Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive 2017 1

Infoboxes
Visual editor continues to screw up infobox layouts. This is what an anonymous editor was trying to do. This is what Visual Editor did. Typically, at least as far as Infobox television is concerned, the errors that I've seen have involved selectively moving some image related fields away from the main group of image fields to the end of the infobox. I normally just fix these edits and move on, but the example that I've provided did that too, but moved a number of other fields randomly. -- Aussie Legend  ( ✉ ) 14:09, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Known. See VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive_2016_2. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 05:30, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

Can't edit collapsed tables
Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:46, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

Refnames
As discussed last year, VE's method of automatically generating refnames :0 :1 :2 :3 :4 :5 :6 is problematic. I'd go so far as to call it a sin against metadata, in fact; if you want, I can go on at great length about the problems it causes.

Something that generates meaningful names might be unfeasible, but would it at least be possible to include a note warning users that such reference names are non-optimal? Lots of people ignore warnings, but some people heed them. DS (talk) 00:05, 4 January 2017 (UTC)


 * I'd like to second 's point. I first encountered these numbered refs in an article being edited by students, and couldn't figure out why they would choose those ref names. They're not at all memorable. Was the Smith 2017 source "ref name=:17" or "refname=:18"? Could the names be chosen instead from the author's or website's name or the title of the book/journal? SarahSV (talk) 21:09, 6 January 2017 (UTC)
 * A probably relevant point in one of the Phab tickets is that since VE is used across multiple Wikipedias the leading character needs to be something that's legal (numbers are not) and on the keyboard of almost all MediaWiki editors (Latin alphabet characters are not). Does an instance of a language wikipedia know what its alphabetic characters are?  If so, perhaps VE could draw from that set of characters for each language, filtering information from the citation (e.g. author name) against the legal character list for that wiki. Mike Christie (talk - contribs -  library) 21:14, 6 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Mike is correct about the limitations. My favorite solution for this is to pull a semi-random string out of the citation (especially to pull the author's name out of a citation template, if common/well-documented templates are being used).
 * Dragonfly, there isn't any way (now; there used to be, and there may be in the future) for users of VisualEditor's visual mode to see or change the ref names. If you're re-using a ref, then you search for it in the list according to actual content rather than ref name.  (But I may someday take you up on the offer to go on about the subject at great length.)  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 07:22, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

Page render glitch
Lfstevens (talk) 04:37, 4 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Odd. The template generates some HTML.  When I use the HTML directly, it works fine.  But not when I use the template.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 07:30, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

table bug
I did an edit to add a row into the table in List of Ministers of Public Works (Queensland). As you will see in the (diff), it broke the table syntax (two rows are merged into one very long row). In case it is relevant, the citation in the last column of the new row was copied and pasted from one of the later rows (at this stage, all the rows in the table have the same source). I have made a number of similar edits to this article (adding rows and copying the citation) without problems, so I am not sure what happened on this occasion. The workaround was to add a newline in the appropriate spot using the source editor; the workaround in the VE was far too much work to even contemplate (I presume I would have had to fix it by deleting each of the extended columns individually). Kerry (talk) 05:05, 1 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Another another one - same problem diff Kerry (talk) 06:03, 1 January 2017 (UTC)
 * You deserve a bug number; I'll make a note to file one next week unless someone else gets to it first. I'm guessing that this is User:SSastry (WMF)'s team.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 07:24, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
 * User:Whatamidoing (WMF), Thanks for the ping. A bug report would be helpful! SSastry (WMF) (talk) 23:17, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
 * This is now https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T155978. Thanks, Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:47, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

Section link in edit summary is wrong
When we have a section with a header like, and I use the Visual Editor to edit its source (a.k.a. use "Visual Editor's wikitext mode"), then the auto-generated edit summary is  , which is wrong -- the link doesn't go to the section. The traditional source editor, as well as the normal (i.e. non-wikitext-mode) Visual Editor generates the correct edit summary:.

To try this out, try to edit this section in Wikipedia.

--Distelfinck (talk) 00:32, 6 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Yea, found how to do it. For reference, the section with the anchor is this Computing. Using VE (even switching) causes the section edit automatic summary to be /* AnchorSub-disciplines of computing */ rather than /* Sub-disciplines of computing */ . Ugog Nizdast (talk) 10:10, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Repeated dropdowns for inserting common edit summaries, and sometimes the button to mark it as a minor edit disappears
00:45, 5 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Can't reproduce this; things seem normal for me on the page mentioned as well as random ones. Is it still happening and more so, every single time? Ugog Nizdast (talk) 07:53, 5 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Seems like a problem caused by MediaWiki:Gadget-defaultsummaries.js and it's ve.saveDialog.stateChanged hook. It has happened several times before, and it seems that a change in VE has caused it to reoccur. User:ESanders (WMF) will probably know what changed. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 08:20, 5 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I had no idea there were gadgets which worked in conjunction with VE, given it being unconventional and having fluctuating development, are there any more that you know of? Ugog Nizdast (talk) 13:26, 5 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't describe our work as either "unconventional" or "fluctuating" :) We also have some documentation on writing gadgets. Most of the editing gadgets implement functionality that is now standard in VE which is why they are uncommon. ESanders (WMF) (talk) 18:23, 9 January 2017 (UTC)
 * VE gadgets...very interesting indeed. Hehe...that came from someone who has just made a few scripts and seen a little of the mediawiki api for fetching information; so to me interacting with VE felt unimaginable. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 19:52, 9 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Looks like that's always been wired up to the save dialog changing panel, so was always slightly broken, but an upstream change has made it more likely you'll see duplicated checkboxes. ESanders (WMF) (talk) 18:23, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

copying material between articles is doing strange things to photos
I have a large list in List of sites on the Queensland Heritage Register in Toowoomba. I needed a subset of that list in Toowoomba City, Queensland, so I opened both in VE and copy-and-pasted the large list over into the Toowoomba City article and then went through deleting the entries I didn't need and then SAVEd. This is the diff. The list included some photos embedded at appropriate places in the list. In the original article, they appeared as



but in the Toowoomba City article they appeared

*

So there are three things here I would not have expected:
 * The replacement of spaces in the file name with underscores (probably harmless)
 * The introduction of the link=
 * The asterisk preceding the File (in the VE these appeared as vertical white space at the points where the photos were embedded within the list and not as empty list items)

I recollect seeing the first two problems some months ago but have not noticed it happening recently.

In my next edit (using VE still) seeing the "empty list items", I then tried to remove the empty list items, but doing so seemed to remove the photos. So I tried to relocate the photos outside of the list by dragging them to the start of section rather than have them embedded within the list. This is the diff where it appears that the 3rd photo is now embedded in the caption of the 2nd photo.

Toowoomba_Railway_Station,_Queensland,_July_2013.JPGVacy_Hall_2.jpg, 2014]]tion, 2013
 * 219x219px]]

How did that happen? I understand how that might happen in the source editor, but how is it possible in the VE? Kerry (talk) 20:13, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

delete starting of user name

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.87 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Journal_of_Nanomaterials_Science?action=edit

How to delete "User:" from my created page

Journal of Nanomaterials Science (talk) 09:30, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
 * please see: the information about renaming pages. BTW: Your username represents a company or group, which makes it fail our Username policy. You will likely be asked to change your account name to represent an individual. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 17:40, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

Visual editor table editing conflicts with IME
fireattack (talk) 11:40, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

Cannot edit wikitables
Is the visual editor not working properly or being upgraded at the moment? I have tried using it in Firefox and Chrome on both Mac and Win and if I go into visual editor on my sandbox and try to edit a wikitable, when I hove the mouse over the table, a pop up comes up, saying "Sorry, this element can only be edited in source mode for now". It has been like this for at least the last 10 hours, this is the first time I've experienced the problem. Beatpoet (talk) 21:39, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
 * There was a stray html tag which I removed and now the table works for me. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 00:43, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

How to previsualize on NWE?
When I hit alt+shift+p the page becomes whitish and doesn't show the previsualization, and I didn't find any way to show a rendering of my edited text other than switching to VE, which is not convenient.--Micru (talk) 09:44, 15 January 2017 (UTC)
 * You need to click the "Save changes" button, and then the "Show preview" button at the bottom of that box. There have been some requests to make that button easier to reach, but no decision has been made about it.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 07:26, 25 January 2017 (UTC)
 * That is quite hidden. I really hope that it is changed, because the current system is not obvious at all.--Micru (talk) 07:42, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

VE not enabled
My recent 1Lib1Ref sessions have shown me that there are people out there wanting to use the Visual Editor but "can't find it" (either for the first time or were using the VE and then "lost it"). In every case, I found these people all have Preferences > Editing > Editing mode set to "Remember my last editor". None of them seem to have set it manually. In all cases, "Temporarily disable the visual editor while it is in beta" was unchecked. (Aside, is the VE still in beta?). It would appear that by default, edits have the VE not disabled (which one would imagine meant it was enabled) but still can't access it because their last edit was a source edit. Now in some cases these users created their accounts before the VE was available, so of course their last edit was in the source editor. But others are new editors who using the VE and "lost it". Something is wrong here. How is "last edit" determined? Is it based only on the editor used for article pages or are talk pages (and other non-VE pages) being considered? And is "last edit" determined by what editor was launched or what editor was in use at Save?

I think if "Temporarily disable" is unchecked, editing mode should not default to "last edit", as it seems to an existing source user into the source editor forever more. I think "both editors" should be the default.

It also seems to me that even if "last editor" is explicitly set by the user, the semantics of "last edit" should exclude any source-only page and even then it should be the last edit at Save rather than at launch in case some tool launches the source editor rather than the user launch it and the user quits out without saving. Kerry (talk) 00:54, 24 January 2017 (UTC)


 * First, thanks for doing that #1Lib1Ref outreach work.
 * When the 'single edit tab' was introduced at the English Wikipedia last year, a small group of editors insisted that all new editors start with the wikitext editor. At the first edit, new accounts should see a pop-up dialog that offers them the ability to choose their favorite (at all wikis/regardless of the default).
 * "Last edit" is supposed to be based on namespaces where both modes are available. (However, I haven't checked to be certain that this is still the case since before the wikitext Beta Feature was released.)  It is based on 'last seen' rather than 'last saved in'.  Given the situation, I think that you may want to direct the librarians to another setting in the preferences, such as defaulting to their preferred environment (whichever that is) or showing two tabs.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 07:47, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

Jumping zombie cursor in table cells and elseswhere
--Timeshifter (talk) 16:42, 24 January 2017 (UTC)


 * This sounds unbelievably annoying. I can't reproduce it (Firefox 50.1.0/macOS Sierra).  So the first question is:  Is it still happening for you?  For example, could you go to https://www.mediawiki.org/ (where they have a slightly newer version of MediaWiki and VisualEditor software as of ~12 hours ago) and see if it's a problem there?
 * Also, I see that there's an update available in Firefox. Do you think that an update might solve it?   Never mind; Kailash is reporting that the problem exists in multiple browsers, so that won't help. Do you happen to have the Beta Feature (wikitext mode) enabled?  I'm curious whether it happens there, too.  If it does, then it might be related to this "finger-slipping" kind of problem. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 08:06, 25 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I have the latest standard version of Firefox. I do not have any Beta features enabled. The problem is not occurring at https://www.mediawiki.org on the tables at mw:Help:Sorting. So I guess the problem is solved. --Timeshifter (talk) 09:28, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

The Shift-key problem
Why is it that when I press/hold the Shift key while typing in VE, the caret (the blinking I beam) goes back to the beginning of the sentence? Kailash29792 (talk) 05:04, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
 * That is the problem I am having with adding ( in a table cell. See section above:
 * 
 * --Timeshifter (talk) 05:24, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
 * For what it's worth, I have heard reports of similar weird behaviour with the Shift key from another user only with the source editor. That user believed they resolved their problem by setting all their preferences back to "vanilla" but it wasn't done systematically so I can't say what specific preferences may have caused their problem. And I believe they also did do all the usual things that you do when "weird stuff" happens: make sure all OS and browser updates have been installed, clear your browser cache/cookies, reboot your computer, etc so it may have had nothing to do with their preferences. I would suggest doing all the "usual things" first and if that doesn't work, try removing some of your preferences and gadgets. I don't think this is a VE problem itself but it may be a problem where the VE is interacting badly with a preference or gadget. Kerry (talk) 09:03, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The "Shift key" problem has nothing to do with which PC I use. And the source editor never shows this problem. Only VE does, regardless of which browser I use, be it Firefox, Chrome, or Edge. Kailash29792 (talk)  10:23, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I just tested it on another PC, and on other tables. Same thing is happening with any shift-key character. Tables in Help:Sorting for example. It only happens on the first use of a shift-key character in a cell. --Timeshifter (talk) 16:44, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

I couldn't reproduce this (Chrome, Mac OS) or can't understand the problem. Go to a table column and try any shift-key character? works for me. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 00:38, 25 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm thinking that this may be a Windows-only problem. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 07:49, 25 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The problem is not occurring for me at https://www.mediawiki.org on the tables at mw:Help:Sorting and, as you said, that site has a newer version of Mediawiki software. --Timeshifter (talk) 09:54, 25 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Definitely not a Windows issue, I'm on Ubuntu and I'm getting the same problem on Firefox and Chromium in the source editor: the shift key brings me to the beginning of the line, making editing almost impossible... I've been having this issue for quite a while and I'm so surprised that very few people appear to experience it (based on the absence of relevant results when searching the issue on the Internet). Natematic (talk) 16:11, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

allow citations to be reused in image captions
Hi, I just noticed that it's not possible to reuse a citation in an image caption. This would be a nice feature to have (for captions that contain information not depicted in their image). Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 18:56, 19 January 2017 (UTC)
 * A basic workaround for now is just copy-pasting the said citation, if you aren't already aware of this. Copying a citation in VE works to some extent; edit the image and paste it in the caption field. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 01:37, 22 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Just remember to copy it from "edit" mode, and not while reading the article (e.g., in another tab). If you copy the  while reading a page, you'll get the blue clicky number itself, rather than the ref's contents.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 07:28, 25 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I didn't know that, thanks! Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 16:50, 26 January 2017 (UTC)

Bug report: move/above below deletes rows instead of moving them
So after reading Help:Sorting I tried to sort the rows of the List of photo and video apps table alphabetically by following the tutorial and clicking the first column's cell, then its arrow on the left and then choosing "move above" (or below). However instead of moving the rows it simply deleted them.

Also would it be possible to implement an auto-sort feature so that one only has to click a button and the whole table(/s) of the current section get sorted alphabetically by their first column's cell-display-values? That would be pretty useful especially for longer tables...

Sidenote that section of the Help:Sorting page describes how to rearrange rows (per above that's not working) using VisualEditor and then suddenly switches to talk about columns instead of rows. It says "Either method can be time-consuming for long tables. For long tables there is a quicker way." -> why is it about columns, not rows, afterwards and how is the method described therafter the "quicker" way? Isn't it the same way that was described before just for columns?

--Fixuture (talk) 20:48, 18 January 2017 (UTC)


 * I rewrote the section in Help:Sorting to clarify it. I also noted the wikitext editing method for when VisualEditor bugginess arises at times. VisualEditor is working correctly on the tables I tried it on within the Help:Sorting page. But as you described, it is deleting rows in the List of photo and video apps table. I don't know why. --Timeshifter (talk) 00:49, 19 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I haven't figured this out completely yet, but it has something to do with that table's structure. If I add another column there is no problem. Must be the cell count or something like that. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 09:20, 23 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I copied the table from List of photo and video apps to my user page on mediawiki.org and the problem is still occurring with the newer version of the Mediawiki software there. Rows are deleted when one tries to move them. Columns move fine. The problem only occurs on that table. Not on tables at mw:Help:Sorting.
 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Timeshifter
 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Sorting
 * I am using the latest standard version of Firefox (50.1.0) on Windows 10 in the Vector skin.
 * Same exact things occur in Internet Explorer browser. On both Wikipedia and Mediawiki.org
 * --Timeshifter (talk) 10:09, 25 January 2017 (UTC)


 * & it's the No template in the last column that's causing this. It might have a problem parsing the end of rows when there's a }} - but that's just a guess. --Fixuture (talk) 20:35, 26 January 2017 (UTC)
 * and In edit mode in VisualEditor I deleted the "No" column, and then tried moving the rows. It worked! The rows moved, and were not deleted. I didn't save the page. I just experimented in edit mode. --Timeshifter (talk) 21:06, 26 January 2017 (UTC)

On Admin Nominations to put your vote or question in, it doesn't have the visual editor icon available.
ExpertListener95 (talk) 19:45, 23 January 2017 (UTC)
 * VE isn't enabled for talk pages. For using them, I'm afraid, you'll have to learn basic wikmarkup. See WP:TPYES and WP:INTERSPERSE which explains the basic. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 00:48, 25 January 2017 (UTC)
 * If you really don't want to learn the old system, then you might consider enabling the new Beta Feature at Special:Preferences. You'll still see wikitext markup code, but the toolbar will be the same.  For example, you could still Insert > Template with the same dialog box, and it will add all the wikitext code for you.
 * OTOH, this is definitely beta testing, so if you don't want to encounter the occasional bug, then wait until the devs have done some more work on it. Whether you want to try it is purely a matter of personal preference.   Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 07:40, 25 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Thank you Whatamidoing (WMF) I really appreciate that! I went ahead and enabled it and so far, I love it! It's so much simpler and easier to use for me. --ExpertListener95 (talk) 01:27, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
 * editors who  vote  on  RfA (or any  other back office or maintenance areas) are expected to  have a knowledge of what  our  administrator system entails and it  electoral  process. It  is unlikely  that  new users with  only  6 or so  edits will have that  experience. The en.Wiki is now the only  major Wikipedia not to have introduced a minimum requirement  for experience to  vote and/or comment  at  RfA. The level of experience required would normally  presuppose that  participants are perfectly  at ease with  traditional Wiki markup at  least in its simplest form. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:36, 30 January 2017 (UTC) Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:40, 30 January 2017 (UTC)

Possible bug inserting pmc= into citations
Please see this possible bug report. Thanks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:32, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

More convenient way to switch refs to use cite
Right now this involves a lot of switching around or a change to source mode. How about a way to see the current random ref text and in the same dialog show the cite properties. Then you could drag and drop the invidiual pieces of the old ref into the right slots. You could include a dropdown to pick which type of cite was relevant and switch the displayed fields accordingly. Cheers! Lfstevens (talk) 01:59, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what you're asking for? What do you mean by "switch refs". Do you mean trying to copy the ref in its raw form? Then I think that would be useful. Could you explain? Ugog Nizdast (talk) 04:25, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for following up. Many refs are of the form The Convert button can only handle a few specific cases. Otherwise you have to be very good with cut and paste or go to source mode. I would like a simpler way to convert such refs into:
 * If you e.g., had a mode that displays the existing ref in a textbox at the top of the cite dialog and let me cut/drag chunks of text into the appropriate field that would be great. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lfstevens (talk • contribs) 19:58, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Oh, now I get it. Converting refs into their respective cite templates. Okay, now pardon me for being slow again, what convert button are you referring to? I just tried and there doesn't seem to be any way to convert a given ref, especially in this raw form, you can edit them but nothing more. Regarding the main issue, let's see what the devs have to say. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 11:04, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
 * If the content of a ref is a simple url, a convert button appears and it attempts to fill out a cite template. There may be other cases it can handle. Lfstevens (talk) 13:34, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
 * If you can get this idea to pass an RFC at WT:CITE, then I'll propose it to the devs. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:15, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

cannot safe edits, error code HTTP 404

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12) AppleWebKit/602.1.50 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0 Safari/602.1.50

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Old_Dutch&action=edit

Watisfictie (talk) 10:22, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Just made a null edit there successfully. Is it still happening? Ugog Nizdast (talk) 10:52, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I see that you have been editing on the mobile site. Was it working on a mobile device but giving you errors on your laptop?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:21, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

Right Shift Key
I can't use it on many pages without the cursor moving to the top left of what I'm writing. Chrome, Windows 10. Please ping me if you know how to fix this. Adotchar | reply here 10:27, 3 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your note. I thought we'd just gotten that annoying bug fixed.  Is it still happening today?  User:Timeshifter, are you seeing this, too?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:18, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Still happening to me in Firefox on English Wikipedia, though not on Mediawiki.org (it is using a more recent version of the Mediawiki software). Use of shift key moves cursor to front of line or cell. Depending on whether I am typing in a table or outside a table. It does not happen all the time. --Timeshifter (talk) 06:59, 4 February 2017 (UTC)

Cite > Manual > Web template
I did Visual Edit training at the State Library of Queensland 3 weeks ago to kick off the meta:Wikipedia Library/1Lib1Ref campaign. The library has now added over 1,000 citations through the campaign, so an excellent result there for 1Lib1Ref, for the library, and .... for the VE as almost all the edits would have been done with the VE. As part of this process, I was involved in mentoring sessions at the library and I noticed some common misunderstanding with the use of Cite.

In Cite > Web, the user can see URL, Title, Last Name and First Name with other fields out of sight below. While these users knew that a URL means the "web address", it is not indicated that the http (or other prefix) is required so it was not uncommon to omit that. I think "i" in the circle for more information should mention the need for the http prefix as this is clearly a common misunderstanding. Also I don't think someone who doesn't understand what a URL is is likely to be helped by repeating the word URL in the info, maybe "URL (web address)" might be helpful either in the main form or at least in the info.

Then comes the Title field. People are tempted to put the name of the website into these field rather than the title of the web page. Although there is a field lower down (but out of sight) for the Website, they haven't seen it yet. I think the word "title" is used here because that is the field name in the cite-web template, but this is not obvious to a user who knows nothing of the cite-web template. When they do reach the Website and Publisher section, it is not clear to them what to do and URLs are often pasted into the Website field again. Given that most web pages don't have an author for the first/last name fields, I would be inclined to move the Website (and posssibly also Publisher) into the earlier fields where it is initially visible and rename Title as "Name of Web page", Website as "Name of Web site" (again, the info popup info is not entirely helpful). I think if the first 3 visible fields were URL (Web Address), Name of Web page, Name of Web site, (perhaps with Publisher as a 4th) with the info popups stressing the difference between "page" and "site", the information going into these fields might be more what we intend.

Another thing I spotted in the librarian's use of VE (and have found in my own use of the VE) is that it maddening to create Cite > Manual > Web and then realise it was a news website and should have been Cite > Manual > News or that it was a digitised book or journal and you would rather have used Cite > Web > Book/Journal. For the VE user there is NO way to fix this without deleting the work you did and starting all over again. Whereas the source editor user simply replaces the word "web" to "news" and quickly moves on. It would be nice if the pop-up for the Cite > Manual > Whatever allowed the "cite web" that appears as a title to be a drop-down that could be changed if you changed your mind retaining the values already entered in the fields. (I personally experience this problem more generally with templates when I need to convert an existing template into a related template for some reasons, most common example is to switch commons-category-inline to commons-category once other external links are present; having an easy way to change the template type to a related one without redoing all the parameters would be a great help).

The other misunderstanding related to the use of Trove's pre-formatted citations. Being librarians, they live and breathe Trove. The correct way to add them in the VE is Cite > Manual > Basic form and then just paste them in, but unfortunately the librarians would see Cite > Automatic (and in their minds these were "automatic" citations) so they tried to paste in that field. Now the interesting thing is that sometimes this actually works (e.g. I think the code is detecting the ISBN for a book in these pre-formatted citation and produces something reasonable from that albeit not what was pasted in), but it does not work in general with the Trove pre-formatted citations. I was wondering if this field should support the parsing of wikitext as Cite > Manual Basic does as clearly to quite a number of these users, these are "automatic" citations rather than "basic" citations. Now obviously when I am in the room and can point them in the right direction, all is well, but for the user at home without this help, they will just be confused when Cite > Automatic seems to work some of the time with Trove citations but not all of the time.

Anyhow that's the feedback I have from watching a number of clearly desirable contributors (librarians) use the VE. They do love the VE (some had prior exposure to the source editor and mostly found it too hard), so my comments above should be interpreted in the context. They loved the VE but they still did have some problems using it, which a little bit of tweaking might resolve. Kerry (talk) 02:13, 4 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Although @Kerry comments are long some of them have very good merit. I am NOT a WMF employee but I have written the following more concise list of his suggestions and my actions:


 * 1) Clarify that "URL" requires a "http://..." My notes: This is not directly within the purview of this project. This is TemplateData fix of Cite web, Cite news, Cite journal, and Cite book  ✅ for those four templates
 * 2) Clarify what is meant by "Title" in Cite web. My notes: again TemplateData ✅ Kept "Title" but added clear description
 * 3) Clarify Website or Publisher params in Cite web. ✅ I will spare you the details. Edits here
 * 4) Great suggestion Create a functionality for switching a citation from/to one of the four citation templates provided. Even I wish this was possible. For automatically generated citations, sometimes the citation template chosen is not the best.
 * 5) Add the ability to accept Trove's pre-formatted citations (or other pre-formatted) in some form. My notes: maybe by use of the Citation template. For example VE already uses the Citation template when it detects a YouTube.com URL fed into the Automatic generator. I have no experience with pre-formatted citations, but to me this seems unnecessary. The user over time learns to switch to "Manual" to achieve this goal.


 * Just trying to help. I hope I was helpful. Even for an experienced user like me VE is extremely helpful. I say thank you to everyone at WMF &mdash; አቤል ዳዊት?(Janweh64) (talk) 13:07, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Citations of essays in books
I have in front of me a book, of a sort that I have seen academics wishing to reference during their first experiments with Wikipedia.

ISBN 0 7100 6979 0. On here, using the /template/Cite book/, the ISBN auto fills to   Providing you manually strip the space characters first.


 * autofill is not working on VE today.
 * the reference is wrong. The Essay I am using is by RTD Richards on page 80, and the title is The development of the modern woollen carding machine.(yes I do know how to change it - but new editors don't.
 * if ve is as clever as it should be, and if ISBN autofill is working again, there can be no technical reason why the book cite window, cannot autochange its format on detecting a compilation. The obscure hat message  'There might be some additional information about the "Cite book" template on its page.'  could be changed to  'If this material is an contained as an essay, click on the compilation button, see "Cite book" for more information.'  The current method of reading through 82 extra fields after the second click is not user friendly, or a user orientated solution.

The aim of VE is to be task orientated- to work for the newuser- not an all-inclusive-when-you-have-stumbled-on-the-technique solution.

So to continue with a second problem. When you have made a lot of site visits to obscure badly referenced places, you learn to appreciate that you can legitimately use the on-site interpretation boards as references. We have a excellent template, and if doing a back-stage pass with edit-a-thon at a GLAM these are incredibly useful. VE doesn't link to but again it could. The level 2 -Add a citation widget- has 6 spaces in the grid but only 5 are used. The 6th space could be Link to other cites, and this could drop to a further level three widget where they are all listed, extra user cite forms could be designed (including one for sign), or it could crash out to a bit of wikieditor code. At this stage feedback from trainers could be useful to explain exactly what our more real-life experienced newbies expect to see.

--ClemRutter (talk) 19:25, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Once again, the issue of the inability to edit footnotes within templates (in VE) rears its ugly head.
There is now a user script - User:Cumbril/References Consolidator, mentioned in the Technology Report of the most recent Signpost, that "converts all references in an article to list-defined format". Or, if you will, the script moves the body of all footnotes into the Reflist template, where the footnotes are no longer editable by VE.

I hope that either (a) the new user script doesn't get adopted and used by many editors, or (b) VE programmers can figure out how to make footnotes within templates editable within VE. Because if neither happens, the usefulness of VE is going to substantially decrease. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:31, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Suggestion: Adding an Uncomment and Comment-out features in VE
As you are no doubt aware Commenting out is a very helpful technique in Wikipedia edit, web design, or computer programming in general. My two suggestions are to improve VE in this regard. The first is perhaps easier to implement than the second:
 * 1) Add an Uncomment button: this would be right next to the "Remove" button that currently exists when editing comments. "Remove" currently deletes the comment. The existence of this "Remove" is stupid and inconsistent with rest of VE (see Template, Cite, Media etc.) because the user can simply hit the backspace button on their keyboard. What I would like is a way that would just remove  . Or perhaps change the stupid "Remove" to accomplish this instead.
 * 2) Add a Comment out functionality: right now in VE if a user highlights any thing and hits Insert > Comment, the portion highlighted is deleted and a new blank comment is created. It works in "source editing" but not in "visual editing". &mdash; አቤል ዳዊት?(Janweh64) (talk) 13:41, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I support this as well. A good idea, new users especially need to know commenting out is better than just removing. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 10:50, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Trying to Properly Cite a Reference

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.95 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salute_Your_Shorts&action=edit

Hello,

Under production, I'm attempting to properly cite the following link I can't get it under the References section either. I apologize for any errors but I figured this would be an important foot note for this entry.

KingSTVO (talk) 06:41, 7 February 2017 (UTC)'
 * It's very easy to cite a web link in VE. In edit mode, go to cite and choose "automatic" instead of manual, enter the url and click "generate"; the ref would be made for you. The ref can be re-inserted once added, elsewhere in the article by selecting the reuse option. What was wrong was: replacing an another existing reference with the new eonline link manually and not changing all the parameters, the former was cited multiple times so it broke in the ref list and the new "combined" ref had only the title and link for the eonline article but still showed older Variety article other information. There was duplicate eonline link which I combined as well. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 11:13, 7 February 2017 (UTC)


 * This reinforces the point I was making above about the UI needing to be Task focused. If a trainee asked me how to do it- I could now explain- but if they followed up with the question 'Why?', I am phlumoxed. --ClemRutter (talk) 15:32, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Display error on Nyuserre Ini
Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:57, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
 * This seems to be caused by the external link in the  parameter used in the second-last sfn cite within the efn note. I tested this by removing it here, tried VE and it worked as usual. You can even go further and add the parameter back with plain text rather than the EL; VE still works as usual. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 07:52, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
 * The 3rd parameter (loc) of the sfn template is used add to the name of the reference. This probably creates a whole lot of trouble for parsoid.. when it is a link nested inside another ref. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 08:32, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

more than 9 authors in journal citation

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/56.0.2924.87 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Rkleegemtsinai/sandbox&action=edit&section=3 How do I add authors 10-18 in a journal citation?

Rkleegemtsinai (talk) 15:48, 24 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Hello, at the bottom of the parameter list is a button "Add more information". When you click it, more parameters will be shown for selection as well as an edit field to enter a parameter name. If you enter an unlisted parameter name, VE will add such an "unknown" parameter under the given name (including eventual typos, so such parameters should be double-checked before saving). In this case: just do this step twice and add unlisted parameters for "last10" and "first10" (without quotation marks). The parameters will be added as empty fields in the list and you can fill them with values as usual. VisualEditor/User guide has an (albeit tiny) section about this function, and Template:cite journal includes a documentation of all parameters for journals. GermanJoe (talk) 16:40, 24 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Hello, To add multiple author names to a journal reference, I copied sourcecode "last5=O'Neal|first5=Timothy" from "Wikipedia:Citing sources/Example edits for different methods" and changed the number to enter each additional author. Thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rkleegemtsinai (talk • contribs)


 * That works too :). To respond to a previous thread you can edit the same section and add your comment at the end of the section (usually with an increased indentation). I have merged both threads just for clarity. GermanJoe (talk) 17:41, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

→→→→Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rkleegemtsinai (talk • contribs) 18:02, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

I want to be able to copy this and put it on my power point

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 9000.91.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/56.0.2924.110 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mandible&action=edit

66.44.195.43 (talk) 22:33, 28 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Which part do you want to be able to copy? If it's an image, then don't try to edit the page; just read it.  Look at the caption for the image, where you'll find a tiny icon of two overlapping boxes.  Click that to reach a page where you can download it.  (If that icon isn't present, then control-click or Command-click the image to open it in a new tab.)  Many images on that page are public domain, but some are still protected by copyright.  You may want to read c:Commons:Reusing content outside Wikimedia.  More images are available at c:Category:Human anatomy, mandible.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:31, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Can you make my page

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/56.0.2924.87 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Bollualawer12/sandbox&action=edit&redlink=1&preload=Template%3AUser+sandbox%2Fpreload

Bollualawer12 (talk) 16:24, 25 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Bollualawer12, if you have a technical problem, then I'd like to know more about what happened. Just click "Edit section" next to your question and tell me what happened.
 * If you need general help with figuring out what to write, then you might want to ask for help at the Teahouse. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:33, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Insertion of unformated Text
It would be great if formated copied Text would be insertet unformated. Thanks --31.16.248.200 (talk) 10:20, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Try CTRL-SHIFT-V when you paste. It usually works for me. Kerry (talk) 11:02, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
 * They're making a change so that if you copy one line (e.g., a headline from a news source), then it will be unformatted, but if you copy multiple lines, then some formatting will be preserved. This may reduce some of the problems (but will probably annoy people who want to copy pre-formatted bibliographic citations and retain all of the traditional formatting).  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:35, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Text alignment and other options in VisualEditor - Suggestion
It would be optimal if there was stronger text formatting / customization options in the VisualEditor, such as the ability to align text (left, right, centered, justified). Supporting simple edits in the VisualEditor such as text alignment are important so the contributor can see the "finished product" while the formatting is applied. As a new contributor, the VisualEditor is much more tangible than editing in Source Code, so polishing the VisualEditor to include more abilities would make editing even better. — Preceding unsigned comment added by TheAnonymousNerd (talk • contribs) 04:49, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
 * In general in Wikipedia, we only use left aligned text. Slight exceptions exist for tables, but table structure is not edited very much, so it's a bit lower priority. Thank you for your feedback —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 12:30, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Is it possible to enable the VisualEditor for some templates?
Some templates consist of tables which however can't be edited with the VisualEditor because only source editing is allowed. Is there a way to enable the VisualEditor at least on some templates? Examples:


 * Template:AM4 chipsets
 * Template:AMD APU features
 * Template:AMD GPU features
 * Template:AMD Radeon Instinct
 * Template:AMD Radeon Pro (Mobile)
 * Template:AMD Radeon Pro WX x100
 * Template:AMD Radeon Rx 400
 * Template:AMD Ryzen


 * Draft:Tick-Tock model/main roadmap
 * Draft:Tick-Tock model/Atom roadmap

The latter two were meant to be templates, but since the VisualEditor doesn't work in template space, I first moved the newly created templates into article space, which then promptly got moved to draft space by someone else. The move into draft space then broke the main articles which transcluded the templates in article space, because moves to draft space don't have redirects, leading to wrong accusations in the edit history of the main articles. (People thought the templates simply weren't there, as they couldn't see them due to the missing redirects.)

The reason I'd like to use a template for these two tables is that they are used in two articles. Editors of the articles have been debating a move of the tables to only one article for years, and any attempts to go forward with such a move have always been reverted. So anyone working on these tables has to sync the changes in both articles manually. --Pizzahut2 (talk) 14:34, 6 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Short answer: No.
 * Long answer: VisualEditor's visual mode can only be enabled in entire namespaces (all the templates, not just this one), so this isn't technically possible.
 * However, there's a relatively simple workaround: Put them in the Template: namespace, and use them normally.  Whenever you want to edit one of these templates, then open the template page, copy (not cut) the entire contents to your own /sandbox (in userspace), and edit them there.  When you're done, save your changes to your sandbox.  Then open your sandbox in source mode (or open it in visual mode, and click the button near the Save button to switch to the wikitext source moe), copy the entire contents of your sandbox, and paste it back into the actual template.  This approach has a second benefit:  if you discover a mistake right after you save the page (which happens to me all the time :-), then you can fix it before it goes 'live' in the real template.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:42, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

how to make your own title

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.79 Safari/537.36 Edge/14.14393

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Soraya_O%27Sullivan?action=edit

Soraya O&#39;Sullivan (talk) 03:41, 3 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Soraya O&#39;Sullivan, I'm not sure whether you want a new username or to WP:MOVE an article to a new title. You might want to ask this question at the WP:Teahouse for new editors.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:48, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Adding interwiki links
I've been adding a lot of interwiki links here, and it doesn't seem to work quite right. Going into the link dialogue and entering :it:Livio Garzanti doesn't generate Livio Garzanti as I would expect; it generates Livio Garzanti which plays hell with the display. Is there a way to do this in VE? Not sure this is really a bug if it's not intended to work yet. However, I should point out that it does actually work in editing mode; it only loses the lead colon when you save. Up to that point you can click on the created link in edit mode, and get sent to the Italian page. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:44, 21 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Hi Mike, I'm not sure if this is a bug or a (mis)feature. In the meantime, if you link to , then it should give you the link that you wanted.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:44, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * It's a bug, and the bug report reportedly exists, but I haven't found it yet. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:23, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

templates and bullet lists - everything looks OK visually in the VE but the source produced is not good
Kerry (talk) 06:34, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Hi Kerry,

It's possible; it's just not intuitive. You have to first create blank lines (e.g., place your cursor at the end of the word "links" in the ==External links== section heading), drag the template into those blank lines, and then remove the extra blank lines.

There's a bug about doing it properly, but I don't think it will be fixed very soon. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:55, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
 * It's not a probably creating a new article as I put in the External links heading, add the commons template, and then add the bullet list of external links. The problem occurs more when working with an existing article. It is one of those situations of when it looks right in the VE but isn't right and can't be fixed in the VE, meaning it increases the risk of being reverted or of reinforcing the perception that the VE is an "extra burden on the community". Kerry (talk) 03:14, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Cursor jumping
Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 08:24, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Sorry for not including steps here. If it's a known problem, I'll leave it alone; if not, I'll try to reproduce it in the next few days. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 08:24, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Maybe it's this: /Archive 2016 1? Ugog Nizdast (talk) 10:00, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I think it's Timeshifter's bug. I'm sorry that it hasn't been fixed yet.  It's apparently more complicated than it looks – perhaps an intermittent thing?
 * Ed, I believe that a set of reliable reproduction steps would be very much appreciated. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:47, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
 * If I'm remembering the circumstances right, I think it's what is you are describing. I'll try to reproduce this asap. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 04:56, 7 March 2017 (UTC) Fixed, sorry. It's the shift key that does it.
 * Check that, I can reproduce it right now. Hitting "shift" in the sentence beginning "Historians William H. Garzke and Robert O. Dulin ..." over at Design A-150 battleship does it. Same setup as above, Chrome on Windows 10. Happens on Firefox too. Rather hard to edit sentences when I can't use the shift key. ;-) Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 05:01, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm testing it on other articles like George W. Hooker, United States Navy, Nicolai Wammen, Khin Yu May, North Carolina-class battleship, and several other random articles; the cursor moves every time I click somewhere and hit "shift." Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 05:07, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Ed, where does the cursor end up? (Start of the line, start of the article, apparently random...)  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:48, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
 * It seems to jump back to the last wikilink, citation, or paragraph beginning, in that order. It never jumps up to a new para. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 09:12, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

Shift is somehow being left tab and shift at the same time

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/56.0.2924.87 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view/Noticeboard?action=edit&section=4#Conflict_of_Interest_regarding_User%253ABomberswarm2

Endercase (talk) 17:12, 4 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Endercase, I want to hear more about this. What exactly happened, and does it happen every time?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:49, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Hey, sorry I didn't see your first tag for some reason. It happens kinda randomly. Usually, after I interact with hyperlinks or edit something I had already written in the same session. Also, the amount of space the cursor moves seems to be random but it is always backward (left tab is inaccurate as it skips through text). I will attempt better documentation next time. What would you like me to record? Endercase (talk) 23:56, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
 * looks like a variation of https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T156228 (timeshifter bug) Endercase (talk) 23:57, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
 * It is also worth noting that after the bug has been "activated" shift will always return to the same location (I think) but allow you to type in that location. I will test right shift next time as well. Endercase (talk) 00:03, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I'm copying your comments to T156228, on the theory that you're probably right, and if you aren't, it's probably the same dev who will get to figure out both problems.  :-)
 * It looks like you're running Chrome on Windows 10, which seems to be what everyone else with this particular bug is using. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:12, 10 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I have tested right shift after left shift problems. It is just left shift that activates the jump. Endercase (talk) 16:43, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

Left-, centre- and right-aligning
Is there any way to align text within VE? I understand it would be disabled within prose for style reasons, but it would be nice to be able to align text in table cells (e.g. often table columns consisting of numbers are centre- and right-aligned). Jc86035 (talk) Use &#123;&#123;re&#124;Jc86035&#125;&#125; to reply to me 10:50, 21 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Hi Jc86035,
 * This is unfortunately not possible yet. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:34, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

Avoiding punctuation
I accidentally selected a linkable term which was followed by an apostrophe and my selection included the terminal apostrophe. When I selected for linking, it found the matching article but also introduced a nowiki tag which is not needed. I think it might help to trim apostrophes and quotes at the ends while placing piped links. (example here) Shyamal (talk) 13:38, 23 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Hi Shyamal, I'm sorry that you ran into this problem. These are called "link trails", and they only create links under certain circumstances (e.g., if it is followed by a lowercase Latin-alphabet letter).    does not create a link trail (it produces this:    instead).
 * There is a long-term plan to make it easier to see whether letters are connected to the link; I've added a link to it on the side. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:55, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

Project pages - where does one ask for these to be VE-enabled
I am now in my 2nd situation of working on a Project page with VE users. Currently project pages are not enabled for VE users so you have to think of a workaround. What I am doing is to put a REDIRECT from the Project page into a user subpage (as VE is enabled for User pages), e.g. GLAM/State Library of Queensland/QWiki Club. It's quite ugly as it is visible what I am doing, but I don't see what else I can do. Kerry (talk) 03:18, 8 March 2017 (UTC)


 * I don't have a good solution to your problem. The general approach is that you have to demonstrate consensus from the community and then make a request (e.g., ping me, but the theory is that editors would just file a Phab task about it).  For the English Wikipedia in particular, you would also have to convince the product manager that the benefit of having it enabled for your target page(s) exceeds the pain that would be caused by having it enabled on ANI.
 * Since that's unlikely, I wonder what you think about suggesting that they opt-in to the beta feature, so that they don't have to learn two different toolbars? I suggested it to a new editor here a few weeks ago, and s/he seemed very happy about that.  It's not a good solution for that page in particular (wikitext syntax for tables is intimidating to most people, and a familiar toolbar won't help with that), but it might be an alternative to consider in other cases.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:01, 10 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Where exactly would I seek to establish this consensus? And what specific pain would occur on ANI? Kerry (talk) 04:07, 10 March 2017 (UTC)
 * The best location for a discussion like that is probably WP:VPPR.
 * VisualEditor can't "indent" replies, and it's relatively slow to load large pages, so it would be painful to use it on pages such as ANI (current size: 409,515 bytes, or about twelve times the old maximum recommended page size). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:21, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

Still unacceptable
If I edit International Space Station in wikitext mode, I can start editing after a few seconds, but I am confronted immediately by two edit notices in their own box, one about British English and one stating "STOP! Are you planning to change aTTitude to aLTitude? If so, please check whether or not this is correct - aTTitude is the orientation of the station, whereas aLTitude is its height.". Then there is a large pink box about the protection, and then a line shown on every article you edit, stating "Content that violates any copyrights will be deleted. Encyclopedic content must be verifiable. Work submitted to Wikipedia can be edited, used, and redistributed—by anyone—subject to certain terms and conditions."

If I edit the same article in VE (four years old at least, and promoted as the default editor by the WMF for at least two years now, if not more, even though usage remains here at what, 5%?), I get first a long, long wait of 50 seconds. And then... no notices at all. Not the two white boxes, not the pink box, and not the standard text every aricle gets on editing. It doesn't seem to be related to the specific article, e.g. on Aerith Gainsborough I don't get the edit notice or standard text in VE either.

Now, these examples may not seem that important, but what about something like George W. Bush, which starts (for the 95% of editors that use the better editor) with "Attention!

Any addition of content that is not properly sourced, does not conform to Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy, or is defamatory will be removed promptly. In addition, you will be blocked from editing Wikipedia, possibly without further warning."

For VE editors, it starts (eventually, after a long long wait) without all that distracting bullshit.

But wait! On the top right, you get a triangular icon with an exclamation mark, and it gives the popup text "Edit notices". So while they are hidden too far away and not prominent enough by far, you can at least access them from VE! Er, wrong, clicking on the icon just gives a box with the text "edit notices" and nothing else. Strangely, in the New Wikitext environment, this does work, and the edit notices are there shown by default (not in the best possible way, but that's a minor problem).

So, if this situation is representative for VE, this means that
 * Edit notices are not shown or accessible in VE
 * Protection notices are not shown in VE
 * Even the general editing instructions (about copyvio and so on), shown at the top of every article you edit, are gone in VE.

Why, dear WMF representants and intermediaries, is such a situation acceptable and tolerated for years and years? Why wouldn't the fact that the most basic things like edit notices, which contain essential information for editors (and general disclaimers about copyvio and so on), are not visible in VE, not be sufficient to start a discussion to finally disable VE completely at enwiki?

This is no longer an experimental, rapidly evolving environment where we need to have a bit of patience; this is a mature environment, in most aspects as good as it will ever get, and it seems that this simply isn't good enough. Fram (talk) 15:14, 23 March 2017 (UTC)


 * I'm no fan of VE so it pains me to defend it, but I think you may be mistaken; have you got some kind of unusual setting preferences, as I can't replicate what you're seeing? When I open the page in question in "pure" VE or in the new hybrid editor, in both I'm immediately confronted with an unmissably-large box hovering over the edit window containing both the editnotices and the protection status which needs to be manually closed (and thus implicitly acknowledged) to continue editing. &#8209; Iridescent 15:31, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

to reply to me 03:31, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Firefox (latest version) on Windows 8.1, no personal css at all. I get the edit notices in old and new wikitext editor. I don't get them in VE. I'm glad it isn't universal, but it still is the same kind of shit I got used to at the time I regularly checked VE a few years ago. Fram (talk) 15:44, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
 * interesting, user reported something similar, but I have not been able to reproduce those experiences. Strange.. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 16:03, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
 * This is purely a guess—I don't know the mechanics of how VE interacts with various browsers—but could it be something to do with the close box on the editnotice window fooling the browser into thinking it's a popup ad trying to sneak in via the back door? Firefox has always been more zealous than other browsers when it comes to suppressing popups. &#8209; Iridescent 16:21, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I think it is Adblock Plus interfering with the popups. I can confirm your behavior with Adblock Plus with Firefox on Linux. But, when I disabled Adblock Plus, the notices show up just fine. SSastry (WMF) (talk) 03:28, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
 * AdBlock Plus is also apparently quite usage-intensive compared to µBlock or µBlock Origin, so this could be a factor in the loading time. Jc86035 (talk) Use &#123;&#123;re&#124;Jc86035&#125;&#125;
 * Thanks, but I have no Adblock or anything similar installed. Fram (talk) 06:42, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Fram, have you tried opening the page in a private window? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:01, 28 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Just tried it, makes no difference. Fram (talk) 06:57, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

Weird situation in edit training today
I was edit training using Visual Editor this morning with a group of about 9 people. Each person was adding their first citation (on their User page) and everyone was adding the same citation, see for an example - I use this example in all my edit training. Most of them got an error message (which I didn't have time to write down as I was too busy trying to work out how to solve it as being unable to save a citation would have been a show-stopper for the edit training) but seemed to be complaining that too many of something were happening at the same time. I note that everyone was probably had the same IP, although they were all logged-in users (a couple had pre-existing accounts, the rest had accounts about created an hour earlier). They were being asked for Captcha and had provided one. The error came on the final Save after the edit summary and greyed out the final Save and the only thing they could do is was "Resume editing". So, I asked them each to do their SAVE one at a time and that seemed to work. We had no problem after that but by then the group were working on individual articles.

Can someone tell me exactly what I experienced and what circumstances trigger it and how I can avoid it happening in edit training in the future? Having things fail inexplicably at edit training sessions is quite embarrassing and hardly gives the trainees much confidence in the software. Thanks Kerry (talk) 06:19, 24 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Hi Kerry,
 * I'm sorry that you had to deal with that. I assume that the problem is too many connections from the same IP or something like that, but let me ask around and see if there's anything that can be done about it.  Could you please ping me with date and time/timezone (as close as you can guess)?  There's always a chance that the problem was a temporary outage.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:11, 28 March 2017 (UTC)
 * About 11:25am on Friday 24 March, Australian Eastern Standard Time (not Australian Eastern Daylight Saving Time). This diff is probably one of the successful SAVEs, so I assume the unsuccessful ones happened a few minutes earlier. The error *might* have said something about external links or URLs as I think my first thought was something like "maybe it's an anti-spam thing" as everyone in the room was adding a citation to the same URL. I don't think it was an outage; I think it was an objection to what was being saved. Kerry (talk) 06:04, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
 * FYI just a helpful tip regarding: "which I didn't have time to write down as I was too busy". Next time take a quick picture with your phone. It's the easiest way to get on with stuff and still be able to accurately process something later. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs)
 * Alas, no phone. Kerry (talk) 22:43, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

mysterious nowiki tags lurking in many articles I have edited in VE
For a few more examples (not fixed) see Cairns School of Arts, Clermont Cemetery, Colonsay Farm, or more plenty more just do what I did and run AWB over the Queensland Heritage Register category searching for "nowiki" (which normally does not occur naturally in articles of this type). Kerry (talk) 04:39, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

add geotagging
geotagging is clumsy in the source editor, could something be added to the visual editor?Back ache (talk) 07:33, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Screen repositioning to top of article when working at bottom of article
Kerry (talk) 07:43, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
 * It seems the problem isn't limited to the bottom of the article but more widespread. I just edited Emerald, Queensland to add the when-template after the word "recently" in the Newspapers sub-section and, again, having positioned my cursor after the "recently", I think clicked on Insert on the toolbar and was transported to the top of the article. Kerry (talk) 08:53, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
 * As Murphys Law would have it, I am doing edit training tomorrow morning so this is not the sort of bug to inspire trainees :-( Kerry (talk) 08:54, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Was able to confirm this behavior after inserting the "citation needed" template at the bottom of an article. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 13:01, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
 * You can always train them using the standard Wikitext editor. Works like a charm, and can be used on all pages! Fram (talk) 06:42, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Speaking as someone who has done training using both wikitext and Visual Editor, I can report that most trainees find wikitext does not "work like a charm" for them as they find it too difficult to use, with the consequence that few continue to contribute after the training session. Trainees have found the Visual Editor much easier and the trainees are more likely to continue contributing (which is the ultimate goal of training). Given the ongoing attrition of editors on en.WP, if we want more contributors, we need the Visual Editor. As I was quite proficient in wikitext, I initially learned the Visual Editor purely in order to train others. However, I have found the VE is a better editor for most article content purposes (very much superior for creating tables, but not as good for working with templates) and I often use VE for a lot of my own article contributions, switching between the VE and wikitext, so I can use the best tool for any particular task. What have been your experiences of training new users in the two editor tools? Kerry (talk) 03:03, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
 * No experience. But if you have editors unable to work in wikitext, they can't participate in discussions, and can't edit all aspects of pages (templates). Despites years of pushing VE on new editors (gently, by trainers like you, and more aggressively by the WMF in general), VE use rate is hardly increasing, so the influx of new, VE-using editors seems not to happen. Yes, VE is better for tables, and that's about the only thing it really is better in. Every time I try it, I swiftly encounter bugs, problems, issues which make it to me clearly inferior to wikitext (see my section above on edit notices and the like). Teaching people to use an easier but limited editing tool, when they have to learn the other, complete tool anyway if they stay around a bit longer, is a short-term solution which may seem to generate more new editors but doesn't seem to have that effect in the long run at all. Fram (talk) 06:54, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
 * You are making an assumption about the permanence of the status quo. I've seen the same arguments about automatic transmission in cars (you aren't a real driver if you can't use a gear stick), about moving from assembly language to high-level programming languages (you aren't a real programmer if you can't use assembler), and the 1970s horror when vi was unleashed into the Unix world of ed (real Unix users don't want or need visual editors). Yet, despite all the huffing and puffing, all the easier-to-use things became normalised. Back in the 1990s wikis were using wikitext syntaxes. Atlassian's Confluence wiki product introduced more visual (based on rich text format) tools very early in the piece, expanding on that until 2006 when they first considered dropping wikitext, finally doing so in 2011, and they have supported Microsoft Word-to-Wiki translation for many years now; given their financial success those guys seem to have worked out what the market wants from a Wiki product. Yet here we are in 2017 at Wikipedia apparently determined to party like it's nineteen ninety-nine!. Look at the big picture. Non-monopoly (CC-BY-SA) content, last century technology, declining community. That's not a nice place to start your SWOT analysis at a strategic planning meetings. If Wikipedia is the digital disruption of the traditional encyclopedia, what is the potential disruption of Wikipedia? If Wikipedia does not move into the 21st century, then soon or later a more tech-savvy competitor will emerge. Kerry (talk) 08:53, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
 * That better things than the current wikitext editor could be developed, doesn't mean that VE is such a thing. You are absolutely right that older doesn't mean better, but equally newer doesn't mean better either. VE is not getting picked up by long-term editors (in general, there are exceptions), and oesn't seem to be the editor of choice of most new editors either. Most statistics generated by the WMF seem to be down (502 bad gateway error), but simply looking at enwiki article space editing statistics, at the moment the latest 500 edits by IPs took (09.39-09.07) 32 minutes: the last 500 edits by IPs, VE only, took (09.39-yesterday, 22.46) 10hours and 53 minutes. For registered users only (no IPS, but also no bots) VE = (09.41 - 04.59) 4 hours and 42 minutes, all edits = (09.42-09.31) 11 minutes. This percentage, of only about 5% of the edits on enwiki (mainspace, no bots) being made using VE has remained more or less the same for years now. If VE truly was superior, many more editors would have switched by now (or at least many of the "new" editors of the last few years would continue using it, resulting in a steady increase of the percentage of VE edits). So, in this case, by popular vote, newer is not better. Fram (talk) 09:46, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I would not expect a lot of long-standing contributors to take it up. Quite simply, if you are already proficient at wikitext, there's not a lot of motivation to put the effort into adjusting to a different way of thinking (plus there's too much "muscle memory" in the fingers). I forced myself to use VE in my own editing until I was "fluent" because I knew wikitext training was a failure so I had to try something different. I didn't like it initially and never expected that I would use it in a regular way as I now do. As for new users, I believe we have a bug which I have reported here previously (not sure what happened to it or whether it is still an issue). New accounts were enabled for the VE but the Editing preference "Edit mode" is "remember my last editor". I know from people I've done training with that some of them have told me later that they have "lost" the Visual Editor. It seems that once they attempt to edit something that the VE is not enabled for, they are switched into only being able to use the wikitext editor from thereon in due to this preference setting. Now in my training, I start by getting them to set their Edit mode preference to be "Use both editing tabs" which seems to solve this issue and they remain VE-enabled. If this is still a problem, then our new users may be losing access to the VE due to the default edit mode. Since you can't inspect other user's preferences, this is something I cannot check on. Also I believe VE is not enabled for IPs, which is an issue if you believe that people start as IPs and then graduate to creating an account. If we lose them as IPs, maybe they don't make that transition. Or when they do, they are now expecting to see the wikitext editor. The stats you see are of the "survivors"; what we don't have such good stats on is the ones who don't survive and what experiences they had before they disappeared. I am not surprised that VE edits are longer than non-VE edits; I would say it is true for me too, because VE opens the whole article so I tend to spend longer than in the wikitext editor where I usually edit at section level, so a lot more edits of short duration in wikitext than in VE. The edit count stats aren't directly comparable, you would really have to drill down and "weight" the edits by the complexity. Probably the best experiment would be be take a group of inexperienced editors and set them all a set of editing tasks (on different articles for edit conflict reasons) but fundamentally the same in content), split them into wikitext and VE groups and then compare what they did and how they did it. It would be useful to compare experienced editors too, but probably harder to recruit the experienced VE editors in this case. This should give us some baselines for how edits differ between the two editors and therefore how to compare them more meaningfully. (Sorry my day job was research so this stuff interests me a lot). Kerry (talk) 10:31, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
 * This is just anecdotal, but broadly my experience matches Kerry's in that I do much longer and more complex edits with VE than I do with wikitext. I still switch to wikitext for certain things, but the list has been gradually growing smaller.  As noted above, tables are clearly better; I'd add that pure content addition -- typing, adding/copying citations, moving text around the article, copyediting, adjusting structure -- is much more productive in VE.  It's because that's most of what I do that I mostly use VE.  I don't use many templates but despite the advances VE has made I'd be surprised to find an editor that found VE faster for complicated templates, except for citations, which I find much easier to work with in VE.  For a lot of wikignome stuff such as categories and repetitive small edits I doubt VE will ever be as productive as an expert wikitext editor. Mike Christie (talk - contribs -  library) 10:39, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

I've heard the "VE edits are longer" before, but looking at the actual "recent changes", there doesn't seem to a significant difference. Most edits are still of the "small fix" variety in either version, and many editors make whole series of VE edits. I have also heard claims that VE edits are more "succesful", but hard evidence for this was lacking (the WMF stats compared all wikitext edits to a sample of VE edits for some unknown reason, and their calculations often weren't matching reality). I don't doubt that for you and others, VE is the tool of preference. But that doesn't mean that promroting it as the tool of preference in general is the best idea, when it seems that in the end, most people use the wikitext editor anyway (either because they drop VE in favour of wikitext, or because the VE editors tend to stop editing completely). Fram (talk) 11:51, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Not sure about either of those stats; I'll take your word for it -- it's really my own experience I was talking about. I don't have a strong opinion about promoting it, though I suspect editors whose editing patterns are similar to mine would find it more productive than they might expect.  I don't know how many such editors there are, though; I'm very much at the pure content end of the spectrum, and do almost nothing with categories, templates, tagging, and so on.  The only change I feel strongly about is that I think it would be sensible to make both VE and wikitext available to all editors, including IPs; I watched my wife (a professional computer programmer and analyst with decades of experience) baulk at the wikitext editor when she made the only edit she's ever made to an article, and if someone with her background finds it an obstacle surely many others do too.  I'd also think a larger VE editing community here would have more clout in requesting changes from the developers -- Jytdog's comment below isn't something that bothers me, since I've never found much value in the human-built ref name strings either (and of course in VE I don't care at all), but it would be nice to have a bit more leverage for requesting whatever enhancements or bugfixes are seen as most beneficial. Mike Christie (talk - contribs -  library) 12:04, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Lack of Infobox

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0

I can't add an infobox.

DatGuyonYouTube (talk) 06:26, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Automatic citation parameters
I was just playing with the VE to understand better what it does, after cleaning up a bunch of student editing.

For journals, if you use the automatic citation formatting function, putting in the pmid, you get this:




 * The biggest problem with this, is the url link to pubmed. The pmid parameter in the ref already creates a link to pubmed, and the url is redundant.  I and others regularly go through and remove it, which is a waste of time all around.
 * I don't know who chose to include the issn, but this is not commonly used.
 * what is missing from the autofill, is the "pmc" parameter, which is an identifier to a free copy of the article at the Pubmed Central.  Why issn and not pmc is very hard to understand.

Can the url be removed and can the pmc be added? I would like to see the issn gone as is clutter but others may object.

Can there be an autofill for books? The plain old wikitext editor has this function off the ISBN; cannot VE do this?

thanks -- Jytdog (talk) 23:34, 10 April 2017 (UTC)
 * The problem with the url link is that in general Citoid does not do logic. It just gathers data and passes that data along. A "only add a link if there is no pmid link"-interpretation is not currently a distinction that any of the systems can make (I guess the template itself could be enhanced to make that interpretation...). From my personal point of view, I even prefer it to have the title linked and suspect it's a lot more accessible to the casual reader. But that's just me.
 * ISSN is added because it is available I think. It just adds whatever it can find.
 * The PMC id is not there, because the pubmed page does not reference it, and it can thus also not be retrieved.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:08, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
 * ISBN is still stuck in bureaucracy I believe. They are partnering with worldcat for that and it was already done in December if I remember correctly. Somehow it has failed to make an appearance so far. It's a bit weird
 * The example I gave doesn't have a PMC so of course the automatic feature can't find it. For pete's sake. The autofill feature of VisualEditor doesn't grab it when a PMC is available.  if it had I would not have written here.   Also what you write about the pubmed link makes no sense, at all.  The underlying software is generating the pubmed link.
 * Every time I try to deal with devs I get useless answers that are arrogant to boot.  I wasted my time here and  I am gone.  Jytdog (talk) 09:13, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Every time you ask questions and I answer them, you expect that I fix them for you instead. Well sorry, I'm not your personal code monkey, just another volunteer like you. I can only give explanations, I have no pixy dust and neither can I make complexity disappear just because you don't like it. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 09:19, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I have no desire for a personal code monkey - nothing i wrote said "fix this now". I do expect answers offered as definitive to be clear and competent. Jytdog (talk) 09:25, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Your judgement of my incompetence is noted, I'll be sure to avoid your questions in the future. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 10:12, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

In case anyone wants to remove the issn from inclusion btw. you can remove the citoid mapping between citoid issn and template data issn from the template data description on Template:Cite_journal/doc. If a citoid value is not mapped in templatedata, it will not be inserted by the reference dialog either. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 13:39, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Would you please address the issue with the software creating a URL in the URL field based off the pmid and the lack of automatically picking up the pmc when it is present. Jytdog (talk) 22:52, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Nah, don't really feel like doing that. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 07:34, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Probably may eventually be solved by https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T126249. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 197.218.91.8 (talk) 19:24, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

VE on Template Pages
I know that the VE is not able to handle template data. However there are a lot of template pages on the english Wikipedia, who doesn't use template data at all (e.g. Template:AMD_Radeon_Rx_400 and other series). For these pages it would be desirable to use the VE (since tables are a PITA to edit in source mode).

So is there any way to enable the VE on these pages? I tried "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:AMD_Radeon_Rx_400?veaction=edit" - which doesn't work.... Wikiinger (talk) 18:16, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Anyone?? Wikiinger (talk) 12:21, 25 April 2017 (UTC)
 * If you insist on using VE, you can always copy the template to your userspace sandbox, use VE there, and copy it back to the template space. Fram (talk) 12:31, 25 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, I know and I'm already doing this. I'm looking for a way/support to avoid the back-and-forth copying the userspace sandbox. Wikiinger (talk) 14:30, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Wrong info for "Table of contents" page setting?
Currently the (i) in Visual Editor "Page settings" for the Table of Contents setting reads: Maybe I am missing something obvious, but shouldn't that be "four" in both instances? According to WP:TOC and a quick test on en-Wiki, the minimum limit to display the ToC by default is 4 headers (regardless of their header level apparently), not 3. GermanJoe (talk) 11:13, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
 * "You can force a table of contents that lists each heading on the page to appear on pages with fewer than three headings, or force it to not appear at all. By default, it will appear if the page has three or more headings."

Unable to edit privacy law
Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 03:58, 2 May 2017 (UTC)


 * It looks like the problem was caused by some stray unclosed italics markup. I did this and now the page works normally in VE.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:58, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

Error saving data to server: Empty server response.

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_4) AppleWebKit/603.1.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.1 Safari/603.1.30

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Consumption_smoothing&action=edit&section=4

I am receiving a message that says "Error saving data to server: Empty server response."

Please help me resolve the issue. Thank you!

Publicecon (talk) 16:54, 28 April 2017 (UTC)
 * This problem should now be resolved. Thank you for reporting it! Sam Walton (talk) 18:09, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

Error saving data to server: Empty server response.

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/57.0.2987.133 Safari/537.36

I keep getting this message when trying to edit this page: Error saving data to server: Empty server response.URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discretionary_spending?action=edit

Mattbainum (talk) 02:30, 29 April 2017 (UTC)


 * You're the third user that I'm aware of to have this problem. Were you using the mobile interface? DS (talk) 13:14, 29 April 2017 (UTC)
 * This problem should now be resolved. Thank you for reporting it! Sam Walton (talk) 18:09, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

Empty Server Response when trying to save new page
Eel-eye-jar eye-bell (talk) 07:06, 29 April 2017 (UTC)
 * This problem should now be resolved. Thank you for reporting it! Sam Walton (talk) 18:09, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

Error saving data to server: Empty server response
Dbryte (talk) 18:51, 29 April 2017 (UTC)
 * This problem should now be resolved. Thank you for reporting it! Sam Walton (talk) 18:09, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

Error saving data to server: Empty server response.
Emmetgtroy (talk) 19:03, 29 April 2017 (UTC)
 * This problem should now be resolved. Thank you for reporting it! Sam Walton (talk) 18:09, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

Problem with submiting links

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.81 Safari/537.36

The server response says something like "server response empty" when I add this link vimeo.com/193289299

Josemazcorro (talk) 09:56, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
 * This problem should now be resolved. Thank you for reporting it! Sam Walton (talk) 18:09, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

Error saving data to server: Empty server response
AliceCostello (talk) 14:49, 1 May 2017 (UTC)


 * I got this too, Windows, chrome, swedish wiki, using source editor 2017. Skottniss (talk) 15:38, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
 * This problem should now be resolved. Thank you for reporting it! Sam Walton (talk) 18:09, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

error while adding section

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/57.0.2987.133 Safari/537.36

I tried to add a new section. Got this error message. Not sure how to proceed:

Error saving data to server: Empty server response.

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influencer_marketing?action=edit&oldid=777982354&wteswitched=1

207.181.231.2 (talk) 18:00, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

Rowan Harley (talk) 19:14, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
 * This problem should now be resolved. Thank you for reporting it! Sam Walton (talk) 18:09, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

Error saving data to server: Empty Server Response
Kateinsinai (talk) 23:41, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
 * This problem should now be resolved. Thank you for reporting it! Sam Walton (talk) 18:09, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

Error saving data to server: Empty server response.
Ron Magnet the 2nd (talk) 10:14, 2 May 2017 (UTC)
 * This problem should now be resolved. Thank you for reporting it! Sam Walton (talk) 18:09, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

Error saving data to server: Empty server response
Magnumfoundation2017 (talk) 15:26, 2 May 2017 (UTC)


 * Everyone experiencing this difficulty : this is https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T164157 and is being fixed as we speak. Apologies for the inconvenience and thanks for your reports and patience, Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:42, 2 May 2017 (UTC)
 * This problem should now be resolved. Thank you for reporting it! Sam Walton (talk) 18:09, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

Possible fix suggestion for empty server response error message
I have noticed that people seem to only get the message on pages with spaces in the title, but when there isn't any, it works fine. The problem may be similar to Windows's tendency to load C:\Program rather than C:\Program Data. The space is seen as the end of the path rather than part of the path.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Vulpus Maximus (talk • contribs) 11:11, 2 May 2017 (UTC)


 * This problem should now be resolved. Thank you for your suggestion, however, and sorry for the disruption. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:17, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

Red link issue in subpages

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0

While editing Symantec Endpoint Protection/Draft, I noticed that all links in the citations appeared as red links. To investigate, I clicked on a link to IDG. Instead, the non-existent Symantec Endpoint Protection/IDG was opened. Codename Lisa (talk) 09:43, 3 May 2017 (UTC)
 * The mainspace is not supposed to have subpages, so it's probably related to that. I have moved that page to the draft namespace. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:00, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

New wikitext mode

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.96 Safari/537.36

,,New wikitext mode" edit feedback Hi. 1. I prefer to have the edit mode when I'm previewing an article. It's better to see both for when you are doing other things rather than writing a text, like a chart/family tree, a graph, a table, etc. To see them both in the same time.

2. A keyboard shortcut for small parameter is needed, and I can't find the break line ( br / ) parameter.

3. The familytree.js tool doesn't appear when I'm on New wikitext mode.Daduxing (talk) 18:39, 4 May 2017 (UTC)


This is still happening. This was already apparently on the "to do" list 2 years ago per this thread. Do the devs really not understand how much time editors waste when they come across  and have to figure out it is referring to? And then to fix it, manually so the next editor doesn't have to waste their time? As VE gets used more, we get more and more of these, and editors have to spend more and more and more time stumbling over these and manually fixing them.

So frustrating. Jytdog (talk) 05:02, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
 * And there is this from 2013. Jytdog (talk) 05:16, 4 April 2017 (UTC)


 * Yes! It is particularly troublesome when an editor copies a reference from one article into another, resulting in conflicting instances of . Devs, please, a little help? Cnilep (talk) 07:49, 21 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Do you have a diff that illustrates this problem? I copy citations between articles using the VE and haven't seen this problem myself? Kerry (talk) 08:41, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Or are you saying that people using the source editor are copying references named :0 into articles that already contain a reference named :0? If so, that's a general problem with the source editor and any reference copied from one article to another has to manually checked for name clash (or wait for the error message to be displayed), but I guess the limited namespace used by VE citations makes clashes occur more frequently.Kerry (talk) 08:46, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * would it be practicable to use (where index is a letter disambiguating from previous instances in that article) as default? If there is no author, fall back to editor, then title, then publisher, then website. If any of these are very long, restrict to first three words or 20 characters or something like that. If all these fail then ":0" would probably be acceptable. &bull; &bull; &bull; Peter (Southwood) (talk): 08:40, 21 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Either that (which is a great idea!), or just include a step where the interface asks the editor to provide a unique ref name; there is no reason to automate the name selection, and as I understand it, automating the name in a way that would work in any language is what led to this awful solution. Jytdog (talk) 17:01, 28 April 2017 (UTC)


 * User:Kerry Raymond first please see this comment from User:Ian (Wiki Ed) who has to deal with this all the time moving content from student sandboxes into article space. This "feature" makes people in the Education Program's (and student's)  work much harder than it has to be.  For an example see, starting at this diff, how referencing in that article turned into a nightmare due to these stupid ref names. Jytdog (talk) 16:55, 28 April 2017 (UTC)


 * : This is probably the point where it annoyed me most: This class, last Spring, ended up leaving all their drafts in their sandboxes, and the instructor asked if I could compile it all in his sandbox so he could edit it all together and move their work into mainspace. I went through all 28 student sandboxes, renamed references (because they all used the same automatic VE ref names), and pasted them into a single sandbox. (Then I realised that I had screwed something up something with the merge and haven't circled back to it yet.) It took me several hours to sort through the articles and rename all the references. While none of it was a good idea, had the students simply pasted all their contributions into a single sandbox, it would have created a terrible mess. Guettarda/Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:26, 28 April 2017 (UTC)


 * Yes, and the source editor was being used. The source editor is NOT smart about citations in copy-and-paste and never has been. For example, I just created sandbox5 by copying the two sentences with citations from sandbox1 and sandbox2. All of them were called :0 in sandbox1 and sandbox2 but nonetheless it still worked when copying and pasting was done using the VE because the VE was smart enough to work it out calling them :0 and :02 in sandbox5 to distinguish them from one another. Can I suggest you try repeating the creation of a merged sandbox doing the copies and pastes using the VE and see if it works or not? Kerry (talk) 23:29, 28 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Bloody hell. These ref names suck for editors.  Please fix this. Jytdog (talk) 00:47, 29 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I agree it would be nicer if the ref names generated by the VE were a little more meaningful (indeed I've asked about it here in the past) but that isn't the root cause of the merging problem being described. The problem appears to have arisen through the use of the source editor, where copy-and-paste works at the textual level rather than a semantic level. The VE is likely to be a better tool for an article-merging task precisely because it recognises that the content being copied and pasted includes citations and behaves more intelligently with those citations. Why not try doing the task (or a small subset of it) again using the Visual Editor for both the copying and the pasting and see if it works? My tests this morning seem to confirm the VE would have done the right thing with the citations. Kerry (talk) 05:01, 29 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I see - I supposed I didn't check on the ones I've cleaned up to see if they were using the normal wikicode editor or VE. The more common problem I encounter is people who copy from their sandbox without clicking edit first; when they paste that text, they create a variety of errors (mostly with references). I think I need to change what I've been saying from "either click 'edit source' or 'edit' before you copy" to just "click 'edit' (not 'edit source')..." or something like that. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:43, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
 * You can tell if an edit is made with the Visual Editor because it will be tagged as such in the article history or the user's contributions. Yes, copying from Read Mode is a very easy mistake to make (I do it myself quite often). Ironically, it is because there isn't much visually to distinguish between Read mode and VE mode, whereas Read mode and the source editor mode are visually quite different; I am not sure if there is any good solution to this. If you are copying from one article to another, Visual Editor is usually better as it is smarter about citations (but you need the source editor if you want to copy at a level below the abstraction offered by the VE, e.g. copy a number of fields in an infobox but not the infobox as a whole). Kerry (talk) 02:30, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

No preview button or list of templates

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.96 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrenceville,_Georgia?veaction=editsource&section=3#Climate

&mdash; Supuhstar * &mdash; 17:12, 7 May 2017 (UTC)
 * FYI, the list of templates is available from the drop down menu on the top right as "Templates used". —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 12:01, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

Screen repositioning
I have previously reported this, but it seems to be getting worse and worse. Increasingly clicking on anything on the VE Toolbar results in a repositioning of the article back to the first screen (although it seems to be random, or at least I am not seeing the pattern). It is making it very hard to use the VE on any article of non-trivial size, because if you are working in the middle of it and it suddenly takes you to the top, it's a real pain to try to find your way back to the section where you are working. At least when it was only happening at the bottom of the article, it was easy to just drag the scroll bar to the bottom to get back, but finding your way back to something in-between is much more time consuming. Kerry (talk) 02:38, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm not seeing anything like this on Phabricator, I think. Does it happen while you're logged out or using the new safemode trick, that allows us to understand whether a script/tool is interfering? (While VEditing, add  to the URL and reload.) If it does, then provide browser (+version), operating system, and skin, please. Also LMK what's an article where I can reliably reproduce this. TYVM, Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:56, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Originally reported here where I included a diff and in a following comment I pointed to the same problem occurring in the middle of the article. Others found it reproducible. I was logged-in. I have not enabled/disabled any safe mode by any explicit action of mine. Why is it not in phabricator? Nobody tells me why they ignore my bug reports. I don't believe it is a long-standing bug. I add commons categories a lot to the bottom of articles without problem, until the problem starting occurring a day or two before I first reported it, so I think it's something that crept in during that time frame. As I said then, the VE still knows where my cursor is positioned (the action selected on the toolbar will occur in the correct place), but my screen is displaying the top of the article. Kerry (talk) 23:30, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
 * I may have simply failed in searching on Phab of course (if there was a bug that meant every Chrome user was consistently getting screen jumps, I think we would have heard way more about this, as we're getting almost 1M of VEdits per month). When I asked "Does it happen while you're logged out or using the new safemode trick, that allows us to understand whether a script/tool is interfering?", I was asking you to try whether any of those actions made a difference, because I can't reproduce this (I should add I have Chrome Version 58.0.3029.96 (64-bit)/Win 10 though). Whenever you have a bug that others can reproduce, I encourage you to throw it into Phabricator: I simply copy/pasted your words at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T164720 . --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:23, 8 May 2017 (UTC)
 * I am using Version 58.0.3029.96 of Chrome on Windows 8.1. Here is a concrete example, open The Old Windmill, Brisbane in VE (I've been working on it for the last couple of days and it's been driving me crazy), and scroll down to the heading Tourist Attraction, then click on the link National Trust of Queensland OR click on the first citation at the end of the first para. Both will zap you straight to the top of the article. Do it as the first action you do after opening the file for edit (the first action almost always does it), after that it seems to be more random. It often happens if you add a paragraph at the end of the article too. What happens when I log out? Nothing of course, because the VE is not available to IPs. What happens when I add the safe mode to the end of URL? No change, I repeated the experiment described above, and sure enough it zaps to the start of the article on that first attempt to click on the citation or the link. Kerry (talk) 10:03, 9 May 2017 (UTC)
 * It could be that the OS makes a difference after all, as it still doesn't happen for me. (FWIW, of course you can use the visual editor while you're logged out. You can reach it both by changing the URL to &veaction=edit, or to just switching via the button on the toolbar.) I hope the team manages to reproduce and understand what's wrong there. best, Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:12, 9 May 2017 (UTC)

Removing one copy of a note destroyed the note text
Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:58, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

1. There is no issue, just a hack doing hacky things ... 2. The "{{#tag" is a hack that is being heavily abused in that article. 2. The expectation here would simply raise more problems, because tag was not designed to be nested in a even in pure wikitext. 3. It does work as expected when the hack is not used. 4. The only reasonable (and unpopular) solution here is deprecating and killing the "{{#tag" parser function. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 197.218.82.97 (talk) 18:39, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Text disappeared during editing, when I tried to drag wording down the page
Johnragla (talk) 02:40, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

i need help i want to translate this article to Spanish. This one of my assignments for class.

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu?veaction=edit

Mrsebasn (talk) 06:08, 29 May 2017 (UTC)


 * Hello, this feedback page is usually only for Visual Editor-related feedback (editor bugs, comments about editor features, etc.). Nevertheless: you'll find some general advice about translating English Wiki articles into other languages at WP:Translate us. You should also look for additional guidance on the Spanish Wiki itself. All language-specific Wikipedia projects are autonomous, and may have slightly differing content guidelines. If you need help on the Spanish Wiki, the equivalent for our English "help desk" seems to be at es:Wikipedia:Café/Archivo/Ayuda/Actual. Hope that helps. GermanJoe (talk) 06:25, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

Added references

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_3) AppleWebKit/602.4.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0.3 Safari/602.4.8

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D,Kr?action=edit

Hello! I added references for this page as it said it could be deleted due to lack of sources and references. I added a few to prove the page, is there anyway to fix this?

Shokrijan (talk) 15:04, 28 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Shokrijan, the tag is added and removed manually. It provides instructions on what you may want to do now. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:27, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

about the Article

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Recreation_of_Ajanta_Cave_Paintings_by_Artist_M.R._Pimpare&action=edit&redlink=1 i want write a article of giving information about the restotaion work done by Mr,Pimpare.

Mmpimpare (talk) 06:40, 30 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Hi,, this page is for discussion of the Wikipedia VisualEditor feature. The article you submitted has been deleted, and it's inadvisable to recreate it. I recommend reading about notability on Wikipedia. Generally you shouldn't create an article about yourself or your own work; if it's notable enough someone will do it for you. If you still have concerns, you can submit a request at Deletion review. If you have general questions, head to the Help desk. —Guanaco 06:47, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

Can't type because it switches characters
181.54.210.96 (talk) 16:00, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Reported at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T167009 . TYVM, Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:23, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

Adding templates to redirect page breaks the redirect

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0

When editing a redirect page and adding redirect category templates, VisualEditor puts the templates above the #REDIRECT line, which means MediaWiki no longer treats it as a redirect.

Page content on redirect pages should be placed below the #REDIRECT.

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Write_through_cache&redirect=no&veaction=edit

-- intgr [talk] 17:37, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

navboxes not rendering after insertion using VE
Kerry (talk) 01:07, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Interestingly the same thing just happened on Upper Flagstone, Queensland (see this diff) in that no newline was added in the emitted source text, even though I clicked on Insert Paragraph to do the Insert > Template, but this time it renders OK. So it may be part of the problem lies with the template itself? I dunno, it's just a standard use of Navbox, nothing out of the ordinary going on. Kerry (talk) 01:16, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
 * This is a Parsoid bug. Parsoid should have known that the transclusion is outside the list and should have added a newline break. We'll fix this. Thanks for the bug report. SSastry (WMF) (talk) 15:47, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
 * https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/356415/ has the fix. It needs to be reviewed. If all goes well, it might be deployed tomorrow / Monday. SSastry (WMF) (talk) 16:17, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
 * User:Kerry Raymond, This was deployed earlier today. Please let me know if this is still a problem. SSastry (WMF) (talk) 23:23, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

Setting redirect in options populates after templates when contributed together

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36

Setting a page as a redirect in the VisualEditor options will populate the redirect line after any content added in the editing pane. This includes redirect templates (such as r from plural).

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Service_workers&redirect=no&veaction=edit

Sasuke Sarutobi (talk) 11:36, 20 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Sorry, to clarify - if the redirect is not the first item on the page, it will not be read as a redirect, so will not work. Please let me know if I need to file this as a bug report. Thank you. — Sasuke Sarutobi (talk) 08:49, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for this report; I've filed the bug at T167348. I think this will be relatively simple to fix, so I hope that it will be working correctly before the end of the month.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:03, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

Centralise text in cells
It is hard to put  in every cell of the table, and impossible to centralise the text when editing via VisualEditor. Can something please be done about this? Or is there a way to centralise them via VE? -- Kailash29792   (talk)  04:35, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
 * , do you have a solution to this? -- Kailash29792   (talk)  03:40, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
 * This has been requested, but has not been done yet. I've linked the request for you.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:11, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

Table insert row or column not working for all users
Please, all users cannot insert any tables to any page due to something. Any browser is affected. Updating my browser (Google Chrome) does not fix the problem. Please!!!! 24.50.204.123 (talk) 00:55, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

It's working again! 24.50.204.123 (talk) 00:59, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

ta.110032

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.102 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sakshi_Shivanand&action=edit&editintro=Template%3ABLP_editintro

175.168.195.84 (talk) 06:32, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

Switch around the unsaved-edit-confirmation dialogue box buttons
I'd like to make the suggestion that the buttons "Continue editing" and "Discard edits" on the dialogue box that pops up when a user tries to leave the page with unsaved edits should be switched around. Due to the standard on Windows machines and most popular software being that the button which cancels or exits an operation is on the left-hand side of the dialogue box, I often find myself automatically pointing to that side when I want to click "Discard edits", before remembering that on VisualEditor the buttons are switched, and vice versa for when I want to click "Continue editing", which is particularly risky as unsaved edits could be lost if I click the button. Thank you. SpikeballUnion (talk) 19:38, 11 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I couldn't really remember if and where this was discussed before, so I added it to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T168611 . TY. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:43, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

heading contains a coord template
Kerry (talk) 01:02, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I just did it myself (diff) [[User:Kerry Raymond|Kerry] (talk) 10:32, 14 June 2017 (UTC)


 * It's the kind of issue I could run into myself, as I also make headings in that way. Put it here, although I should add that given how frequent that template is, if this was an epidemic, we'd probably know. TY, Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:51, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

HotCat problem
When I use HotCat after a VE edit, it grabs the previous revision of the article not the current revision. This was a problem months/years ago but seemed to have been fixed. Suddenly it's back. I don't know if the problem lies in VE or HotCat. Kerry (talk) 23:33, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
 * If it persists, I suggest reaching out to HotCat devs. Gadget/tool/script maintainers are the ones in charge of their creations, although the team is of course available for clarifications to help fix stuff :) Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:58, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

Template highlighting gets stuck when template is shifted
SpikeballUnion (talk) 20:18, 11 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Same remark I made below. It's weird the highlighting gets stuck for you. If you confirm it still happens, we can throw this all in Phab. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:38, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I put together an annotated video showing the glitch in action. SpikeballUnion (talk) 13:24, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I hope I'm not a bad person for finding this amusing! Also, what's with all you people providing videos of the issues? That's amazing! Putting this in Phab now. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:02, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T168633.

VisualEditor occasionally opens a link within a template instead of the template's settings when clicked
SpikeballUnion (talk) 20:44, 11 June 2017 (UTC)
 * SpikeballUnion, thanks for your note. Is this still happening today? Because I can't reproduce (Chrome/Vector, but Win10): as soon as I hover over the template, the line/box becomes blue. (I also wonder if this is a matter of reaching the link before the page has fully loaded.) Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:34, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes. This has happened on occasion since I started using VisualEditor over a year ago. I don't know how to consistently reproduce it, but it does have a much higher chance of happening the first time one hovers over a template, compared to later times. It can happen when the page is fully loaded, though. SpikeballUnion (talk) 12:16, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I put together an annotated video showing the glitch in action. SpikeballUnion (talk) 13:22, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Will be useful when https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T168638 is triaged. Best, Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:16, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

12345

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:30.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/30.0

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwartzian_transform

199.221.15.225 (talk) 15:24, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

"Review your changes" shows wrong diff after switching to source editing

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:54.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/54.0

When I made some changes to a citation template in VisualEditor, then switched to source editing and changed the citation further, then the "Review your changes" button doesn't show my latest source changes -- it only shows VisualEditor changes.

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Post-quantum_cryptography&veaction=editsource

-- intgr [talk] 09:23, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Interesting, intgr. Is this still happening? Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:56, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, see screen recording: youtu.be/nX9_hKCrj_Y (cannot add direct link because it's blacklisted) -- intgr [talk] 11:13, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Perfect. This is now https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T168618. (The "related" videos on YouTube were... crazy.) Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:29, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Well, what do we know, intgr, bug is resolved and we'll see the fix in action later this week. Thanks again for putting time into this report and especially for the video! Really appreciated. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:49, 26 June 2017 (UTC)

Page options in Visual Editor
New users can easily reach the Categories, Page settings and Advanced settings screens, where many will experiment without understanding the effects of their actions or whether they are helpful or appropriate. Important parts of the issue have been raised before here.

In Categories new users will add non-existent categories or add their user page to mainspace categories, which is deprecated per categorization guideline.

In Page settings they can:
 * Redirect the page – many will try to redirect their user page to a non-existent mainspace article or to an external website; and set the STATICREDIRECT magic word.
 * Add the FORCETOC and NOEDITSECTION magic words, including to pages with no sections.
 * Categorize the page as a Disambiguation page.

In Advanced settings they can:
 * Set the INDEX or NOINDEX magic words. Trying to control indexing like this has no effect in most namespaces (see WP:Controlling search engine indexing). In user space it overrides the default no-index setting, which most new users have no valid reason to want to do.
 * Set the NEWSECTIONLINK or NONEWSECTIONLINK magic words.
 * Add the DISPLAYTITLE magic word – this is intended to stylize the existing title, but many will input a completely different title, which is ignored by the software.

Thus many of the controls on these screens encourage new users to take actions that either have no effect, have unwanted or incorrect effects, or are against Wikipedia policy or practice. The harms of allowing easy access to these controls to inexperienced editors are debated in more detail in the earlier discussion linked above. If it is urged that VE should reproduce all facilities offered in wikitext editing, in the case of magic words there is no comparison: in contrast to VE, none of the wikitext editing controls link to magic words, and before discovering magic words most editors would formerly have acquired considerable experience and be likely to use them appropriately.

New incidences of one of the magic words are listed here. It will be noticed that nearly all new users listed there have also changed several of the other settings listed, to no benefit to themselves or Wikipedia. I urge redesign of VE page options to point users more towards a basic set of controls that are likely to be useful to most of them Noyster (talk),  21:27, 15 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Firstly, not all VE users are new editors; I'm certainly not, so don't take away my tools. New users using the wiki-text editor break things every day too, because they don't understand wikitext syntax and so they screw up articles by trying to edit them and removing the trailing ref tag on citations or add fields to infoboxes that aren't supported by the template type or turn a table into a pile of rubble. I deal with this stuff on my watchlist every day as IPs are using wikitext (indeed, one of my main uses for the wikitext editor is to clean up wikitext syntax accidents). New editors in wikitext makes syntax errors. Because VE users can't create syntax errors (well, they can but it's much harder for them), their errors will tend to be semantic errors. The underlying problem is that new users are new; they can do damage no matter what tool is at their disposal, just the type of damage changes depending on the tool. Having said all that, with VE, we *could* restrict some of the more advanced features to new users. Maybe we could make doing an "online tutorial with quiz" a pre-requisite to enable each advanced feature (gamify it even, e.g. "Category achievement unlocked!"). With wikitext we have no ability to prevent new users from breaking anything and no real way to insert a "learning opportunity" into the process. So I think in the long run, we are actually much better off with new users in VE than in wikitext, as we do have a growth path into a supported learning framework. Kerry (talk) 06:57, 16 May 2017 (UTC)
 * +1, this is a non-issue. Those, more advanced, options are hidden away in a menu most new users are unlikely to ever click. I've been using VE for a while now and I've never clicked it before now. Sam Walton (talk) 09:38, 16 May 2017 (UTC)
 * I feel the same as and  - I'm not a new editor, but have found its tools actively beneficial to my workflow (especially the options, which I only recently discovered). I have noticed that the options menu seems to pop up more frequently (e.g. if I'm creating a redirect and switch to VisualEditor), so I can certainly see that case where it brings itself to the attention of someone who may not understand the tools.
 * If we're looking for a scalable solution that'll keep it away from inexperienced users, how about linking its visibility to one of the autoconfirm memberships? — Sasuke Sarutobi (talk) 11:42, 20 May 2017 (UTC)
 * I don't think that the team will agree to this. Generally speaking, if a brand-new editor (or a logged-out editor) can do something in the wikitext editor, then the team believes that the same editor should be able to do the same thing in the visual editor.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:59, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I concur with the principle but I would probably then argue that we ought not to allow new contributors or IPs to do it in any editor. I would argue that we should be moving to a system of "just-in-time on-the-fly" learning so that when someone wants to use a "new-to-them" feature, we put them through a few quick slides of "how to" and "key policy considerations" with a couple of multiple-choice questions to pass and then they are "licensed to use it". This is what the VE already does with its little popups of "Ooh, that's a link, do you want me to tell you about links". Like a drivers license, it could come with a probationary period (expressed in terms of # of non-reverted edits) during which it could be subject to more scrutiny and then less scrutiny once they are passed that time. Basically, take our existing idea of a confirmed user and explode it in a virgin/novice/confirmed user status around a range of actions. We could tie this into watchlists by flagging edits as being virgin/notice/activities for the changes undertaken. I don't think we should think in terms of "how do we reduce the VE to the lowest common denominator of the source editor" but "how do we make the VE so beneficial to both its users and in relation to the impact to the surrounding community that people will start to think that this is the better tool and the default entrypoint for new users". I concur with the end goal of VE being as capable of doing useful actions as the source editor but not with the VE being as capable as damaging the encyclopedia as the source editor is. So I think the principle is right but it needs to be framed towards a more positive end goal. Kerry (talk) 08:34, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
 * It's true that if I'd started editing in the visual editor, then I wouldn't have made some of the mistakes that I did, such as believing that  was the same as the navbox.
 * I like the way that you frame the idea: as capable as benefiting, but less capable of damaging.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:43, 26 June 2017 (UTC)


 * One of the big reasons I use the source editor is to deal with miscellaneous templates that would be better handled as page options on the property sheet. Stuff like:


 * Italicize title
 * MDY
 * English dialect (from list)
 * TOClimit
 * Merge (into)
 * References columns (#)
 * Common tags (refimprove, orphan, no footnotes, underlinked, pov, coi, rought translation, copyedit, ...) handle multiple issue grouping/ungrouping appropriately
 * Lfstevens (talk) 22:52, 4 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Lfstevens, there's been some talk about creating a meta-data page that includes some of this information. The idea is probably years away, but you might like it when it gets here.
 * Also, you might be interested in Editing/Projects/Columns for references, which handles reference columns automagically (no more need to guess a reasonable number of columns based on how it looks on your own device). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:59, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Lfstevens (talk) 07:26, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Allow VE users to contribute to this feedback page using VE
It is as dumb as toast (to quote Dilbert) that VE users can't contribute to this page using the VE. I note that VisualEditor says "VisualEditor will allow people to edit all pages without having to learn wikitext markup and will hopefully encourage more readers to become editors." (my emphasis). I suggest doing the following 2 things. The first can be done today (easy, I have already done it for a page in the Wikipedia namespace). The second needs some code (but I hope not too difficult).


 * Enable the VE on this page by REDIRECTING this page into one on User space. That is, create a User account (suitably named, perhaps with Visual Editor Feedback as all/part of its name). Since User space is enabled for VE, this page becomes instantly accessible to the VE user.
 * Enable "Insert > Signature" (may require some code behind it, although I am guessing the code is probably there) but I see this as desirable but not essential. People can sign their User names by typing it in or we can see who they are from the history. We can live without it if it is too hard.

Kerry (talk) 23:27, 6 June 2017 (UTC)"Or of course you could just use it like this. My first VE edit on this page. Yeah! And signing does work. Kerry (talk) 23:50, 6 June 2017 (UTC)""Does https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback&veaction=edit work? Kerry (talk) 23:57, 6 June 2017 (UTC)""So if we put a big button saying 'VE users - click here to provide feedback, we have the ability to use the VE to report VE feedback. No need for the User page solution. I like this very much. Kerry (talk) 00:04, 7 June 2017 (UTC)"

I have just made my user talk page VE-friendly! Kerry (talk) 00:57, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I have knocked up a little template Template:VEFriendly which could be added to the top of any page that we wanted to make accessible to VE users (like, say, this one). Of course, I am no expert on template writing or creating sexy graphics, so feel free to improve this template or come up with some alternative. But, if we cannot get other namespaces open up to the VE, we can make individual pages VE-Friendly. I presume there is no reason why any of us should not make our own User Talk page VE-Friendly. I presume there is no problem with other pages being made VE-friendly by consensus of the usual community that co-exists around that page. I certainly think we should include it onto the User Talk pages of VE users, so they can write on their own talk page in the only editor they know! Kerry (talk) 02:18, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
 * With some help from User:Evad37, the template is now much better. Can we put it on this page please. Kerry (talk) 07:03, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I have no particular objections to that, although if there is any malformed wikitext on the page, then there's a chance of disaster, which could be quite distressing. I don't think I'd exactly encourage it, but if people want to try it out as an experiment, then that's okay with me.
 * We could also send feedback to the Flow board on mw.org, which is pretty friendly to anyone who's used the comments section on any website or sent e-mail from a web browser. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:47, 26 June 2017 (UTC)

Cannot add table columns
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_mobile_virtual_network_operators?veaction=edit&section=1

Whenever you try to add columns in the first table, your browser says the script has frozen.

This is 100% reproducible in Google Chrome 59 and Firefox 53 without any add-ons.
 * I'm experiencing the same problem whenever I use both Chrome and Firefox. Perhaps VE is going through a major re-work, and this is a glitch? -- Kailash29792   (talk)  09:31, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Me too, I am also experiencing that problem. Please, fix it! 24.50.204.123 (talk) 00:57, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Seems to be fixed. Artem-S-Tashkinov (talk) 08:56, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
 * The usual cause of this behavior is a malformed wikitext table (e.g., forgetting to add a cell somewhere in the table).
 * The use of templates such as yes and no to color the background of tabel cells is not supported. It may work, and it may not.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:57, 26 June 2017 (UTC)

Cursor is not where it's shown on screen
I don't know what is going on here, but as you can see from the bug reports, I am submitting, the VE is almost unusable at the moment. So many things are broken. I had to stop adding navboxes and commons categories with it because of the bug where it jumps to display the top of article when I am working at the bottom of the article. I did a lot of my work today in source editor because the VE is just manifesting so many weird bugs. Stuff that used to work has stopped working. Yes, I have rebooted, yes I have ensured I am using the most up-to-date OS and browser, yes I have cleared my cache. I cannot run VE training classes with this sort of thing not being fixed. I am seeing no response to my bug reports. Kerry (talk) 07:44, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * ping Elitre and Whatamidoing —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 08:22, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I'll take a look ASAP, thanks. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:43, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I have made a comment here - in any case, luckily I'll meet the PM later today, so I get a chance of flagging this more appropriately. Thanks. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:14, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I have a deadline around this bug. On Monday 3 July, I am facilitating group session with a focus on NAIDOC Week (because it's NAIDOC Week!). We are going to be using a CC-BY sources like this one (of which there are many) to create/expand articles relating to Indigenous communities. As the group are relatively inexperienced editors, I will be giving them the Attribution for one such webpage to copy and then they will have to modify to the title and URL of the particular Indigenous community they are working on (I'll probably add the archive url stuff myself later for them, too hard for newbies). So I'd prefer it if it didn't look like an lawn mower was munching their attribution. The goal for the session from a training perspective is finding and adding wikilinks so having the bug with launching links to other articles fixed would be a huge help too. While I can work around a bug in my own editing to a large extent (using the source editor if all else fails), this is a group of VE-only newbies. Kerry (talk) 07:03, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
 * We... can't commit to a date, but I certainly hope the fix lands in time. Best, Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:50, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
 * And FWIW, Kerry, this is now resolved. I assume fix goes live later this week. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:42, 28 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Great news! Thanks Kerry (talk) 11:29, 28 June 2017 (UTC)

Being able to paste \{\{Yes\}\} and \{\{No\}\} into the cells of a table
Please make it possible at least to copy/paste them. Artem-S-Tashkinov (talk) 08:56, 10 June 2017 (UTC) While within the VE, it certainly doesn't look like you can Template:Yes and Template:No as it displays a whole load of style rubbish in the cell. But as my test above illustrates, it does actually work. And yes you can copy-and-paste them with the VE, but it is tricky to work out if you are copying the whole cell or the cell contents. In summary, you can do it in the VE but not entirely easily. But while the result of the copy and result looks like it worked in VE as the last row of the table shows, it failed to work after SAVE. Kerry (talk) 07:29, 13 June 2017 (UTC)
 * "It does actually work" - what's your web browser? What exactly do you do to make it possible? Ctrl+C/V don't work, Ctrl+Insert/Shift+Insert don't work, mouse right click -> Copy -> Paste also don't work for me. Artem-S-Tashkinov (talk) 11:06, 21 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Artem-S-Tashkinov, it works for me in 2 ways: one is clicking on the cell (just so that the table menu and the arrows appear) and then using CTRL+C/V, but this only seems to work in some cases (like, when from the first cell of the row I paste into the first cell of the other row). Adding Yes and No via the Insert menu instead does lead to code being exposed, but it saves and shows up correctly from what I can see. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:04, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I've figured out that it works in Google Chrome 59 but doesn't work in Mozilla Firefox 52. It would be great if it worked in Firefox as well. Artem-S-Tashkinov (talk) 22:07, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
 * The use of templates like this is not supported in the visual editor. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:58, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
 * For some reasons \{\{Yes\}\} is supported, albeit only in Google Chrome. Artem-S-Tashkinov (talk) 08:06, 27 June 2017 (UTC)
 * No, it's not "supported". At any given point in time, under some circumstances, it may or may not "work".  However, the team does not commit to making it work:  they do not "support" this kind of template.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:39, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

Lack of a Quit button
Something that comes up during some of my VE sessions is the lack of a Quit button to exit the VE without Saving (either because you did nothing OR you did something and decided it was the wrong thing). It's peeved me initially, but I just use the browser BACK to solve the problem, but this doesn't seem to occur to the people who "can't make it go away". On shorter articles, an easy way out is just to click the Article tab (although this appears not to be an intuitive action). And in any case it's not a general solution as with larger articles the VE is scrolling with just the toolbar visible at the top of their browser window. The only way is to scroll all the way up the article and then click on Article. Now I will agree that the source editor doesn't have a Quit button either but it does have the ability to use SAVE to exit without the need to have actually changed anything, so the source editor is scoring 1 out of 2 but the VE is scoring 0 out of 2. Kerry (talk) 07:29, 13 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Source editor has Cancel as a non-buttoned option at the end of the line of action buttons, so scores more like 1.9 out of 2 &bull; &bull; &bull; Peter (Southwood) (talk): 07:39, 19 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Or you can hit ESC on your keyboard. Works for every OS. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:28, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * There was some talk a couple of years ago about putting an "Exit" at the end of Help menu – available if you need it, but out of the way. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:48, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

Wikilinks being copied as URLs
What on earth is happening? I just copied some text from one article open in VE into another one and all the wikilinks came across as URLs to the Wikipedia article instead of internal links? Kerry (talk) 23:22, 13 June 2017 (UTC)
 * See this diff Kerry (talk)|
 * I don't manage to reproduce this though. Is it gone? I have tried in both reading and editing mode FWIW. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:27, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * They all came across as broken URLs:   .  I think we need to figure out how that   link is happening to you.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:51, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

More template dirty diff complaints
Known issue. I don't speak French, but I came across FrWiki complaints about VE looking like vandalism when it disruptively scrambles existing template parameters.

Expected result: Clean diff. Parameter order does not change, and no needless changes to newlines or whitespace.

WONTFIXED by Jdforrester in Phab T133874. However it should be fixed. I thought you should know that complaints keep cropping up about it. Alsee (talk) 16:42, 23 June 2017 (UTC)


 * Thank you for the link. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:56, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

Leaving an edit page
There are times when I need to backspace to make corrections and for some reason, the focus has left the formatting, so the backspace key takes me back to the previous page, making me lose the edits. There's some kind of confirmation modal dialog but it happens way too fast for me to realize what it's asking. What would help is if that dialog did not default to "leave the page." It should stay on the page unless explicitly selected otherwise. If not for this design decision, the visual editor would be more useful. As it is, I've lost up to 30 minutes of edits at a time and have adopted a practice of interim saves to make sure a lot of work isn't lost, but that does not reflect well in the edit history. 196.52.2.44 (talk) 02:55, 24 June 2017 (UTC)


 * Are you using Firefox? I have had the same problem on occasion, and it is maddening.
 * I don't believe that this can be solved in the editing software. However, there is a plan to provide an automagic, temporary save system, and that would reduce the risk that we will lose our work.  I don't know when that new save system will be ready.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:58, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

"error loading from server"
The error I reported 02:40, 15 May 2017 (UTC) has recurred, but this time with the error message "error loading from server". Is there a way to avoid this, or recover edits from it? Johnragla (talk) 08:32, 24 June 2017 (UTC)


 * At this time, I believe that the only hope for recovering your work is if you had copied the whole page before trying to save it. I'm sorry about that.  They are planning improvements, in the form of an auto-saving system.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:01, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

== the use of national emblems for Irish players is confusing...it is the case that any Irish players before Brian O'Driscoll and captioned beside a "Lions" ensignia. After (and including Brian O'Driscoll) an Irish Republic National Tricolour is used.I fe... ==


 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/603.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.1.1 Safari/603.2.5

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_and_Irish_Lions?action=edit&oldid=787536477&wteswitched=1

148.122.187.2 (talk) 16:16, 26 June 2017 (UTC)


 * This kind of comment should be posted to Talk:British and Irish Lions. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:05, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

Messed-up cites
Apparently trying to autogenerate a cite link from
 * http://www.theborneopost.com/2014/08/31/stingless-bee-honey-the-mother-medicine/

produces the following:

From this edit. I tried to reproduce it and was able to. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:22, 28 June 2017 (UTC)


 * Wow. Seeing code in there looked dangerous, but it's not as bad as I feared. I checked the source website causing the problem. The vcard with the author info includes an email, and that email is wrapped in javascript protection. The javascript is being copied like plaintext (not code). It's being copied like it's a list of author names.
 * I'm not sure, but I suspect their website is wrong. If so, we may just have to manually remove junk from the ref. Alsee (talk) 05:19, 29 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Ian. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:05, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

Stranded category tags
Deryck C. 22:55, 25 June 2017 (UTC)


 * Hi Deryck,
 * This is actually a bit complicated, partly because every wiki has its own idea of "the correct" order, and also because on some pages, the categories are supposed to be added to the "wrong" section, such as at WP:VPM. I've linked an old discussion about it above.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:39, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

"Manage TemplateData" does not open on Template:Multiple_issues/doc

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:54.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/54.0

The built-in button for managing TemplateData does not open ont his page. When I manually clean it out (leave {} ) then it opens, but then saving fails.

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Multiple_issues/doc&action=edit

-- intgr [talk] 12:51, 16 June 2017 (UTC)
 * The doc page in question has invalid JSON on the page, and it seems the error handling of the Manage TemplateData that is supposed to catch that problem has become broken itself. I filed a ticket. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 11:53, 21 June 2017 (UTC)
 * This was fixed, BTW. Thanks all! Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:38, 30 June 2017 (UTC)

IETF language tags and cs1|2 |language= parameter
, apparently done with ve, adds a reference with eng-US. That language code is not supported by MediaWiki and so not supported by cs1|2 templates. While  is a valid ISO 639-2 and -3 code, MediaWiki doesn't recognize three-character codes when there is a two-character ISO 639-1 equivalent:

cs1|2 does not support IETF language tags that use ISO 639-2 or -3 codes because there has been no pressing need. But, cs1|2 does rely on MediaWiki's language support to obtain a language name from an ISO 639-1 or -2 code that MediaWiki recognizes. ve should not be using language codes not supported by MediaWiki. —Trappist the monk (talk) 11:42, 1 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Hi Trappist the monk,
 * Thanks for this explanation. A minor point:  "VE" doesn't do this.  Citoid does.  And the citoid service reliably supplies whatever language the website claims to be using, without exception, modification, or pre-processing.  Citoid hands over accurate information about what the website claims, whether they claim something CS1 recognizes, such as , something it doesn't recognize, such as  , or something that is obviously wrong, such as  .  Editors need to check the language specified by the website, just like they need to check to see whether the website has provided complete and correct information in the other fields.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:42, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

Clicking on link in the edit-link box is broken?
Previously, within the VE, if you clicked on an existing link, the edit-link box popped up and if you clicked on the link, it launched that page. This was very handy for resolving disambiguations, or checking what content was at the other end of the link. Now when you do it, it launches /w/LINKNAME which launches a new tab in my browser but it contains not the article expected but Wikimedia Foundation logo and

Page not found /w/Brent_Cockbain

We could not find the above page on our servers.

Did you mean: /wiki/Brent_Cockbain

Alternatively, you can visit the Main Page or read more information about this type of error.

I was editing Innisfail, Queensland in this case with the link to Brent Cockbain but it seems to be happening all over. Kerry (talk) 04:20, 11 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Possibly a transient, already fixed thing? I don't seem to be able to reproduce. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:44, 22 June 2017 (UTC)


 * It's not transient but it doesn't happen all the time. But I have experimented a little more on Bowenville, Queensland. Having just opened the article in VE, if I opened the link for Warrego Highway and then opened-in-new-tab the article, it worked fine. However, after editing parts of the lede (not in any way relating to the text or link about the highway), the same attempt to open Warrego Highway failed. This is the diff of the edits I did, after which I could not open the link to the Warrego Highway article successfully. It is the reverse of the bug where the screen starts displaying the start of the article while are trying to edit lower down in the article; that happens very often on the initial edits but seems to settle down after a while to be random. Kerry (talk) 06:28, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Scratch that theory too. At the moment, I can't get launch the links at all even at the start of the edit. Kerry (talk) 06:38, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Kerry, can you give me the exact and complete URL of the article when you're editing and getting this bug? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:00, 26 June 2017 (UTC)


 * OK, I just opened an article for edit (this is the URL in my browser). I see the link Australian Labour Party in the lede paragraph and I note the unusual spelling (the spelling of Labour/Labor changed over the life of this political party so you have to check if the correct spelling is used in the correct time frame and the easiest way to remind yourself of the date of the spelling change is to read the article on the Australian Labour/Labor Party). So I click on the link, a popup box opens (I see the link symbol, the word Link top left and on the right top, the "prohibited" sign and the Edit button with a link showing as Australian Labour Party in blue middle of the box, a bit of a logo at the left and the words "political party in Australia, political party in Australia" below). If I click on that Australian Labour Party link in the popup box, it launches a new tab in my browser which displays its title on the tab as "Not Found", the URL in my browser address bar is https://en.wikipedia.org/w/Australian_Labor_Party and the body of the page comprises a black-and-white WMF logo (head and two halfs of a body sitting in a curved U shape) which is appeared to be squashed to be narrower and more oval than normal with the words Wikimedia Foundation underneath. To the right is the message:

Page not found

/w/Australian_Labor_Party

We could not find the above page on our servers.

Did you mean: /wiki/Australian_Labor_Party

Alternatively, you can visit the Main Page or read more information about this type of error.

Now, if I had clicked Edit in the box (rather than click on the link), it would have opened up the dialogue of suggested articles or URL as appropriate. In that screen there can also be problems about being unable to launch things but that seems more random and possibly worse after I have been editing things in the article. In the above, I did no actual changes, so I think that is the simplest scenario for this particular problem. Kerry (talk) 02:07, 27 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Thank you for all of this. It's not breaking for me today, in Safari or Firefox.     Perhaps it's browser-specific?  Also, how many edit tabs do you have?  Do you have the new wikitext mode enabled in Beta Features?  I have two, and "Edit" leads to a slightly different URL.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:45, 29 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Browser is Chrome Version 59.0.3071.115 (Official Build) (64-bit) (latest version), Windows 8.1 (all updates done). I usually have multiple edit tabs. I always run Google Calendar in one tab, another tab will have Wikipedia open (obviously) and there may be more, depending on the specific type of editing I am doing, but almost always a tab for the Queensland Place Names database, another for Trove, generally one for random Googling searching for info and citations, possibly Wikimedia Commons, and random others depending on exactly what type of info I am adding. Typically 5-10 (beyond that, I start to close the ones I am not using as I use a small screen laptop (for disability reasons) and they start to become too squashed up to tell the tabs apart on the top of the screen). I don't have the new wikitext mode enabled in Beta (I did try it but something about it annoyed me, I forget why, and turned it off again). But having said all of that, I am struggling to see how generating the URL to launch could be altered by the browser. It feels like there is some chunk of code somewhere that adds /w instead of /wiki/ when constructing the URL. Or perhaps some code that copies the article title to construct the URL is doing so 3 bytes earlier that it should, so /wiki becomes /w or somesuch, perhaps some memory management problem where a string has been freed despite still being referenced. That's what it "smells" like. Kerry (talk) 21:18, 29 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I meant, do you have [Edit][Edit source], or just [Edit]?
 * The software uses different URLs, depending upon whether you have the new wikitext mode enabled. I don't know why, but it does.  To get to wikitext (with two tabs), I have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Lear?veaction=editsource here at the English Wikipedia, and that takes me to the new wikitext mode.  At the Simple English Wikipedia, I have the beta feature disabled (but still two tabs), and the URL for the corresponding article is https://simple.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=King_Lear&action=edit
 * I think that there is a bug open about the link tool giving the wrong URL if you are using a  URL to start editing.  I'll have to look for it later.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:55, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I don't have the new wikitext mode enabled but I do have the two tabs (Preferences > Editing > Show me both tabs). Kerry (talk) 04:35, 7 July 2017 (UTC)

Screen repositioning
Has there been any progress on this bug? I had to clean up a load of citations in some articles today and every time I found the citation I needed some screens of text down and clicked it, I fly off to the top of the article. It's been happening for months now. Kerry (talk) 04:42, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * It hasn't been triaged yet. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:24, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * iWhy not? It's not a visual editor if it doesn't show you what you are editing. I have seen it occurring at WikiClub. Being beginners, they tend to t think "what did I do wrong?" But I know I'm not doing anything wrong. And when you do repetitive tasks on articles like add Navboxes etc, you see it happen on *every* single article, I'm contributing a lot less lately because of it, it's just too frustrating to use. I've got training in a week and have next wikiclub in a fortnight, all of which is done in VE, which I am not looking forward to. Kerry (talk)

Badshah HY (talk) 11:42, 7 July 2017 (UTC)

Preview

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.112 Safari/537.36

I'm not sure if it's a client-side problem, but the preview edit feature does not work for me, it only freezes the software

Jjjjjjdddddd (talk) 01:49, 3 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Jjjjjjdddddd, I need more information about this. Are you in the visual or wikitext modes?  What did you click on to get to "the preview edit feature"?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:44, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Well, I clicked "Save changes" in wikitext mode, chose "Show preview", and got a freeze. Not sure if it's my sub-par computer or a software bug. Jjjjjjdddddd (talk) 05:47, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Jjjjjjdddddd, do you still remember what page it was on ? Was it a big article, or a small one ? Had you made many changes or just minimal changes ? —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 07:31, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm pretty sure it's happened more than once, and I think it was a fairly small thing(70 b or so) Jjjjjjdddddd (talk) 03:03, 14 July 2017 (UTC) UPDATE: It happened again. Jjjjjjdddddd (talk) 05:11, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

"Edit" button working differently for citations!
Previously, if you hovered over a citation (footnote number), and then clicked edit, if the citation was created using a template, then the template editor opened (for example, for the template "cite news"), and you could edit the template (modify an existing parameter, add a new parameter, etc.). Now when you click "Edit", the Reference dialog opens, and you have to click in the box with the text, then click again, in order to invoke the template editor. Further, when saving the changes, there is yet another additional click. This is not only three extra clicks, it's confusing to editors who were used to the old system. And, as far as I can see, there actually isn't anything that can be done in the reference dialog if the citation was created using a template. Why was the change made? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:31, 1 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I think part of the problem is that it's not obvious that you have to click the link in the edit window to edit it. The new version is less user-friendly than the old.Red Fiona (talk) 21:05, 2 July 2017 (UTC)
 * This is known, accidental, and going to be fixed.
 * Fixing it is probably going to annoy the editors who have been asking for this for the last couple of years, because in the current "broken" mode, it's possible to add a second template or extra content to the footnote: , and in the old system, you couldn't do that.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:47, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
 * The problem, for me, is not so much the new system, so much as the only reason I knew how to edit using it was User:John Broughton's message. It's really non-obvious.Red Fiona (talk) 13:14, 5 July 2017 (UTC)


 * There are (at least) three things that an editor can do with a footnote created with a template: (1) edit that template (modify parameters), (2) add a second template, or extra content, to the footnote, and (3) change the group to which the footnote belongs. All of that can be addressed - with minimal impact on experienced editors, and minimum additional clicks/steps required, by using "modify" rather than "edit" as the action that one can take with a template-created footnote, from the main editing window. Specifically, clicking on "modify" would open a dialog with those three choices. In most cases the editor would end up doing a single extra click ("edit template").


 * If that approach were taken, the current dialog should be retained for circumstances where the footnote is already mixed - that is, where more than just a single template is used; clicking "modify" would display the current dialog. Then hovering over the content of the footnote would indicate which part is a template (or a separate second template); that experience would resemble editing as is currently done in the main editing window. Of course, selecting a template in this case would be via an "edit" link, rather than a "modify" link, just as is the case in the main editing window. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:50, 6 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Intellectually, the current behaviour is right, because we are dealing with two constructs, being the ref pair and the template within the ref pair, so it makes sense that you need a 2-level edit so you can modify at both levels. In particular, the current behaviour makes it possible to add a after the citation but still within the reference as requested by that template's documentation. Otherwise, there is no way to do this in the VE; you have to use the srouce editor. It also makes it a more consistent UI experience for those of us who use other  templates than just the 4 built-in (web, news, book, journal) ones (and I do use quite a number of other cite templates myself). But I agree that none of these reasons are common "use case" that most  people are likely to be wanting to do and maybe when you first click on the citation, there should be two buttons, Edit, which jumps straight into editing whichever template is in use (including those other than the "big 4" as I do find the two step process for working with these annoying) and another button "Ref Edit" (or whatever better name comes to mind) which lets you play at the reference level where you can add a deadlink or CC attribution or commentary on the citation that falls outside of the cite template parameters. Kerry (talk) 22:54, 6 July 2017 (UTC)

This was resolved. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 17:05, 12 July 2017 (UTC)


 * I'm not seeing any change. Does the tracking ticket imply that the fix was supposed to be implemented on 13 July? -- <font style="font-family:Brush Script MT; font-size:15px;">John Broughton (♫♫) 04:25, 17 July 2017 (UTC)
 * The train was late, but yes, and it is working indeed now. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:31, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

Array of 404 issues resulting from /w/ instead of /wiki/ URL in editor mode
SpikeballUnion (talk) 16:36, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
 * This may have been already fixed. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:30, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Strange things that you can do with the VE
I was doing a Cite > Manual > Basic intending to paste in one of my favourite citations, when it seemed I didn't have my favourite citation in my paste buffer but by some accident (probably Ctrl-A Ctrl-C when my brain was in neutral) I had a copy of the article itself. Curiously it actually worked although the end result was pretty weird. So I saved the result for anyone interested to see what happens if you put an article complete with infobox, references and navboxes as a reference to itself. Here's the diff. I'm not reporting this as a bug (it did more-or-less what it thought I wanted), just in the category of "by gosh, that copy and paste is smart in the VE". Kerry (talk) 16:06, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

Kindly remove this image

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/59.0.3071.115 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Navghan_Kuwo.jpg

Raakuldeep (talk) 12:50, 27 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Hello, this page is only for Visual Editor-related feedback and bug reports. However, the linked image is currently under discussion for deletion. Please feel free to comment directly in the thread at Commons:Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by Raakuldeep (also including 3 more images). GermanJoe (talk) 08:05, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

Copying wikilinks and they become URLs
When copying from Capricorn Coast, it included a photo with a piped link in the caption. But when I pasted it into Farnborough, Queensland with this diff, all kinds of weird stuff happens to the link to the image and to the link in the caption.

Try clicking on the two images and try clicking on the links in the two captions. Kerry (talk) 01:51, 13 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Kerry, as of today I can't reproduce, but I also can't say whether this was related to something that has been fixed in the meantime? Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:29, 19 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I repeated it and it is not occurring at the moment. Kerry (talk) 16:12, 20 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I think that this is an instance of T166333. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:46, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Easy and very quick to use

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/59.0.3071.115 Safari/537.36

This is a really useful add-on, it speeds up editing up a lot. I can now very easily edit and add references and other things.

Anish Mariathasan (talk) 12:53, 20 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:50, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Not indexed by Google

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:54.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/54.0

This page is having about 7 hits per day from various wikipedia links but srill not showing in google searches. Pl help in correcting the same.

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_House,_Kalimpong?action=edit&veswitched=1&oldid=791026305

Subhrajyoti07 (talk) 16:56, 20 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Pages are not usually indexed by most web search engines until they are manually marked for indexing by other editors, or until they are 90 days old. You can read more about this at New pages patrol/patrolled pages.   Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:55, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Plain links with quotes fail to make the round-trip edit

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:55.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/55.0

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Intgr/sandbox?veaction=edit

When I paste a link that includes a double quote mark like https://www.google.com/search?q="test+Google+search" then VE initially links the whole URL. But after saving, only part of it is linked.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PCjccTVaTY

-- intgr [talk] 08:28, 21 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Thanks for this note, intgr. I've filed the bug report.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:12, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Interaction with GoogleTrans

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:54.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/54.0

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Ornithology?veaction=edit

Note that if you have your preferences with the gadget by User:Endo999 - GoogleTrans - enabled - you will have serious troubles with visual editor when pressing the shift key.

Shyamal (talk) 04:06, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for mentioning this. I will fix this problem up this weekend. Endo999 (talk) 07:55, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

GoogleTrans no longer works in Visual Editor (pages with parameters 'vedit='). Endo999 (talk) 06:11, 2 August 2017 (UTC)


 * I think that you meant  instead?
 * Also, I believe that approach won't exclude any pages if you have enabled the Beta Feature for the new wikitext mode. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:30, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
 * User:Timeshifter: Remember T156228?  Do you have "GoogleTrans: open a translation popup for the selected text or the word under the cursor when pushing the shift button" enabled in Special:Preferences (third item on the page)?
 * Shyamal, can you tell me what troubles you were having? For example, was the cursor jumping around?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:35, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
 * - yes, the cursor jumps (or was jumping) to the beginning of the paragraph. Shyamal (talk) 02:59, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Yea, I actually meant to put 'veaction='. That's what the gadget does now.  Thanks for letting me know about this problem.  It wasn't too hard to fix up. Endo999 (talk) 20:11, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
 * My initial tests show that with the Beta wikitext mode enabled, that the URL has 'veaction=' within the parameters, but please give me example showing this not to be the case and I'll work on it. Endo999 (talk) 22:58, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random?action=edit (with the Beta Feature for the new wikitext mode still enabled).
 * Also, even if you don't opt-in to the Beta Feature, you can start in the 2010 (light blue) wikitext editor and use the button in the left corner of the toolbar to switch to the visual editor without changing the URL. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:53, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your reply. Since you are a Wikimedia contributor can you suggest a test for me to know that I am in Visual Editor so that I can disable use of GoogleTrans gadget within Visual Editor.  Currently, I have the test that 'veaction=' must be in the URL, but you are saying this isn't good enough. Endo999 (talk) 18:45, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

I have GoogleTrans enabled in preferences. But I don't remember ever using it. Or at least not in a long time. I don't need it since I have the "Translate This!" Firefox addon which I use often. With that addon one selects text, right-clicks the selected text, and a popup menu with options shows up.

I am not currently having the problem with the shift key causing the cursor to move around while in Visual Editor. I just tested it inside and outside of a table in an article.

I will be disabling GoogleTrans since I don't use it. --Timeshifter (talk) 04:05, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

Ken Wahl actor DOB 10-31-1954 ?
Making a correction. Ken Wahl DOB 10-31-1954 ... I've found many on other names. This is the first time I've sent info. Ty Brenda Register — Preceding unsigned comment added by BrendaRegister (talk • contribs) 16:27, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Provide a way to identify whether a link is piped or not without opening the link editor
When looking at a page in the source it is trivially easy to determine whether a link is piped to a different target than is displayed or not. In VE only the link label is shown and there isn't a way to see at a glance whether the label is the same or different to the link target without mousing over the link individually.

Some way of highlighting that a link is piped to a different target would be useful (e.g. in relation to T55973 when a link label is changed but the link isn't, contrary to your intention). My very first thought is perhaps a dotted or dashed underline. It doesn't need to report what the target is, only that the target is not identical to the label. I haven't got time to see if this is a duplicate of an existing task. Thryduulf (talk) 08:28, 4 August 2017 (UTC)


 * Will mouseover text be a good compromise? I'm not a developer either but my take is that a dotted or dashed underline in VE only would be counter-intuitive to the WYSIWYG principle. Deryck C. 14:38, 4 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Mousover text exists already, but you have to mouseover every link to see it, which is cumbersome. I'm looking for some annotation to highlight that this is a piped link I need to mouseover. Whether underlines are the way to go I don't know, they were just my first thought, and while VE is broadly WYSIWYG it's not completely, e.g. no TOCs, blank lines to interact with templates, question marks to interact with comments, etc. Thryduulf (talk) 15:00, 4 August 2017 (UTC)
 * I agree this would be useful. Different colour maybe? I use the Preference > Appearance > " Display links to disambiguation pages in orange" and I find the orange definitely draws my attention to potential problems around disambiguation links. Of course different colours are not an ideal solution for people with vision issues. Kerry (talk) 06:55, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Now added to Phabricator as T172861. Thryduulf (talk) 10:34, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Thank you for filing this, and especially for including the permalink to this discussion. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:22, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

For citations, have a "Generate and insert" button
Probably not a new complaint, but the Visual Editor is really slow and a huge reason for why I don't contribute more to Wikipedia.

Here's a small and simple suggestion to speed it up: When adding citations, I have to first click "Generate", wait 5-10 seconds, then click "Insert". Why not give contributors the option of skipping the second step, by allowing me to simply click a "Generate and Insert" button in the very first step? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jimsmith1978 (talk • contribs) 06:42, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Used to think this too; it would be a good idea. SpikeballUnion (talk) 04:24, 16 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Jim and SpikeballUnion, I think that the point behind the separate 'Insert' button is that you need to see the results that the citoid service gives you. The imagined workflow is paste in the URL (or ISBN, etc.), "Generate" the citation, manually look at the result, and finally "Insert" it (only if you like it).  Skipped the "Insert" step would also skip the opportunity to look at the result.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:50, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
 * I agree. Automatic citations often contain errors because web scraping is a messy business. Very common ones that I see come from government agencies that appear as

which renders as

. The only way you could fix this is to write to the website's owner and tell them that they've got the wrong language code on the page. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:20, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
 * I always knew the Scottish were funny people ;) Thanks.  Red Fiona (talk) 19:51, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

Suggestion for Citations in VE
Some articles have warning messages at the top to use DMY dates in the references. This is an easy box to overlook when adding several references. If a title in a citation has a line break in a red warning message appears when you save the link. Is there any way that this could also be done if you put the date in the wrong way? Asking because I feel really bad about the amount of effort that users like Lugnuts spend tidying up after users like myself. Red Fiona (talk) 16:20, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
 * In general, VE itself tries to do few things that are very Wikipedia specific, especially if they are specific to a single Wikipedia (because that is very high maintenance). I'd say, that long term, editors shouldn't have to care how the date is entered. I'd also say that if a bot cannot do it, then VE cannot do it, so what I wonder is if Lugnuts can be replaced by a bot... —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 18:42, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Oh well, since it doesn't matter, please change the VE to use DMY dates when it constructs citations. The DMY people like me will all be very happy and the non-DMY people can be the ones who wait for the bot. Kerry (talk) 07:57, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Citoid uses an easily translated ISO standard for dates, and you can set the date format inside the citation template to whatever you want (the df template). If you do that, then the citation template will always automatically transform the ISO date to match the desired format.  A bot could very easily add that parameter to all citation templates on a page.  You could also propose that the templates treat dmy as the default, unless specified otherwise.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:24, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
 * I'd be delighted if DMY was the default. I am tired of fixing date formats in articles manually because other people are using Citoid. I understand that searching the article for the "Use DMY dates" template is an issue for performance, but it would only be in "automatic citation" which is a bit of a sit-back-and-wait situation for the user anyway (something the user freely chooses to do as an alternative to manual citation). As it stands, the VE does appear to be treating some templates with special processing (infoboxes, coords), so it is not without precedent. Kerry (talk) 22:11, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
 * I've been told that it can't be done. It's not performance; it's the mess of trying to make it happen.  And if they somehow managed to do it, then the dates would get mangled again if the article got translated into another language.  Manually changing date formats seems tedious (why don't you just wait until someone runs one of the date-formatting scripts to fix it?), but IMO this is worse.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:45, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Presumably you fix ht.WP without waiting for some bot for the same reasons I fix date formats on en.WP articles about Australian content. Firstly because I haven't seen any date-fixing bot come past in a very long time (and even when I did it wasn't frequent enough) and so I do it myself because I care about Australian content and I don't want it to be wrong, which is both ugly and confusing. But I think the real problem is that we are seeing this as a content issue rather than as a rendering issue. We should just template every date on Wikipedia and let the rendering display it correctly for the locale or as directed by the user's preferences. We could deal with spelling variations the same way. We really are using the wrong tools for this job. Kerry (talk) 06:48, 4 August 2017 (UTC)
 * I fix things at htwiki because I can't do more important things there (since I don't speak the language at all), and because there are no local bots. The m:Global bot policy does not currently permit global bots to clean up obviously broken wikitext.
 * I wonder whether we could set you up with a list of Australia-related articles that need the df item added, and let you fix them all quickly. You're running Windows, right?  (Or maybe it would make more sense just to poke one of the bot ops to get a date-fixing bot running through your favorite subject area.)  User:Magioladitis or User:NicoV would probably know the best way to do this.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:36, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Since you mention Windows, are you saying AWB (which suits me fine)? The problem with any bot is that I have thousands of Australian articles on my watchlist so I generally see updated articles within a day (I usually work my way through my watchlist every morning religiously - I get notifications by email and I delete the mail when I have checked and, if needed, fixed the article) so I see the non-DMY dates going in, so I have to fix them. The bot needs to run faster than I do if it's going to save me work. When I say I fix them manually, I use some gadget to actually fix all the dates within the article. But I have to open/save each article manually. So AWB suits me well, as I just have to SAVE or SKIP. But for the next month, I am quite literally at sea, so I won't be doing my watchlist for a while..  Kerry (talk) 18:23, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, I was thinking about an AWB approach, if bots weren't available. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:01, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
 * And I probably won't be reporting any VE bugs either :-) Kerry (talk) 18:25, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

photo

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.113 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Billy_%22Uncle_Bill%22_Wright&action=edit How do I upload my photo?

Billy &#34;Uncle Bill&#34; Wright (talk) 17:56, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

trying to upload photos to the wiki and it is not working

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 9460.73.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/59.0.3071.134 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_(advertisement)?action=edit&oldid=793673451&wteswitched=1

Thesubarulovah (talk) 18:17, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

Recent performance analysis?
This is a bit of a generic complaint but it seems that Visual Editor performance has noticeably decreased during the last months or year, especially when loading large articles with tables. At the same time Visual Editor seems to hog every last bit of processor ressources while loading such pages - to the point where everything else freezes for several seconds. Admittedly my PC is utter crap (Windows XP, 2x1.8 GHz, 2 GB RAM, Firefox 52.0.2), so I probably have only myself to blame ;). (1) But has there been any recent research in Visual Editor performance especially for low-end systems? (2) And are developers still working on performance tweaks? Just curious, any info or links to recent research would be appreciated. GermanJoe (talk) 12:28, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
 * It seems that on average, the load time has consistently gone down, even for the bottom 5% worst performing user agents . However, that also incorperates the fact that people generally tend to update to faster machines over time, so i'm not sure what the trend is when you would pin that to one specific non-updated machine. It is also true that Firefox is generally a slow browser when it comes to VE, and that generations of machines using XP, are probably never going to run VE fluently. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 11:04, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
 * The team is talking about a proper performance audit during the next quarter. I don't know yet if they'll get it approved, etc., but it is something that they thing that it's time to check.  AFAIK nobody is explicitly working on performance right now (although it's something all of them keep in mind).  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:24, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Image addition bug
EvilxFish (talk) 10:05, 3 September 2017 (UTC)


 * Strange. You were uploading the same versions of those files each time, right?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:22, 7 September 2017 (UTC)


 * Yes it was the same files from the same machine both times, please note that the current versions are slightly different though as other users removed the embedded data. EvilxFish (talk) 19:25, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

PgDn jumps to near the beginning
Lfstevens (talk) 13:40, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Only have a save shortcut on the final save dialogue

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 9592.94.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.114 Safari/537.36

When saving an article, there isn't a first "Alt+S" save shortcut, like the one when the final save dialogue loads. These two shortcuts should be largely the same.

Sadads (talk) 03:00, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

How do I see a preview of my work when editing in wikisyntax mode? Can't find it.

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.113 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Snapdragon66?veaction=editsource

Snapdragon66 (talk) 16:54, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
 * you have to click "Publish", and then in the dialog that pops up, it's the 2nd button at the bottom left. It's a bit confusing indeed but there is already a ticket for the developers about this confusion. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 18:16, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Rajesh shah
Brun 1983 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ashika shah (talk • contribs).


 * Hello, if you would like to post article-related feedback, please use the article's talkpage instead (probably Talk:Rajesh Shah) - but you should provide a published reliable source for any information you want to get changed or added. I'll post a few additional links with some basic information about Wikipedia on your user talkpage. If you have further questions, the WP:Teahouse is a good forum to ask for Wikipedia-related assistance. GermanJoe (talk) 19:55, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Needs link to these "usual tradeoffs..."

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.113 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Triclopyr&action=edit

RedBird 14:36, 25 September 2017 (UTC)


 * Hello, please suggest article-related changes on the article's talkpage Talk:Triclopyr (Visual Editor feedback is primarily for editor-related bug reports and comments). Or you can edit the article yourself of course. GermanJoe (talk) 18:00, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Preview?

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0

I can't figure out how to view a preview. I need it to see that a template looks right.

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulkner_Act?action=edit

Acebarry (talk) 14:29, 1 October 2017 (UTC)


 * - Does this section, above, answer your question? -- <font style="font-family:Brush Script MT; font-size:15px;">John Broughton (♫♫) 23:49, 2 October 2017 (UTC)


 * - Yes it does! I thought by doing that I would save my work. Thanks for getting back to me 23:51, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

overlinking: worldcat and oclc
Recently I've encountered a lot of edits like where new citations are added that have both oclc and include a redundant link to the same place in url. To me, this 'functionality' seems pointless because the two link to the same place and that place is not a readable copy of the cited source – worldcat may have a link to Google preview but there is no guarantee of that. Don't overlink, don't link title with url when the value of url does not go to the source.

And why are worldcat/oclc handled differently from other identifiers?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 10:50, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

Deleting infobox parameters scrolls screen to top of dialogue box
SpikeballUnion (talk) 19:20, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Citation in infobox floating at the top of the article during Edit
Kerry (talk) 01:16, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Thank you. I was going to report this issue ages ago but Template:VE Bug2 wasn't working in the bug report page. I'm pretty sure this: http://prntscr.com/gu62xo is what you were reporting. It only started happening about 2 or 3 months ago. SpikeballUnion (talk) 19:25, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
 * I just noticed it in the last day or so. I've experimented a little. It occurs when there is an infobox with a citation and when there is some change made to anything in the infobox (doesn't matter what field). If you open the infobox to edit but then don't make a change, the problem doesn't occur. If you edit the infobox, Apply changes, the citation appears but if you then Undo, the citation goes away again. If you edit the infobox, Apply changes, the citation appears. If you edit the infobox again and reverse the original change, then Apply Changes, the citation disappears. So it seems to trigger precisely on an infobox which is changed from the original. Kerry (talk) 00:32, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

VisualEditor won't disable
I am fed up of the VisualEditor and I want to disable it but I don't know how to do this. Can you please help me. I don't like the way the buttons on the VisualEditor are so confusing to locate and I am happier editing on the original editor than the VisualEditor. Pkbwcgs (talk) 09:13, 7 October 2017 (UTC)


 * I even enabled the source editor but this rubbish VisualEditor won't go away. Pkbwcgs (talk) 09:16, 7 October 2017 (UTC)


 * I am becoming frustrated because 5 minutes it will go to the source editor and then it will automatically change to the VisualEditor and I completely hate the VisualEditor. Pkbwcgs (talk) 09:30, 7 October 2017 (UTC)
 * If you always want the source editor then you should have "Always give me the source editor" at "Editing mode:" at Special:Preferences. "New wikitext mode" and "Automatically enable all new beta features" should be disabled at Special:Preferences. Did that help? PrimeHunter (talk) 10:23, 7 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes it did but the images problem is still not fixed yet as indicated at Village pump (technical). Pkbwcgs (talk) 10:30, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Signpost
Is there a chance visual editing will come to the Wikipedia Signpost pages? Eddie891 Talk Work 22:34, 8 October 2017 (UTC)
 * There are three ways. One is to get the VE enabled on the Wikipedia namespace in which Signpost lives. This is a policy issue rather than a technical issue. The second is to place the template at the top of individual pages, which basically lets you invoke the the Visual Editor on that page, for an example see GLAM/State Library of Queensland/QWiki Club. The third is to do manually what the template does, which is to add &veaction=editsource onto the URL of the Wikipedia page. None of these are officially endorsed, but just saying what I do in similar situations. Kerry (talk) 00:50, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
 * While its technically possible already per what Kerry said, editing Signpost pages with VE won't be a pleasant experience because of all the custom formatting and templates – e.g. for https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2017-09-25/News_and_notes&veaction=edit everything you might want to edit visually is interpreted by VE as blocks of templates/transcusions. If you want a better experience, VE needs to be able to visually edit content within such blocks (which I think has been requested before, but IIRC is too difficult with too few use cases for mainspace) - Evad37 &#91;talk] 03:03, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
 * I assume that the present design relates to an era when the source editor was the only option but would the same design decisions be made today. Even as someone quite proficient in the source editor, I'd be reluctant to edit anything made so complex. Given there's often a call for more people to contribute to Signpost, I can see why they don't if they have to master the complexity of those templates., can you clarify what kind of edits you are wanting to make? E.g. to write content, to comment, or what? If it's clearer how people are wanting to contribute, it might become clearer how to reduce the impediments to doing so. Kerry (talk) 10:12, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
 * I usually do a significant amount of writing content for The SignpostEddie891 Talk Work 11:08, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Ref name
How do we add references with the "ref name" via VE? -- Kailash29792   (talk)  18:37, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
 * I don't think you can. Mostly this is not a problem as the VE automatically labels citations with numbers, but it becomes a problem when a citation is declared within an infobox rather than in the main body of the text, as this gets "overlooked" when you do a citation re-use. I do not know of a solution other than using the source editor. Kerry (talk) 08:27, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

Searching and re-using citations
Knope7 (talk) 01:14, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Agreed. Nothing happens. I usually just scroll so I've not noticed the problem before. Kerry (talk) 08:32, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

No easy way to get back to VisualEditor
Hi! I'm asking on behalf of Wiki Education - we have had several students end up losing access to VE because they post on a talk page, which can only be edited in source mode. Since the default is to remain in the last editor version used, there's no easy way for them to get back to VE. I know that for more experienced and/or adventurous Wikipedians they'll go to the preferences tab, but honestly there are a lot of Wikipedians who don't go to the preferences tab (where they can change it back or enable both) and I don't think that all really know that it's there offhand, given that I've had a few students ask me how to get to their sandbox. I figure that it's because of an overload of information and a fear of messing things up (more).

Is there a way to keep VE from getting disabled when editors post to a talk page or perhaps have the "enable both" option the default upon launch? Or other than that, perhaps a way for people to get back to source mode without going to the preferences section, like a popup that comes up after they save their talk page message? Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:45, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Hi, I think that for the time being, if the option on the toolbar for the easy switch back (the pencil) doesn't seem to be working for your cases, I think you could consider highlighting it, or the possibility to have 2 tabs, as part of the information you're already certainly providing to the students. At least you have good chances to succeed, because it is a group with a finite number of people with whom you can communicate in several ways. So while it may be suboptimal, I think it's what you can do now. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:21, 3 October 2017 (UTC)


 * This happens to my trainees too. The solution is to set Preference > Editing > Editing mode to "Show both editor tabs". Do NOT use "Remember my last editor", because sooner or later this setting leads to the problem you are seeing. Kerry (talk) 03:33, 4 October 2017 (UTC)


 * We've been telling students to do that, but I didn't know if there was a way to resolve this without having to go to preferences. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 13:58, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Can you elaborate on why the toolbar switch is impractical for them? If the problem is occasional, it should be enough: if it's too frequent, then yes, choosing a different setup from Prefs does the trick. (FWIW, there is an option "Always give me the visual editor when possible".) Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:10, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Because they see the markup and panic. These are generally new users; they don't generally know the semantics of the "pencil" icon. I know of a couple of people who clicked it thinking it was a drawing tool. Why not tell them ""Always give me the visual editor when possible"? Because at one point it didn't seem to work properly and nobody has reported here that it has been fixed. Also, when dealing with a panicking/frustrated person, I tell them what I *know* works to fix the problem and not something that I think *might* work. These problems are generally occurring after the class so we are communicating by email so there's quite a time lag already to sort out their problem. The frustration of new users is already fairly high, so I don't want to make it worse. This is a new user problem rather than a functional problem. Kerry (talk) 08:59, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

Edit a row in a table and it disappears from view
Kerry (talk) 08:33, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Having done more table editing, I notice a pattern. When adding a link to the table cell, if the drop-downs list of link suggestions is very long, that's when the table moves upwards on the screen, presumably to accommodate the longer drop-down, but putting the row out of sight when the link is added. If the list of suggestions is short, the table seems to remain in place. Kerry (talk) 09:01, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

the table cannot be edited

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_military_and_paramilitary_personnel?action=edit

Adithya harish pergade (talk) 18:40, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Special Characters in the Citation Editor
Hi, I was just wondering if there was a way of adding special characters in the titles when using the citation editor? Red Fiona (talk) 19:56, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

science

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 9592.96.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.114 Safari/537.36

it doesn't doesn't contain anything about Acoustics consultant Analytical textile technologist Animal technician Astronaut Astronomer Audiologist Biochemist Biologist Biomedical scientist Biotechnologist Botanist Chemical engineer Chemical engineering technician Chemist Clinical engineer Clinical psychologist Clinical scientist Consumer scientist Criminal intelligence analyst Data analyst-statistician Ecologist Economist Education technician Electronics engineer Fingerprint officer Food scientist Forensic scientist Garment technologist Geneticist Geoscientist Geotechnician Healthcare science assistant Laboratory technician Materials engineer Materials technician Medical physicist Meteorologist Microbiologist Nanotechnologist Nuclear engineer Oceanographer Operational researcher Paleontologist Pathologist Pet behaviour counsellor Pharmacologist Physicist Psychiatrist Psychologist Research and development manager Research scientist Scenes of crime officer Sport and exercise psychologist Sports scientist Technical brewer Technical textiles designer Textile technologist Vet Zoologist

204.186.238.66 (talk) 14:25, 18 October 2017 (UTC)


 * You apparently think that the article Science should include a long list of occupations. I've added a link - List of scientific occupations - in the "See also" section; I don't think any other action is needed. In the future, please makes suggestions for changes to an article on the Talk page for that article; in this case, that would have been Talk:Science. -- <font style="font-family:Brush Script MT; font-size:15px;">John Broughton (♫♫) 04:51, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Heads-up


Over two years ago I contacted several wikis as part of the plan to progressively centralise user feedback about the visual editor at mediawiki.org. (Among the other advantages it offers, the centralised board is the only one that Community Liaisons at the Wikimedia Foundation commit to check at least once a week.)

We are now working at the second phase of feedback centralisation. We think this page gets enough traffic that it's worth keeping it here, but we still want to make a change. The page will need a visible notice on top. It must either flag the name of at least one volunteer who agrees to monitor and take action on the page from now on, or it needs to say that the page is not actively monitored by WMF staff. (In any case, after the transition is complete, you can get our attention at any time by simply pinging us, like you're already doing.)

Unless I hear from you before, I'll come back in 2 weeks, on 2017-10-24, to see whether someone has volunteered, otherwise I'll simply put the other notice up. I appreciate your attention and all your support! Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:16, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
 * What are the benefits to those of us who currently contribute here? The signal seems to be "we are no longer wanting feedback" or "we are no longer interested in the Visual Editor" (a once-a-week look doesn't sound like any action will be taken on an urgent bug). A quick visit to the centralised page makes it look inferior to what we have here. I don't see a template, which is useful for most bug reports. Will it be possible there to add screenshots which we can't do here? And how do we setup notifications when the page changes? I ask this because I don't get them from other wikis such as wikidata even though I have tried many times to set the preferences to do so. And how do you actually read the entries -- they all appear empty? And what is the role of this volunteer you are seeking for here? Bug reports need to be seen by the developers not random volunters. The motivation for this change seems unclear and the proposed new arrangement seems to be to make it more difficult to give feedback, particularly for the new users who are the target audience of the Visual Editor. Kerry (talk) 00:43, 11 October 2017 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your questions. When the visual editor first landed on big wikis, the Foundation had a huge staff that took care of the feedback for months, on several of our wikis. Liaisons don't have those staff resources any more: on the top of that, we never meant to "own" the feedback process. It is vital that communities self-sustain in those areas where this is possible (especially the biggest and best organized ones), and feedback at a not-crucial stage of the life of a single product is certainly one of those areas. This doesn't mean CLs simply walk away: we remain available whenever the need arises, but we just can't behave as if this is our only task and priority, like it was in 2013.
 * The TL;DR (the process goes way beyond en.wikipedia, so some of the following may not apply) would be: having all the feedback on a single, centralized place like mw:VisualEditor/Feedback mainly means getting faster, more frequent replies and more attention from a higher number of people, including the people who are building the software. It also means chances are high, that editors will find that someone else has already written there about the issues or requests they wanted to post.
 * Maintaining a local page instead can be cumbersome: it needs to be checked frequently in case someone reports urgent issues. Old threads need to be archived from time to time. Off-topic comments should be removed to keep readability. Feedback left there is sometimes not easily understandable or actionable at all.

As for your questions:
 * Yes, we still want feedback. We will always want feedback. Including yours :)
 * There isn't a template. In all these years, there hasn't been much need for it, if any: in the worst case scenario, we can point people to mw:How_to_report_a_bug so they know which structure is more effective for their reports.
 * Once a week is the minimum: it refers to the process of following-up after a task has been resolved. If the report is on mw.org, then I'll go close/summarize the thread and update the Tracked template. I check centralized boards multiple times a day.
 * You can upload screenshots in comments there by drag&drop, and then clicking Upload (it's the uploading procedure from within the visual editor), or you can use https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/file/upload/ (no need for them to be actually attached to a task).
 * For watching the page, I simply have it in my watchlist and get email notifications every time a new thread comes up. To follow specific threads you're interested in as they evolve, you can watch them by subscribing individually to them.
 * Most of the threads are actually empty - the page gets some spam or OT content (I'm on it). https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Tyf6r3spq0a16k77 is an example of an open thread. You can see closed threads at any time by clicking on the "X comments" link.
 * Volunteers who watch feedback pages simply help with requests as they come by: they look up on Phab if those are already known, otherwise they file a new task. Phab is how you put things in front of devs' eyes. I'll be happy to discuss more in details with anyone who would like to step up, if they have any doubts/concerns.
 * However, in case this isn't clear though: this page is not going away. Others elsewhere are, but this one doesn't really need a redirect at this time. We simply need people to know that the mediawiki.org one is the officially staffed one. If volunteers want to keep this one alive, that's great!, go ahead, otherwise let's simply have a notice that reflects reality. HTH. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:11, 11 October 2017 (UTC)
 * I have now put the notices up. LMK if you think tweaks are necessary. best, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:23, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Shortcut "Ctrl + Alt + S" should work in the end also
The shortcut "Ctrl + Alt + S" is not working in the end. At the article it´s working but if you are inside the "Save your changes" it´s not working (in opposite to Shift + Alt + I").

Thank you very much!--F.Blaubiget (talk) 15:05, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Stop VisualEditor scrolling the page down when inserting a hyperlink
Is there any way to stop VisualEditor scrolling the page down when inserting a hyperlink, as in this screenshot: http://prntscr.com/h34uht? If not, can there at least be an option made for it? It's slower to work with and harder to immediately click on the first result. SpikeballUnion (talk) 14:41, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Templates blocking editing of adjacent image captions
SpikeballUnion (talk) 19:16, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

Make the page scroll down when using Find & Replace
Is there a way to make the page scroll down to see which items of text are being replaced as it happens? It currently stays in the same place, and there is no way to scroll to the current item of text selected for replacement: you can only go to the next or previous one. SpikeballUnion (talk) 19:23, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

Is Visual Editor stripping whitespace by default
Hi all, re: this edit, and this edit, I'm trying to figure out if Visual Editor is stripping whitespace by default, or if this user might be doing this on purpose. Anyone know anything about this? If the whitespace is being stripped by default, that's a bit annoying, since a lot of editors prefer setting up infoboxes by lining up the = signs. Thanks, Cyphoidbomb (talk) 22:27, 22 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Seems to be doing it here as well. Can someone please turn this off? Cyphoidbomb (talk) 04:01, 25 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Also for the 100th time, fix the damn bug where VE scrambles the order of existing template parameters, even when the user hasn't touched them. Alsee (talk) 13:00, 31 October 2017 (UTC)
 * I've elevated this to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T179259#3729758 Cyphoidbomb (talk) 15:11, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

In source editing, the text does not line up with the text cursor (so edits are no where they should be)

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:58.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/58.0

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Probability-generating_function&action=edit

Enedrox (talk) 05:22, 5 November 2017 (UTC)

Audio editing software - VE "switch" "glitch"

 * User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.102 UBrowser/7.0.6.1618 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_editing_software?action=edit&oldid=776328615&wteswitched=1

106.207.13.186 (talk) 08:49, 30 November 2017 (UTC)
 * The first time I followed your link it (eventually) timed out with a server error. Clicking 'cancel' in the error dialog took me to the source editor. I was able to switch to VE from there with no issues. Also, your link now works without error, so maybe my actions cleared some server cache somewhere... Definitely confusing and user-unfriendly though. -- Begoon 09:11, 30 November 2017 (UTC)

Grammarly browser plugin
I really thought it would be great if this browser plugin Grammarly worked with VE. It seems very popular and in case you haven't heard of it: see official website. Fortunately, it does work with source editing since it seems to search for editable html fields to check, so the markup language will cause some problems. (I just used it here to correct a few things in this post) For someone more technically minded, I was wondering if a small fix in VE would make it compatible as opposed to pleading with the Grammarly devs to make it work. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 18:49, 8 December 2017 (UTC)
 * VE is fundamentally built on the "contenteditable" mode for HTML + lots of other complex additions. This mode gives a lot of power, but also has lots of inconsistencies across browsers and is rather hard to support. This is the reason that grammarly doesn't work in VE. Either we have blocked it, because it was breaking VE, or grammarly has blacklisted VE (not sure which one). if you google a bit for grammarly and content editable, you will find lots of other editors have similar problems. You should contact grammarly for sure if you want this, but I think it might take a few more years for the browsers to become more consistent, in order for grammarly to reliably support complicated editors like VE and CKEditor. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 12:41, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

Blockquote text formatting reset by Visual Edit
Quoted text changed to normal font text from small font text by Visual editor. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.197.7.225 (talk) 19:40, 11 December 2017 (UTC)