables were a coincidence. It happened to me again in main article's text. I didn't save the edit this time... TeamGale 19:02, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I added everything to 54654. You are all welcome to improve and expand. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 17:02, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks! I checked the bug page and I saw that the bug was fixed. I clicked "edit beta" on the first article, Michael Giannatos, I had problems and it seems that it's gone. Hope it won't happen again :) Thanks for all your help! Really appreciate it! TeamGale 00:39, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

Timeout, "Error: unknown error" but it saved
This edit timed out with "Error: unknown error" ... but it actually did save the edit. (Which saved some annoyance, but was a new behaviour I thought I should note for you.) - David Gerard (talk) 21:06, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi David, isn't this 53093, which we discussed a few days ago? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:02, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Not quite - every other time I've had a timeout with "Error: unknown error", the edit wasn't saved. This time it was, and that's new to me. I see you've noted someone on fr:wp got the same. I would wonder if the error with a save and the error without a save are the same bug. (Noted in 53093.) - David Gerard (talk) 12:11, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I had incorrectly read those edits as still saved with VE. Thanks for stopping by! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:25, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
 * And again: "Error: unknown error", but the edit actually saved. (Note this edit was literally a single-character change.) - David Gerard (talk) 15:59, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Yep, I don't think what you actually do makes any difference at that point - of course, if you paste 1MB of text, that will have a different impact... but ultimately, I think that articles above 100k bytes are affected. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:14, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hmm, you think it's a sheer size thing? I thought it was complication, like having lots of references ... another edit that gave an error but saved, btw - David Gerard (talk) 21:51, 26 September 2013 (UTC)

Odd one
When I try to edit Clarke, Irwin & Company, the Save button is missing from the toolbar. It appears for me on other articles. I've edited Clarke, Irwin with VE before successfully. Can anyone else duplicate this? by the way, VE liaison team rocks ;) The Interior  (Talk) 23:07, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your note, The Interior, although you ain't being NPOV here! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:04, 26 September 2013 (UTC)


 * It's a browser-related bug, apparently - I see the problem in Firefox (in fact, everything to the right of "More" is missing, on the toolbar), but not when using Chrome. (Both latest browser versions on latest Mac OS.) The bug is caused by the text of the page starting with a file, as can be demonstrated by the fact that my moving the image slightly removes the bug from the page. I'm not sure if this has been reported previously as a bug (odd that it depends on the browser), but I do remember a number of cases where VE was overly sensitive as to what the initial characters are, on a page. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:31, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Nice detective work, John. I'll get my alter ego to look at the bugs related to initial characters.  The Interior  (Talk) 01:35, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Although, now that I think about it, I have been editing it for a while on FF with the cover file at the top. Hmm. The Interior  (Talk) 01:51, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Bug 54379 is similar. The Interior  (Talk) 02:13, 26 September 2013 (UTC)

I suspect it is related to that bug, given that the symptoms are the same but I've not established the cause beyond it not being italics in the image caption. The image caption not displaying in VE is unrelated by the way. Thryduulf (talk) 14:25, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Actually, it appears that bug is related! When I remove the word "page" from the image caption it works, when I add it back it doesn't . I've reported this as but I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be a duplicate of one of the other two identified here. Thryduulf (talk) 14:40, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for looking into it, Thryduulf. That does look like the culprit.  Since the symptoms and trigger are similar, I hoping it's the same bug.  The Interior  (Talk) 17:07, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Yep, Removing "page" brings back the caption. Definitely not handling that word properly.  The Interior  (Talk) 17:09, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for digging into this, and I apologize for jumping to conclusions about the exact cause. (Though, in my defense, I think it helps to be familiar with already identified VE bugs. Hopefully that's an expertise that won't be useful, say, in a year or two.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 04:42, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

Is there an announcement/status page?
VE seems to have vanished - I assumed a serious bug is being dealt with and wondered if there was a status page that explains why VE was removed or if I should look to see if the issue is only with my own account. I'm using Firefox 23, am signed in, etc.

Related to this is that pages such as VisualEditor say "Attention Internet Explorer (IE) users: At the moment, VisualEditor is disabled for all IE web browsers. For IE9 and IE10 users, this is intended to be temporary." An infrequent user of WP will be confused by this. Is IE disabled for the next two or three minutes? I suspect the announcements about IE being disabled should mention an estimate on when it will be available. --Marc Kupper&#124;talk 17:38, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
 * VE was recently turned into opt-in for registered users and not visible for IPs. WP:VPT has more about this. For IE, VE is horribly, indefinitely broken, so disabled is putting it lightly. Chris857 (talk) 17:55, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you Chris857 - The wording and placement of that announcement was ... disturbing.... I should read Lord of the Flies again before commenting. --Marc Kupper&#124;talk 18:22, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
 * It was also announced here, see and  above. -- Red rose64 (talk) 20:17, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I should have caught as I did not do the mental translation of "now opt-in only" to the clearer "is not available." The hat notice at the top of VisualEditor has the same problem. You need to read it carefully and then translate the bold "VisualEditor is available" into "VisualEditor is not available" by reading and understanding the full sentence. --Marc Kupper&#124;talk 08:17, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

Error reports before they even happen!
At Village pump (technical), Jdforrester posted the details of next week's release, with the request to post feedback there (which I already did) or here (doing!). I haven't checked the other "features", but the first and largest "improvement" should really not be applied: "You can now drag-and-drop elements other than just images - references, reference lists, templates and other "nodes" should all be moveable with the mouse."

Having tested this, this means what I feared it would: all the bugs related to image handling are now also present in template handling. Moving a template puts it straight in the middle of text, not where you actually want it. You can't move it to the bottom of the article. When moving, the page doesn't scroll, so you have to move it bit by bit, ruining the layout on the way. Despite the announcement, some templates can't be moved anyway (at least, I can't move the template at the top right of ).

The advantages of this new release don't seem to be great enough to outweigh the disadvantages wrt this issue at least. Why can't they make sure that basic functionality works for the one thing they had it enabled for (images), and only then expand it to other things like templates and reflist (because of course reflists need to be moved so often...). Fram (talk) 08:55, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

I finally found a Mediaiki page with references, and as could be expected but contrary to what was announced, reflists can not be moved. Probably a good thing, but if even the official wmf announcements can't be trusted anymore as to what is includd and what isn't, then one wonders how much these things have been tested (assuming they have been tested at all).

Proposal: the WMF doesn't issue any updates, new versions, new rollouts, ... for the next 3 months, and then comes back with some seriously tested actual progress. Please don't bother us with weekly unreliable announcements of very dubious improvements, it will not create any goodwill at all. Fram (talk) 10:34, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

Where did Edit Beta go?
I can't find Edit Beta; it's not an option anymore. What should I do? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ktingle14 (talk • contribs) 16:53, 27 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Preferences --> Editing. At the end of the page, check the box "Enable VisualEditor (only in the main and user namespaces)" TeamGale 16:56, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

Editing in a table
While trying to add some wiki links in a table, this happened. That kind of result was also happening in the past but I remember that it had been fixed..? Maybe I remember wrong. If it had, then it re-appeared :/ TeamGale 03:18, 29 September 2013 (UTC)