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I'm continuing to have problems with rendering references. I attempted to include five citations to an article I'm developing on my user page, involving four references and one split citation. For some reason, only the first reference rendered, the second, which I attempted to split, ended up with some rendering error, and the third and fourth never appeared at all. I have no idea what happened, but here is a link to that version of the page, and these are the references I attempted to cite: http://reachrecords.com/about, http://reachrecords.com/artists/show/Lecrae, http://www.allmusic.com/artist/sho-baraka-mn0001000605, http://allhiphop.com/2012/04/08/five-christian-hip-hop-acts-you-should-know/.-- ¿3fam ily6 contribs 00:19, 7 July 2013 (UTC)
@ 3family6:, I have no clue what the issue is, but I do know how to open a bug report. :) Are you able to replicate the problem so that it happens again? Can I ask what browser and operating system you are using? -- Maggie Dennis (WMF) ( talk) 17:08, 8 July 2013 (UTC)
Different but somewhat related error: I'm finding when I split a reference (if it works), the citation appears not on the line where I want it, but at the beginning of that paragraph. Here's an example, fifth paragraph in the History section. This bug occurs much more consistently (like pretty much every time) than my above problem.-- ¿3fam ily6 contribs 01:41, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
It seems that the issue with bug 49854 has resurfaced. Whenever I edit any parameter in an infobox (doesn't matter on which page), some (but not all) piped links and files are displayed as plain wikitext like "[[Capital city|capital]]" instead of " capital". If the infobox contains references, a cite error in red about a missing reflist also appears near the top of the page (as previously discussed at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive_2013_07#Table.2FTemplate and possibly related to bug 50423, but not entirely the same). Is this a known issue or have I missed it? thayts t 16:33, 9 July 2013 (UTC)
@ Mdennis (WMF): Yes, sorry I wasn't too clear about that, it doesn't affect the save indeed and is only a displaying issue. I found the pipe link bug still to be present though, but it's been only one and a half hour after associated bug 50801 was declared fixed and it probably needs some time to back-port. It also seems that the reference bug is not really fixed, but that the error message is simply being suppressed: if you hover over the infobox after editing it or if you click it, an empty bar as wide as the article body will be highlighted at the top of the infobox. Previously, this bar contained the error message. I'm using Firefox 22.0, perhaps you can reproduce it with that. thayts t 17:41, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
The new editor is basically useless. I have been waiting for 10 minutes for it to accept an insertion point. Patrickwooldridge ( talk) 04:11, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
I don't see the number of editors who have disabled VE as meaning much of anything, other than that editors familiar with wikitext editing can do most things much or quickly in the old editor than in VE, and, more importantly, can do everything in the old editor, while VE has limits (can't edit tables, other than contents; can't edit blockquoted material, etc.), and also is still producing quasi-random errors.
VE is a beta. It shouldn't matter, now, whether 2% or 20% of edits are done with VE - what should matter is whether the VE team is getting the feedback it needs to see where the bugs are, and how serious those bugs are. Eventually VE will be able to do everything that the wikitext editor can, and there will be minimal bugs; at that point - and only at that point - should we be concerned if VE isn't attractive to experienced editors.
In short, I think anyone at WMF who looks at "percent of edits using VE" as a measure of success is making a mistake. And I think anyone in the Wikipedia community who looks at "percent of edits using VE" as a measure of failure is also making a mistake. The goal as this point - the measure of success - should be to get to a stable, relatively bug-free, fully-featured WYSIWYG editing interface. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:20, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
This revision [2] contains some junk text "QuickiWiki Look Up QuickiWiki Look Up QuickiWiki Look Up" at the very bottom of the page after the authority control, person data and categories. When you try and edit with VE you cannot actually see the junk text. I've play about in my sandbox and the actual conditions for the text not to appear seem to be quite sensitive, at one point new line character appeared. The text remains after VE finishes the edit.-- Salix ( talk): 09:06, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
Hi - sorry if this is an FAQ or anything but is it normal behaviour in this VE-tagged edit that, afterwards, the infobox worked fine but its layout, if you wanted to see it in the source, was trashed (line feeds stripped, I think?) so you couldn't really read it, and you certainly couldn't compare it with the previous? As I say, apologies if it is covered elsewhere and please feel free to point me in the right direction if so. Cheers DBaK ( talk) 21:40, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
I have just edited my first template: {{
cite web}}
in a reference. I was able to edit the template successfully but have the following comments:
trans_title
in this case). Thus I cannot use the filter to select a parameter unless I already know what its name is, which rather defeats the object of a GUI...value2|name3 = value3|name4 = ...
:
...value2 |name3=value3 |name4=...
with spaces before each delimiting solidus and not around the equals would avoid these problems.-- Mirokado ( talk) 22:38, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
...value2 | name3 = value3 | name4 = ...
if we're going to change it at all. So, to go mea culpa for a minute; I explicitly requested that normalisation should normalise with, rather than without, spaces. This is because ultimately normalisation is for the sake of markup-editors; name3=value3 is somewhat hard to read for long templates with lots of values.
Okeyes (WMF) (
talk) 10:40, 11 July 2013 (UTC)...value1 |name2=value2 |name3=value3 |name4=...
.)
Looie496 (
talk) 13:59, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for the responses. I have looked again, using shift-refresh in Firefox to get, I hope, the latest version. Please see File:VisualEditor template dialog 20130712-0245.png.
I can upload more screenshots if anything above is not sufficiently clear... -- Mirokado ( talk) 01:50, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
author link
is not a valid parameter in {{
cite web}}
, it gives a nice red error message: Unknown parameter |author link= ignored
.I would like to suggest that all of the editing dialog boxes should have help page links (probably via an embedded icon) that open a new window with help information appropriate for that dialog. Dragons flight ( talk) 02:04, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
What happened to the "author" parameter for the cite-web template? Online journalists often use pseudonyms, and the author parameter works better in this case then first or last name.-- ¿3fam ily6 contribs 14:05, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
Your save changes popup is so tiny I have to blow up the page 5 times to see what I type. Then I have to do the reverse afterwards. I hate this. Please leave such things alone. It has worked for years. If it aint broke, dont fix it! Torturella ( talk) 17:17, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
The Save Page bubble/box/dialog thing is really annoying. I wanted to review my changes (as I'm not sure how the visual editor does things yet). I had no idea how to do this, so I clicked "Save page". And then I found the preview changes button...
Even so, this leaves me with an overlay of the diff with the darkened background of the page I was editing. In most content display styled like this, clicking in the darkened area closes what you were doing in the foreground and re-focuses on the main page. This is not the case with the visual editor. This then prompted me to look for "x"s in the top right corners of boxes. As no x's exist, I had to stop completely and look at the entire UI.
It's also not immediately clear that the arrows across the top of the changes preview dialog and save changes dialog exist, nor clear what they do. Commonly "exit dialog" is reflected with an "x" in the top right corner. This is instead, an up arrow.
I understand that this isn't at all confusing once you get used to it. It's a new thing and humans don't like new things. However, my brain is trained to look and act on specific cues on how computers tend to work. Clicking on an unfocused area should focus it. x's close things. Neither currently holds true for the visual editor. -- SnoFox( t| c) 17:25, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
I've been around Wikipedia. I make small edits -- correcting notes that should be a template, moving things to talk pages, fixing typos and stray characters. I know what a transclusion is as I sit and read things about Wikipedia. However, I have never once said "transclusion" in conversation when talking about Wikis. I use the word "template". Everyone I know uses the word "template". It's a simple word and everyone knows what it means.
When mousing over all of the new toolbar icons, the context menus told me what they are. I hovered over all of them and then thought, "Okay now where's the template button?" A few moments later, "Oh, derp. Transclusions."
A new editor or inexperienced editor will never make that association, and will likely (if ever) find out how to add a Citation Needed template by simple trial and error - clicking all the buttons until he get what he wants. -- SnoFox( t| c) 17:42, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
Can someone help explain to me what I did wrong in this template data that I'm getting this error, "Syntax error in JSON"? I've gone over it 10 times and can't seem to find the problem. (I had to add nowiki tags or else it wouldn't let me save the page. Also, though this is in my sandbox, it gives me the same error when I try to copy and paste it into Template:Infobox attraction. Can someone help me please? Thanks!-- Dom497 ( talk) 22:47, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
\"
) or just use single quotes within the string. —
This, that and
the other (talk) 00:54, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
I've been playing around with VE and when it comes to putting infoboxs in an article, it takes way too long. You have to click on the puzzle piece, search the template, click a parameter, fill in the parameter, go back, click another parameter, fill it in, repeat. It is way faster to just search for the template on wiki, copy and past the syntax (or code; whatever it is called) and fill in each parameter quickly. All in all, my point is that inserting infoboxs using VE is extremely inefficient and should be addressed.-- Dom497 ( talk) 00:12, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
When editing a template:
Also, initial capitalization of the parameter names seems to act strangely. -- Ypnypn ( talk) 02:50, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
I edited All-Ireland Senior Camogie Championship 1992 to fix a simple typo, and VE duplicated a simple table way down the page. I saved it to demonstrate the bug, then undid the edit. Chris the speller yack 04:05, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
What is the point of this "new" tool again? Or is there actually no real reason for it other than the fact that someone created a "tool" with the hope that it would be used because they had nothing else to do that day, and there was nothing on TV and the "new" video game they were awaiting had not been released yet. Otherwise, aren't "new" technology tools supposed to offer some advantage to their old counterparts - not reduce functionality or reduce the capacity for productivity. Why was this rolled out? Isn't there some means or process of Quality Assurance for application development on Wikipedia? Stevenmitchell ( talk) 10:16, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
Doesn't seem to have an obvious way to sign or leave a note about what you've changed. Celia Kozlowski ( talk) 10:51, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
Is there a script or a setting to make it say [edit | source] instead of [edit | edit source], and show it all the time instead of only on hover? Sometimes I click "edit" by instinct, before the "edit source" button is displayed, so it would be nice if both buttons are displayed to avoid confusion. It would be even better if the order could be changed to [edit | visual], because sometimes I click "edit source" accidentally when I want to use the Visual Editor, and vice versa.
The placement of the edit summary box is not very intuitive. I looked for it for some time before checking the documentation and reading that I should click "Save page" to see the box, and click "Save page" again to actually save my changes. It would be nice if the edit summary box is always shown; if the purpose of hiding it under "Save page" is to make people write summaries more often, then maybe a red box could be added around an always-visible unfilled box, or a dialogue box could ask editors to confirm if they were sure about leaving a blank summary.
The time it takes to load the editor and save changes for long pages is way too long. Maybe this is because it loads the whole page for editing when I want to edit just a section. I hope that this will also be fixed.
-- Joshua Issac ( talk) 10:55, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
Just used it for the first time today, on Apixaban. It seems intuitive enough but I had a problem when I tried to fix a wiki-link that I thought I inserted wrongly after looking at my edit. When I tried to remove the wiki link, it deleted a whole section. I tried it a couple of times, cancelling to avoid saving changes each time it went wrong. After about the fifth attempt, it seemed to reload and show my original wiki-link was okay. I'm assuming it's just a small bug that will be fixed in time, but it's a bit confusing. Red Fiona ( talk) 13:52, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
Editing Gol Transportes Aéreos Flight 1907#Criminal proceedings I added two cleanup templates, {{ update}} and {{ prose}}. In the visual editor the two templates were differently left-aligned and different lengths, despite saving and displaying correctly. Reopening the page in the visual editor, the templates appear at their correct size and alignment, but do appear with an apparent blank line between them. Thryduulf ( talk) 14:04, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
This new version is really confusing and it has barely half the functions of the old editing capability. I'm not able to make a table, and many other things. J. A. Zwierzcowski ( talk) 14:11, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
Please read: Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#VisualEditor tag not working correctly
It appears that that "Tag: VisualEditor" label on revisions made with Visual Editor has been (accidentally?) deleted from all older edits. As a result, we presently have no way of tracking most of the VisualEditor edits made during the first week of deployment. Dragons flight ( talk) 17:23, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
I wrote the phrase In 1962 the ''[[Elizabethan Express|Elizabethan]]'''s six-hour schedule between London and Edinburgh.... If you open this in Visual editor then everything from the 's is in bold.
I experimented further and tried writing the sentence in VE. Changing to italics and then linking gave
Linking before changing to italics gave
(See User:Edgepedia/VE/Bold for sandbox) Edgepedia ( talk) 19:11, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
I'm on a relatively good computer (the one I use for all my Feature Pictures work) with a good internet connection (BT Broadband).
I thought I'd see if VisualEditor had improved at all. Just scrolling down a largish page was jumpy, awkward, and laggy, even now, after supposed improvements.
Jumpy, awkward, and laggy are just going to put users off. Adam Cuerden ( talk) 23:36, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
How can an editor insert a sortable wikitable in the new VisualEditor format? Bullmoosebell ( talk) 01:14, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
Some templates are really rather complex. I'm trying to write the template data for {{ Infobox World Heritage Site}} and parts are just too complex to explain in the short json format. Really a it would be good to have a link to the full template documentation. Maybe a "Documentation" field could be added to json and that interpreted as a clickable link in the dialogue.-- Salix ( talk): 10:52, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
Drag-and-drop appears to work, but there are oddities about what seems to happen, and in the end the transfer doesn't actually happen.
Demonstration: start with this test page. We will attempt to drag and drop to the bottom of the page the line "L3 header" and the line below it. Strange things happen which I have called "Oddity" rather than "Bug", because I am not sure whether this is supposed to be working yet; if not, it is confusing that it appears to.
1. Select the first L3 header and the line below it by placing the cursor to the left of "L3 header" and dragging down to the left of "Another L3 header" (so as not to leave an unwanted blank line).
2. Place cursor on highlighted area and depress mouse button to "grab". (Oddity 1: cursor does not change shape until you start to drag)
3. Drag selection down to bottom of page. (Oddity 2: the "Another L3 header" line, which was not selected, ceases to be a header)
4. Release the mouse button: the selection appears at the bottom of the page, with formatting correct. (Oddity 4: but it is displaced one indent's worth to the right, and it is not possible to move it left. I think this one may be connected with Bugzilla:50353, inability to put the cursor below the last line of a page.)
5. Try to save the change. {Oddity 5: though it appears to have happened, it hasn't. The "Save page" button is greyed out and inoperative. If you make another change and then undo it, the "Save page" button becomes operative but "Review your changes" produces "Could not start the review because your revision matches the latest version of this page". If you actually make another change, that change happens but the drag-and-drop does not.)
JohnCD ( talk) 17:29, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
(@ JohnCD:, apologies for my unclear language. :) What I meant was that the ghostly image trails my cursor, but the original content remains in place, and when I release my mouse button the ghostly image disappears, leaving the original unmoved. I see this is tracked and updated, but I just wanted to clarify! -- Maggie Dennis (WMF) ( talk) 14:52, 12 July 2013 (UTC))
This is just terrible. Way to complicate things and make me never want to edit. Fog Devil 16:52, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
I was playing around with adding an image to an article in my sandbox. I note seven issues:
-- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:40, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
When I edit the External links section of Bossalinis & Fooliyones, the {{ Discogs master|523614}} template vanishes from view. It's still there and I could even get VE to that template, but it's not displayed. Huon ( talk) 00:02, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
I am unable to edit tables and the background colors used in it. Saha.rj ( talk) 05:24, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
I spent a little time tweaking a screenshot of VE using GIMP, to show some thoughts about the direction the UI might go in. I'm adding a picture at right. This is not a product of deep thought, more an attempt to provoke some sort of planned design process rather than the haphazard evolution that seems to be taking place. In particular, I expect there might be a need for additional "Edit" and "Tools" menus. Experienced editors will recognize that I've placed the CharInsert gadget on the second line. That gadget wouldn't be usable directly (even if gadgets could be used in VE), because it includes markup functionality, but its UI seems to me very similar to what is needed for inserting special characters. Looie496 ( talk) 03:18, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
The village of Follifoot is approximately 4 miles from Harrogate not 2 miles as stated in the article. My attempts to edit and save the alteration have been unsuccessful. Perhaps someone with more knowledge could correct the article for me. Janebly ( talk) 11:44, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
FlashSheridan ( talk) 16:30, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
For the template data for Infobox species
Template:Taxobox/doc I want to indicate in a parameter description that two single quotes should be used around an argument e.g. ''H. sapiens''
however I can't distinguish this from double quotes e.g. "H. sapiens"
when looking at the produced template data.
An infobox for plants, animals and other biological taxa
Parameter | Description | Type | Status | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Species | species | Species taxonomic rank. Should be given in abbreviated forms and in italics, e.g. ''H. sapiens''. | String | optional |
Bad Species | badspecies | Species taxonomic rank. Should be given in abbreviated forms and in italics, e.g. "H. sapiens". | String | optional |
When displayed its impossible to distinguish this from a double quote in the wiki doc page. In the VE dialogue box its also impossible to distinguish the two.-- Salix ( talk): 16:47, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
"<code>''italic''</code>"
. With the switch to
HTML5, the code-tag is still being supported ("forever") in wikitext, but I am unsure how the VisualEditor could recommend the use of code-tag font in these cases. -
Wikid77 (
talk) 20:12, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
I was reading an article yesterday, saw errors in it, but it was late, so I waited until today to fix them. Today I hit 'Edit', made the changes quickly, but when I tried to save, got a message that the edit session had expired. I suspect that what expired was not whatever got set up when I clicked 'Edit', but something that got saved yesterday when I loaded the article for viewing. It struck me as user-hostile behavior. This appears to be different from bug 50424, but what do I know? This should be easy to recreate, if you don't mind waiting about 15 hours before you begin editing. Chris the speller yack 20:08, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
I want to go back to the old way, please. I don't see this option in my account settings (under "editing"). Startswithj ( talk) 05:32, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
There is actually a proper off switch for VE. It was chosen to disable the off switch for en:wp, and instead have a half-hidden option that the VE breaks every now and then. Enabling the off switch is apparently an "enhancement". The patch is awaiting deployment. Anyone from WMF have an idea if/when this change will go through? - David Gerard ( talk) 08:54, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
Dear Wikipedians:
Cheers, Startswithj ( talk) 17:47, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
I've spent 3 hours editing a page and adding citations but now it wont save saying: Error: invalid error code. So disheartening. Makes me not want to bother spending so much time trying to improving things... Fieldstones ( talk) 07:11, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
At User:Thryduulf/Hierarchy of content decisions I have an incomplete table (it's part of an unfinished user essay) with the table opened, some headers and rows defined but no closing syntax.
When making an unrelated edit, VE deleted all the table syntax apart from the the opening line
[3] e.g. changing !Level!!Process!!Appeal process!!Notes
to LevelProcessAppeal processNotes
.
I know VE doesn't deal with tables properly yet, and this is an unusual use case, but there is no reason for it to be deleting syntax. As in the example above deleting the exclamation marks (and pipes on other rows) doesn't even result in cleaned up plain text (replacing them with space instead might do). Thryduulf ( talk) 08:05, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
Anish7 ( talk) 11:02, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
Despite having hid VE, I've just discovered that it's back. The whole "Edit" and "Edit source" nonsense is back. When I was editing the Iván Hindy article it even automatically chose VE for me. Why? Is the opt-out malfunctioning? Manxruler ( talk) 12:52, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
Why would you change Wikipedia like this? Do you think that users are going to bother trying to learn a whole new system of editing. This is clunky and I don't understand it. I will stop editing this site if this is not changed. Kuzwa ( talk) 14:56, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
In case of Doubleclick on the template, should show a Transluction dialog. Rezonansowy ( talk) 20:00, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
I go away for a month and I no longer know how to edit!? J04n( talk page) 00:11, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
I'm finding the icons on the little buttons to do various things (add wikilinks, add references, add a template) are not clear or intuitive, the only exception being perhaps the add-an-image icon. I think some of them simply have obscure design that could be improved, but that can only go so far to make things clearer. A mouseover of any of these buttons should display a brief text explanation for what that button does, and/or the VE should have an option to toggle the views of its tools between icon, icon w/text, or just text, just like browsers do. postdlf ( talk) 17:27, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
This whole VE venture is really the most perplexing and seemingly insane development in the nearly ten years I've been editing here. The insistence of the WMF that it be foisted on everyone when it is clearly not ready for prime time really makes me question their judgment and basic competence. postdlf ( talk) 17:55, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
I've made a mockup of one idea, at File:VisualEditor - Toolbar - Reference-edit1.png - That image includes the original, and two adaptations that use a snippet of grey text and a blue superscripted number [1]. The grey text could be made into abstract letterforms (rather than the letters REF) in order to make it usable by all languages. Or could use a grey + sign and the blue number. (Only problem is RightToLeft languages. Not sure how to solve that.) Just a thought. – Quiddity ( talk) 05:49, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
For a new editor who, in theory, will never touch the "edit source" button it makes sense to wrap nowiki tags around double brackets, etc. But for editors used to typing in wikitext, the nowiki tags are unnecessary and a cause errors. Can there be a opt-in preference somewhere to suppress VE from "helping" by adding nowiki tags to text entries? VQuakr ( talk) 03:30, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
A warning is really a different solution than a selectable preference. This interface is complex enough that is surely merits a dedicated preferences screen anyways, why force editors used to Wiki markup to slow down and click buttons if they wish to opt out of the nowiki tags? VQuakr ( talk) 21:32, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
I think this is the first goddamn time I've said fuck on Wikipedia. It's a great idea for quick ce edits and like a goddamn fucking idiot I just keep trying to make it work only ending up, as often as not, spending twice or more time on an edit. One time I reviewed an entire article with ce edits and more complicated reorganization of material only to find, when I was all done, that nothing had actually been processed. I never did that again, but I still, like an idiot, keep using it--that's how it goes when one is the eternal optimist. If you can't fix this goddamned thing please admit it and throw it out. Please accept my profanity in the same lighthearted spirit in which it was used, but for christ's sake, this is just plain nuts. Gandydancer ( talk) 18:32, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
I seem to be having difficult in addin a web link so going back to normal editor Glh54 ( talk) 08:40, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
When the first reference is in an Infobox it is correctly numbered and shown as 1. However, the first reference in the text is also shown as 1 in the text but numbered as 2 in the reflist. See East Toowoomba, Queensland for an example. Downsize43 ( talk) 10:24, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
This is all very confusing and counter-intuitive, and it doesn't even seem to work the same way twice. I can't help but think that something isn't working correctly! There doesn't seem to be a way to add new references, for example. Yes, there's a "create new reference" tab, but all it does is create a blank reference that can't be edited - presumably it isn't meant to do this!
Templates sometimes let you add new parameters, and sometimes don't, and the ones I've tried to use (convert and cite journal, so far) either output gooblidigook or nothing at all. It doesn't even behave the same way with the same template on repeated attempts. Obviously, I haven't saved any of the edits I've produced so far with VisEd, because nothing I've tried to write with it was functional.
Something is clearly screwy (and possibly at my end, not yours), but I can't figure out what. I get that wikimarkup isn't intuitive for new users, but I can't help thinking that neither is this.
At the very least, the instructions on the Help page need to be greatly improved. Half the time, I can't figure out what they mean. "Add parameters", for instance, isn't really sufficient as the entire description of a particular step. Add parameters how, exactly? Anaxial ( talk) 17:03, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
Hello, dear colleagues!
Add the parameters form template to see all the options. For example, you can add a button to "All parameters", then he is not with regards to TemplateData, or not come to all the template parameters (in brackets {{{}}}). I still need to add the ability to edit the template TemplateData, once in this form with the words: "This parameter has no description ',' This template has no description ',' This parameter is not specified "required", "Please, add them", ... . -- Xusinboy Bekchanov ( talk) 04:38, 14 July 2013 (UTC).
Inside <TemplateData> impossible to use interwiki? https://uz.wikipedia.org/?title=Andoza%3ABilgiquti_aholi_punkti%2Fdoc&diff=1576912&oldid=1576911 -- Xusinboy Bekchanov ( talk) 17:22, 15 July 2013 (UTC).
Attempted to make this fairly simple edit, the VE spent ages trying to save and came back with "Error: Invalid error code". I pressed the second "save" button again, it came back with the same. Gave up and did it in wikitext - David Gerard ( talk) 09:06, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
Possibly this is related to the server issues I've just discovered we're currently having. I understand they aren't related to VE, but will certainly impact it. -- Maggie Dennis (WMF) ( talk) 13:30, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
You already know this, but I'll repeat this every few days until you fix it: get the opt-out out of "gadgets" and make turning on VE involve javascript. Being off should involve nothing. Right now, your code is repeatedly turning on VE despite very very very clear instructions in my preferences for it to go bugger off. — LlywelynII 11:43, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
Moments ago, while I was editing an article using the editing tool that works properly, the properly-disabled mess misnamed Visual Editor restored itself as my default editing tool. It seems to have been returned to its well-deserved grave after I resaved my "gadget" preferences, but why should any editor have to watch out for this dysfunction to recur? Hullaballoo Wolfowitz ( talk) 12:59, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
If its needed again the following css can hide the visual editor.
div#p-views > ul > li#ca-edit:not(.istalk):nth-last-child(4) { display: none; }
.mw-editsection-link-primary { display: none; }
.mw-editsection-link-secondary { visibility: visible !important; content: "source"; }
.mw-editsection-bracket { visibility: hidden !important; }
It's supplied with no warranty, expect it to mess up on some namespaces and hide normal edit links as well, kill section 0 edit links. It may also break if you have any custom css js or gadgets or if any software changes.-- Salix ( talk): 17:23, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
This new system won't let me copy from one edit to another Jørgen88 ( talk) 13:22, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
There are now two sets of apparent endnotes in this article, created by different forms in the WYSIWYG editor. Please update the help to make it clear whether to use Transclusion for citations. Thank you. Mragsdale ( talk) 16:04, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
I don't believe there is any situation where it's acceptable to have two identically-named parameters within a template ("url=", "url=", for example). But VE doesn't prevent that from happening. It should. -- John Broughton (♫♫)
I didn't find one, so I opened one. :) -- Maggie Dennis (WMF) ( talk) 22:38, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
The Edit transluction button should follow with window frame. For example: if I showing a second half of any infobox, the popup button should appear on the current visible place of the infobox, not stay on the header. Rezonansowy ( talk) 20:51, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
I just wanted to point this discussion on MediaWiki which would indicate that we will, once again, be unable to disable VisualEditor once Flow arrives to replace our current talk pages.— Kww( talk) 21:46, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
This comment (from the person leading the Flow project at the moment) is particularly interesting: "Parsoid does not do well with templates. Ergo, we are designing with the assumption that we can't use templates." And for performance reasons, consideration is being given to not storing talk pages as a set of edits (diffs). I'm not sure how all this will impact bots and automated tools like WikiEd, but I do know that those are used a lot outside of articlespace. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:07, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
(1) Click the "transclusion" icon
(2) In the lower left of the resulting dialog box, hover over the "+" sign until the bracket pair ("[ ]") is visible; click on that.
(3) Click on "[ ] Content"
(4) Click on "Apply changes"
Now none of the "insert" icons work, and a number of other icons on the tool bar also don't work. (The user guide is silent as to what these brackets are supposed to do.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:33, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
The process of adding information (parameters) to a template, in the dialog box (popup window) has a number of issues that make editing significantly more confusing:
Let be honest, it's pretty rare that the nowiki tags are used. The Visual Editor should allow the contributor to use wikicodes. In my opinion, the more simple would to have a tick box where one can tick it on or off if he wants the Visual Editor to assume "nowiki" for its contributions or to allow wikicodes (i.e. mainly [[ ]] or {{ }}) to work for its contributions. Thanks, Amqui ( talk) 03:20, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
The way I imagined it being coded is that the non-default "power user" mode would behave exactly the same as existing, except that after the user clicked "save changes" the program would remove any nowiki tags from the change before saving. Since this behavior would only be for users that requested it, there would be no need for changes to the on-the-fly rendering. Intentional use of nowiki is pretty uncommon; a "power user" that wanted to add them could use the "edit source" or temporarily change their preference settings. VQuakr ( talk) 22:56, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
The {{ coord}} templates makes heavy use of Function overloading with a variety of different syntaxes:
the format depends on the arity of the unnamed parameters. The template data for this is quite awkward but simplest to have the 2nd, 3rd and 4th parameters as optional and the 5th parameter for longitude degrees. There is a T51743 for this but its been closed as WONTFIX with a suggestion that we split coord up into a number a separate templates with a different syntax for each. Argh.-- Salix ( talk): 07:21, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
I added {{ unref}} to PRITV: while in VE, it sent the content of the article right to the bottom below the infobox and the existing {{ uncat-stub}} template. Looked ridiculous. I saved it with appropriate edit summary - and on saving the page the result was poor but not as bad: the "unref" template was appearing level with the top of the infobox, so centred within a narrower area rather than across top of whole article, but much better than it had appeard while editing in VE. So two different problems:
Pam D 07:43, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
I've looked at T51603 but that seems to be inconclusive discussion which hasn't been added to since 17 June. Is there any progress anywhere on this vital facility: the ability to leave messages in an article, as Hidden Comments, which will be seen automatically by every editor who goes to edit that article, or that small section of that article (so, no, an edit notice popping up for the whole page does not do the trick)? This seems to me to be a very important feature we mustn't lose, but the discussion at that bug seems extremely relaxed about it. Is there another bug I'm missing? Is it regarded as a priority? Is it likely to get fixed anytime soon? Pam D 08:06, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
It's nothing like as important as the hidden comments issue, but it was annoying on day one of VE and is still b****y irritating for a regular wikignoming editor:
Is it un-reasonable to ask to be able to see the content of a page while choosing stub templates or other transclusions, or while choosing categories (eg Category:1937 births or Category:Villages in Żyrardów County)? T51969 isn't showing much/any progress. Pam D 09:18, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
Superb! Much better and easier and visual. Super48paul ( talk) 11:37, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
VE was working as expected in Safari on an iTouch, despite it not being a supported browser yet. (Until Safari decided to crash, that is. But I am using an iOS 7 beta.) Ignatz mice• talk 12:29, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
While making
this edit, the added parameter (website=[[iOS 7]]
) showed up, once I'd changed it in the transclusion-editor, in the ref-editor. However, clicking "Apply changes" in the ref-editor did not make it appear in the WISYWIG displayed text; I thought I'd have to go into source and add it. It did show up once I'd saved the page, though! (Note: I could not reproduce the problem with
these
edits to my sandbox—the new parameters did appear after applying changes.)
Ignatz
mice•
talk 12:58, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
When the user edits for example, a {{ Legend}} template, color picker may be very useful. We should also think about adding there a table of basic colors. -- Rezonansowy ( talk) 13:32, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
See edit. Is there a way as yet to add text to an external link, rather than dropping a bare link into an article? I couldn't find one in the interface - David Gerard ( talk) 13:51, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
Wormshill:a FA : correctly detected a spurious */blockquote* line 83- then mangled the markup on the last lines. On watchlist- not edited the evidence -- Clem Rutter ( talk) 14:53, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
where do i write my edit summary? Kingturtle = ( talk) 15:23, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
Good luck with the visual editor... the users I support have been hoping for this or years! I just hope this doesn't hide things like using templates and other more advanced functionality too deep. But I like that the regular edit is still there. Tenbergen ( talk) 19:17, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
In adding geocoordinates to Brooklyn Preparatory School I failed for half an hour to understand how to do it with VE, and finally fell back on Edit Source and did it the old way as outlined in MOS:COORD. Will someone add the links from there to whatever page tells how to do it with VE? Jim.henderson ( talk) 19:41, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
Hi, I created a new user page with VE. Upon Save I clicked [Review your changes]. But the review presents a plain <pre> tag, so the wiki source extends way off to the right.
VE could apply a named style to this pre tag that sets its wrap style to something more useful, like white-space: pre-wrap;
. This is
T52180, although it sounds like behavior changed since June when that was filed. Thanks for VE! --
S Page (WMF) (
talk) 21:09, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
Not sure if this has been reported already. Noted on an IP's edit [4] Risker ( talk) 00:57, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
After saving an V-edit on Shiva, I saved the page. From contents, I clicked on a section. Instead of going to the section, it went in Vedit mode. -- Redtigerxyz Talk 09:48, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
The dustbin/trashcan icon doesn't seem intuitive for "unlink". An icon of a breaking link (on the lines of the one here) would be more natural. The dustbin seems as if the linked word or phrase might be deleted completely. I remember seeing someone complaining about this, and Maggie asking for ideas for a better icon, a while back, but can't find it in Bugzilla so not sure if it went any further. Sorry to be vague. Pam D 17:59, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for the weighing in and such, folks. I've made a request for this change. PEarley (WMF) ( talk) 19:22, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
What is going on? How come I can't see the markup on this page? Please, turn it back to the simple system that previously existed. I've made thousands of edits and I don't know what to do here. The old way was so user-friendly.
Please do not make this the default editing system. I really enjoyed working on Wikipedia and would rather not quit. 69.125.134.86 ( talk) 21:50, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
Did WMF actually turn this thing on for all IP editors on schedule despite the amount of opposition that plan has received?— Kww( talk) 23:18, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
This sucks, change it back! GGib ( talk) 21:56, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
So, I'd like to be able to figure out whether I like VE - but I can't, because I've never seen it, and I don't know why. I've still got a single "edit" button, which still leads to the wikitext editor. I don't have the gadget to suppress it checked off in prefs. I'm using a browser that, according to the FAQ, should be supported (Firefox 22). Anybody have any ideas why this editor doesn't exist for me? (I suspect, based on the description, that I wouldn't like it, but it'd be nice to be able to confirm that). Nikkimaria ( talk) 01:35, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
It was a nice attempt, but please get rid of it, also, if you are going to have a public beta, don't make it the default edit option as it is now. Sephiroth storm ( talk) 04:15, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
In VE, adding wikitext (let's say, for example, an asterisk at the beginning of a paragraph) results in a warning popping up. That's preferable to no warning at all, but:
The warning should pop up over wherever the cursor/focus is, or, if that's too difficult, in the middle of the screen, similar to the positioning of the "Add media" or "Add template" dialog boxes, but smaller, of course.
Even if an article is so short that scrolling won't push the warning out of sight, if an editor is focused on what he/she is typing, it's quite easy to not notice the pop-up as it appears. When it eventually is noticed, the editor may well have difficulty figuring out what triggered the warning.
Obviously fixing the positioning of the warning is critical, but there are other ways that the warning could be improved; I'll list those for the sake of completeness:
burn the visual editor, dont want to click edit source every time Cake ( talk) 06:11, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
md_5 ( talk) 08:23, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
I've noticed changes in the behavior of the Template Editor. Now, required parameters are already selected for value addition. This helps quite a lot. --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me) 09:32, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
And I've added Bugzilla:51436 to request the template's description at the search results. Diego ( talk) 14:36, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Do any of them make VisualEditor look bad?
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if some of them did, and, honestly, if so, it's probably not because of anything inherent in VE, but because it was extremely, extremely buggy at the time of the A/B test. I still can't scroll the screen using VE without it lagging, and that's after some speedup-bugfixes.
The results are apparently known. I know they won't be written up yet, but I think we have a right to know: Does VE actually look good in them?
If it doesn't, I do think we should continue work to debug it; it's reasonable to presume it *will* be better in future. But, given the results were meant to be released before the deployment to IPs, I have to ask: Where are the results? Adam Cuerden ( talk) 09:39, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Does leave feedback work anonymously? 63.255.24.6 ( talk) 12:57, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
editing
Tricyclic_antidepressant (general overview) page, near the end of Overdose section, paragraph on treatment:
tried to edit initial text "Treatment" to "Treatment of TCA overdose" then link that to the #Treatment section of Tricyclic_antidepressant_overdose (dedicated) page - would only allow link to
page, not
section-within-page!
(at least that's what the visualeditor gui 's popup said, & appeared to be the literal case too... standard firefox 22.0, xp64, all scripts/ads/cookies allowed...)
ymmv, but until that part works for me, i'll stick to edit source :P
gui , user guide & searching feedback archives didn't help me on this at the time, shame 'coz otherwise excellent editor
-
203.194.42.58 (
talk) 15:24, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Every time I click edit, it's crashing my computer, crashing the internet browser (Firefox) or simply doing nothing. Not a fan of this at all. 217.42.46.111 ( talk) 15:33, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Hi,
I just tried to edit a page on mediawiki.org, and the behavior of VE was really strange. I don't know if it's relevant because mediawiki.org is probably different, and I don't even know if they use the same version of VE.
Try editing mw:Help:TemplateData/fr :
-- NicoV ( Talk on frwiki) 17:57, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
In
this edit, <nowiki>...</nowiki>
has been added without even wiki markup... --
NicoV (
Talk on frwiki) 18:36, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
In the figure, the original carbons are numbered, but not the products. It would help to number the product carbons. The text reports 3 negative charges at both ends, but plainly shows only 2 negative charges at each end. Lrunge ( talk) 20:15, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
I'm going to keep this short, mostly because I assume someone else has already brought this up. (I didn't read through the archives or the 70+ entries in the Contents.) As a programmer and Vim user, I personally don't plan on ever using the VisualEditor. Still, I've ran into a problem. Talk pages, Wikipedia policy pages and similar pages have an "Edit" tab where other pages use "Edit source". This is inconsistent. If I don't pay close attention and accidentally hit "Edit" where "Edit source" exists, I'm entering a world of pain. Not only do I not get what I want, but the VisualEditor is so slooow... even when editing a section I need to waiiit, and when it's finally done, I still need to go back to select the correct tab. Yeah, it's all new and I'll get used to it I'm sure, but it's inconsistent - which it shouldn't be. -- 82.170.113.123 ( talk) 23:20, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Also, the delete button and arrow keys had no effect. It was still possible to add characters though. Tommy ( talk) 23:20, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
May I suggest that if VE recognizes it cannot understand an edit, it shouldn't save it. The < nowiki> examples above are among the best examples, but some of the quasi-math HTML errors could also be corrected that way. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 01:21, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
When viewing an article you have permission to edit, you see two tabs at the top - "Edit" and "Edit source". When viewing an article you don't have permission to edit, you see only one - "view source".
This is not good UI design There needs to always be the same number of tabs displayed. Ideally there should be a view-source equivalent so that people can see the page as if the could edit it. It should allow them to interrogate things like template, so they can find out which template is producing what they see and how it does that. When VE can cope with copy+paste, then this will also allow them to copy and paste the relevant image/template/whatever to whatever article they are working on.
If the read-only editor is not possible (and given the workload of critical bugs it will likely be a while) then that tab needs to pop up a message saying that editing is restricted currently/until xx:xx for <log entry> and that they can view the wikitext source if they want (linked to an explanation what that means). Thryduulf ( talk) 02:38, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
"Wikipedia is happy to announce the live Beta of VisualEditor"? What announcement? Might I suggest an unambiguous notification in the new "edit this page" process that points out the new "edit source" tab for the old system? The first notice I got about VisualEditor (which I'd never heard of) was actually editing a page like always, only to find a visual editor (didn't see the name or a link to info) which wouldn't let me add and preview a citation, my most common WP work besides copyediting. I only found Wikipedia:VisualEditor by clicking on the mysterious "BETA" that appeared at the top of the page. ("BETA" what?) Yes, I eventually found "edit source", but given WP's recent proclivity for adding and moving around top-page tabs, I didn't notice it initially. Even without using VE yet, from my quick look, I suspect VisualEditor will be a tremendous help for all editors. But dropping it on everyone by default without warning is bad practice. (If there was a warning, I didn't notice it, which suggests it wasn't a very effective "notice".) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:27, 3 July 2013 (UTC)
This issue is not answered. It has been ignored.-- Paul McDonald ( talk) 15:26, 5 July 2013 (UTC)
"But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."
"Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."
"But the plans were on display ..."
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That's the display department."
"With a flashlight."
"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."
The last thread above makes me think it would be useful to add a class of Echo notification which produces a highlighted banner (similar to what happens when your user talkpage is edited). While the effect for each user would be the same, their talkpages would not be updated (just a single "notify all" page of messages would be updated) so there wouldn't be 19 million page edits, RC/watchlist updates, &c. Most sitebanners are less personal than this and might not trigger such a notice. But "message everyone personally the next time they log on" messages -- such as major interface changes, major licensing changes, a sea of fire, &c -- could be handled this way. – SJ + 07:33, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
It's realy slow and annoying. Just like every new introduced feature, there should be an easy way to disable it, for example on click on the information box above the page that shows enabling this tool. Qtguy00 ( talk) 14:17, 4 July 2013 (UTC)
Why does no standard user preference to disable VisualEditor exist?
|
---|
VisualEditor is the new default experience for all users. We recognize that it still in beta and has issues, including lack of support for some aspects of wikitext. Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. Developing VisualEditor into a tool that can meet the needs of all our users will take time. Therefore, we encourage all users (including power users) to regularly check in VisualEditor's progress, and we're running VisualEditor in parallel to the traditional Wikitext editor. Power users will find ways to disable VisualEditor completely, e.g. by means of user scripts and gadgets. However, to encourage continued testing of VisualEditor as it develops, completely hiding it from the user experience will remain a non-trivial task. The current experience is designed to be minimally intrusive for users who want to continue to use wikitext indefinitely. Both at the page and section-level, editing as wikitext should require no additional action other than selecting the "edit source" option. We would rather make VisualEditor's availability through the UI interfere less with the experience of power users rather than introduce a new preference: For example, resolving bug 50542 could make the integration of VisualEditor less noticeable. Please let us know about similar issues. We hope to hear from users who could never imagine using VisualEditor as their default editing environment. Fixing bugs aside, we want VisualEditor to be as efficient and powerful as wikitext while being discoverable and easy to use, and we highly appreciate your feedback on what improvements could make it so. |
How do I disable VisualEditor?
|
---|
To continue to edit the wikitext directly, simply click the "Edit source" button instead of "Edit". On section edit links, you can open the classic wikitext editor for that section by clicking "edit source" instead of the regular "edit" link. If you would like to remove VisualEditor from the user interface, then you can go to the Gadgets tab of your Preferences page, check the option "Remove VisualEditor from the user interface" in the "Editing" section, and click the Save button near the bottom of the page. (Note that gadgets are community-developed and not supported by the Wikimedia Foundation.) |
Put an "edit source" link on the help box, or lose copy editing of short sections of long articles from occasional users. These users expect to fix a comma or awkward wording in a short section by clicking on "edit" and finding an edit box right there after a page load. They don't expect to have to wait for "edit source" to appear after hover. They don't expect to find very sluggish scrolling and failure to reach the bottom of page in one try and failure of the "End" keyboard key and absence of an edit box at the bottom of page. They might keep trying long enough to find the help box. At least, the help box should mention the fact that "edit source" will appear after hover, and at least, that "edit source" should be linked to edit the section in an edit box. — Pifvyubjwm ( talk) 21:03, 9 July 2013 (UTC)
I'd like to say a genuine thank you to whoever put the yellow box at the top telling me I can enable a gadget to disable VE. However, I'd also like to say that editors shouldn't have to rely on an unsupported third-party extension to do this - instead, there should be a check box in the Editing tab in Special:Preferences (which is where I first looked, and is the obvious place) which if CHECKED means that VE is turned on and if UNCHECKED means that VE is turned off and inaccessible just as if we turn this gadget on. I don't mind whether the default is on or off - but ticking a box to disable a feature is counterintuitive, as is having to go to an "experiments" page to do so. ~ Keiji (iNVERTED) ( Talk) 18:38, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Hi. I don't see an option to go back to normal editing mode. I just want to make a quick change and prefer not to deal with a visual/WYSIWYG-ish mode. An option to use the "bare-metal" original syntax would be nice. My original edit would take 30-45 seconds this way. That's a good thing. It is a wiki, after all. Wantnot ( talk) 10:30, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
If you refuse to accept an apology and refuse to explain your views when asked, then there is not much more that I can say. I will leave it at just registering my disappointment at your lack of good faith. Thryduulf ( talk) 18:32, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
How does a user preview their edits before submitting them, like with the old standard for editing? I made a edit, but there should be a way to preview edits for QAQC / PCC-PCI purposes. Bullmoosebell ( talk) 01:01, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, PEarley (WMF). I'm just used to editing with the codes, but I did find the Edit Source link. As long as Wiki doesn't get rid of the Edit Source link, I'll be alright. VE is new and innovative, and will take some getting used to, but I'm not seeing the benefits yet. Thanks for your help with this change, I see a lot of users are poopy-faced about having to use VE and you (and all the all the supporters) are quite professional and patient. Keep up the great work! Bullmoosebell ( talk) 01:52, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
This may have been reported, but it seems that leading spaces are rendered differently in VE than on the Wiki page. With the Wiki page they cause the text to have that dotted box around it, and to appear as single line. In VE it displays just as a leading space, with no indication of problems. I saw some IPs having issues with the difference between the two. - Bilby ( talk) 02:04, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
There's another bug, possibly; I don't know if this has already been reported. If a page already contains text, followed by a template (not necessarily on the same line) and the next line has a leading space, attempting to remove the leading space using the backspace key also removes the template. The space can only be removed by moving the cursor beyond the end of the template on the same line and using the delete key. Peter James ( talk) 22:57, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
I think VE is a good idea. However, I think that there should be an easy way to turn it off, so you don't have to retrain your muscle memory, and think Wikimedia did it a huge disservice by the manner of its launch - it's buggy and largely unusable as it is now. I can't even scroll down to the bit of text I want to edit in it because it slows to a crawl when I slow. It damages the code of the site. It's not ready.
But it's a good idea, and, were, for instance, the WMF to switch it out of default to "opt-in" for now, and stop the hugely counterproductive pushing forwards with the schedule before fixing the bugs - do you really need another several million editors using it to tell you it's still massively buggy? - I'd look forwards to a relaunch in a few months, and would likely give it another try then. (Hell, another wiki I'm on already has a working Visual Editor, and I think that one's pretty great. MoinMoin-based, for the record. Of course, the big difference is that one works perfectly, is quick, uses minimal resources, and feels natural to use.)
But you can't launch buggy software, make it the default, ignore it's causing damage to the code of articles, try to prevent people from turning it off - a problem because misclicking, a.k.a. clicking exactly where you used to click, means a 15-second loadtime and an unusable interface because I can't scroll without massive lag - and expect happy users.
A way that would likely have gotten everyone on board would have been to announce that VisualEditor would be tested by a one- or two-month trial, during which time it would become the default for all editors, but could be turned off using simple instructions that were put in the sitenotice for the first few weeks or first month of the run.
After the period, turn it off, but tell everyone how to turn it back on in the sitenotice.
You now have a bunch of enthusiastic users, and a lot of bugs. Patch it up. Make it work better. Get a really good product ready. Then turn it back on for everyone, again, telling them how to turn it off. Muscle memory is an awkward thing, and Visual Editor, after all, puts the VE-edit link where the Wikimarkup link was - but a lot of people will use it. [By the way: Edit (Text) and Edit (GUI). That's what the MoinMoin wiki I like uses, and which are far clearer terms than the unclear-at-best and actively-misleading-at-worst "Edit" and "Edit source".]
Anyway. Yes, I do think you should make VisualEditor Opt-in only for now. You've screwed up the launch really badly, and backing off a bit will show you listened to the community. Of course, you should make a sitenotice to help people willing to put up with the bugs to keep using it, and you'll almost certainly get enough users still using it to keep the bugchecking up.
Should you run out of bugs, or reach a stage where you don't have enough testers to know if you've got everything, just turn it back on for everyone. So long as you're actually responsive to the community, and know the difference between "test of potentially buggy software" and "suicide pact to launch our software permanently, even if it causes damage", you should keep the support of the community, barring, perhaps, the ones you got too upset by this PR disaster.
However, eventually, you're going to have a great product. And at that time, you want to have the right to turn it back on for people. You don't want to be in a situation where everyone's already turned it off, because when you did turn it on, it was too buggy to use.
In short, I think you should take VisualEditor away. But I want it back later. Adam Cuerden ( talk) 07:28, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
[Unindent]:For that matter, Please, I beg you, cancel the rollout to the other big wikis until such time as you've sorted out more of the bugs.
There's no need to cause problems in more places. You'll just upset those wikis, and how on earth will you defend yourself? You need more data? More data than en-wiki can provide? Adam Cuerden ( talk) 09:22, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
And for anyone who says "throw more people at the problem", that has its limits. A team like this, can absorb about 1 highly qualified 'outsider' per 2-3 months, without it hurting the team productivity (and remember that people can and do leave as well, further limiting your growth factor). — TheDJ ( talk • contribs) 17:27, 16 July 2013 (UTC)By the time en.wp would be satisfied, we would be 3 to 4 years down the road, and keeping up to date with the rest of MediaWiki would occupy much of that time. We don't have this amount of time. So instead, we will USE them (our most diverse and complicated scenario) as reluctant beta group to get the quickest to where we need to be. They will curse us now, but the net effect will be positive.
I made this into its own section, since it is a different idea than those made above. The relevant part of the roadmap:
98.243.174.235 ( talk) 20:51, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
If you place the cursor after the last character of a link and start typing then your text becomes part of the displayed text for that link: [[Fish]] → [[Fish|Fish and chips]] rather than the intended [[Fish]] and chips or [[Fish and chips]] which would be expected from a WYSIWYG editor (even if it isn't what is wanted).
There is no way to edit part of a link at all, the only way around it is to unlink the whole phrase and relink the part you want linked.
This is not usually a problem, as you can work around by starting from after the space after the link rather than before it (i.e. start from position 9 rather than position 8:
0123456789AB [[Fish]] and
However, this is counter intuitive if you want to add punctuation after the link (add it after the space, delete the space, add space after the punctuation). It also means it is impossible to add unlinked text when the link ends the line, as happens often on disambiguation pages. For example try adding context to the links at Mandi#People.
It is possible this is the same as bugzilla:50945 but I don't think it is.
Additionally, when your text becomes part of the extended link when you didn't want it to, pressing ctrl+z to undo it sometimes (but not always) results in the last character you typed being replaced by a white pawn (♙). I have a feeling this one might have been reported before but I can't find the report if it has. Thryduulf ( talk) 19:28, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Is there an edit filter yet that detects pawns? - David Gerard ( talk) 06:58, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
At this sandbox page I experimented to see how the VE would cope with the {{ od}} template (Ignore all the text, it is left over from a previous test). I actually found myself experimenting with indentation. It seems that where text is indented, VE renders one blank line before and after the indented section for every line that does not exist. i.e. section 1 of the sandbox page is rendered with five blank lines between the line starting "Fiji" and the outdent template. Section 2 had two blank lines at the end of the section (2 colons indenting), Section 4 is illustrated right, there are 5 blanks lines (one for each level of indentation) before and after the indented section (the Roman numerals are just to show the indentation and were not produced by VE, the line marked 0 was a pre-existing blank line).
If you try to delete any of the blank lines before the indented text, that level of indentation is deleted and subsequent lines moveed left one indent:
i i ii ii iii iii iv v Text 1 Text 1 Text 2 → Text 2 Text 3 Text 3 v v iv iv iii iii ii ii i i
If you try and delete a new line following the indentation, then the entire indented section and all associated VE lines are deleted. This cannot be undone. Thryduulf ( talk) 01:54, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
The Teamwork Barnstar | ||
Hi, This is a Barnstar for all those developers who worked on MediaWiki software and various MediaWiki extensions.Special mention to VisualEditor, Universal Language Selector, Edit Filter as milestones which helps achive wiki moto access for all , and many more extensions which are user freindly.Thanks to all you developers Mahitgar ( talk) 03:45, 17 July 2013 (UTC) |
Of the last 5000 edits, 201 (4%) were tagged as "nowiki added". Dragons flight ( talk) 05:04, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
At the bottom of a conventional editor has a qiuckly insert bar. I would like the same with the visual editor, but more elegant. — ƒora jump, 07:02, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Way back on 30 June I complained that I couldn't follow links from within hatnotes or refs while editing articles in VE (I'd been using ctrl + left-click) and Oliver pointed out that with right-click and menu choice they should work. I'm sure that advice worked at the time. But today I'm finding that even right-click isn't getting me anywhere useful. I may be missing something but it feels as if this is a change, that right-clicking used to work OK - eg to follow a link in a hatnote (eg the link to PLI in the hatnote while editing Pli). Pam D 09:26, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
I've added edit filter 573 to test for the addition of multiple blank lines to articles. Looking at the results from last night, this is not strictly a VE issue (many people and tools using source editor also do this), but people using VE may account for 50% or so of the cases it traps. Dragons flight ( talk) 12:40, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Can't add rows to tables 94.142.172.21 ( talk) 14:27, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
I tend to use Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation popups a lot. Mainly to check that the link I'm inserting is actually the right one. I can just hover over a link a small popup window will appear with the first line of the article being linked. This allows me to readily confirm the link target is correct. Without this I feel like I'm editing blind, the link I've just inserted might be the right one but I can't confirm it until I save the article and hover over the link.
This raises two questions. 1) Could some popups like function be applied to give a better indication of where a link is pointing? 2) is there going to be any way gadget can work with VE? -- Salix ( talk): 14:39, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
When editing lumpectomy, when you make a selection that includes the block of references at the end, and then press ctrl+x, it crashes the google chrome tab (chrome 28). WS ( talk) 15:32, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
I'm not sure what the user intended
here, but I'm sure that <nowiki />
was not supposed to be part of it. --
Redrose64 (
talk) 16:32, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Toolbar is really big relative to the size of the screen. 199.212.27.245 ( talk) 17:00, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Has someone brought up Template:Album ratings? This is an instance where the transclusion option on VE, while it does work, is more inconvenient than just wiki-markup. In wikimarkup, if you want to insert a new review into the middle of the template, i.e. between reviews 3 and 4 (rev3 and rev4), you just change rev4 to rev5 (and rev5 to 6 and so on), then insert the new score. With VE, you have to add a new rev parameter to the bottom, and move the content of ALL of the parameters affected through copy-paste. This is much more time consuming than editing the wikitext.-- ¿3fam ily6 contribs 17:44, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
An editor made a change to the Danny Worsnop article using VE - but the changes haven't showed up in the article (even when there is a diff). What on earth is going on here? Insulam Simia ( talk/ contribs) 17:58, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
I'm beginning to get the hang of it, and learning all the idiosyncrasies of the software. (What to the < and ^ arrows on dialogs do, why do I need to click on the template name to show the list of parameters, why does the newline and tab not work as expected in template dialogs).
Working on a Cornish parish involves creating a lot of small interlinked articles, and I've noticed that link dialog does not know about recently created articles, I created Penpol Creek (River Fowey) about 30 minutes ago and I'd like to link to it. However its not coming up in the hints and it I enter it in manually VE thinks its a new page, shown in red in the dialog. How long does it take to recalculate the list of articles?-- Salix ( talk): 18:43, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
After hitting the save button and then the final save button (bring back finish editing). It looks like none of usual javascript is working, popups does not work, neither does the wiki min atlas links (you can't see the little round globe). You need to reload the page to get anything working again.-- Salix ( talk): 18:55, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Ah, you were marginally quicker than me! I've marked the bug I opened as a duplicate :) Thryduulf ( talk) 19:14, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Still corrupting articles. See [11]. There seems to be a major problem between VisualEditor and template:Episode list, I don't care which one is at fault, and I am getting weary about constantly fixing these. Until this is fixed please disable VisualEditor from making change to the attributes in this template if it is unable to suppress exposing internal details of the template. Geraldo Perez ( talk) 19:04, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
"Edit source" has an easy option to type in the ISBN or doi number and have the details of the book or paper automatically filled in. The visual editor needs this if I am to use this. J1812 ( talk) 19:48, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
It has been noticed on the plwiki ( [12]) that the dialogs (especially References and Page settings) are like modal windows: they are unmovable, huge, they are at the center of the screen and, unfortunately, they cover the content. It confuses users who have small-resolution screens and those who want to compare the data they're adding with content without losing added—but not applied—changes (for ex. when adding categories:year births/deaths with the introductory text or when adding a reference with the info being sourced). Tar Lócesilion| queta! 22:16, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
I found an example of this in the Filter 550 list. If you enter "In 2012 he was included in Variety's Legal Impact Report 2012" and some following text, and then select "Variety" but not the following "apostrophe-s" and click "Italic", you get this. The result actually looks like what was intended, with only the word "Variety" in italics, and if the closing </nowiki> was immediately after the apostrophe it would make sense; but it is confusing (and might cause other problems) to have it so far downstream. JohnCD ( talk) 22:44, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
This is madness. VE is not yet ready for primetime, and I suspect the devs do not speak every language there's a Wikipedia for, meaning that this won't even provide useful data back.
People should be fired over this. Adam Cuerden ( talk) 23:03, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Hate to butt in here, but I would like to echo Adam's original point (less the calls for firing)—rolling out VE, in its current state, to any languages that at least two people on the WMF dev/liaison/whatever team do not speak (type) fluently is sheer madness. Unless you'd like to have the discussions that have been going on here for the past weeks all over again, only filtered through Google Translate. Ignatz mice• talk 03:05, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
I can't figure out how to insert or properly edit tables. BuddylBat ( talk) 00:54, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
Alright. While I'm being calm and collected. Here's why I - and I think a lot of others -got so upset.
Let's ignore the Flow issue: I think it's clear now that all statements that were causing so much upset were Jorm's opinions alone, and pretty much exactly opposite to those of the WMF.
So, what was wrong with the launch? I think it can be divided into two issues: 1. muscle memory and 2. the fact that bugs in VisualEditor were, objectively, damaging the site.
Muscle memory This introduction is rather long, in retrospect. Feel free to skip to "What went wrong", below. One develops habits as a long-term wiki editor. And some of us have special needs - but I'll get to those in a minute. Long story short, the VisualEditor tab is where the old "edit" tab was. In early days, you had to hover over it to get the edit source tab. I do a lot of tasks that VisualEditor can't support. I'm heavily involved in both images and templates, and, even when VisualEditor supports images better, I'll still be better off using Wikitext, because I do image restorations, and, for example, a rather common situation is that someone, four or five years ago, went to the Library of Congress, and grabbed a low-resolution copy of an image, because the high-resolution images there are TIFFs, and no indication is given that the TIFFs are higher resolution than the JPEG. So I take the high-resolution version, do some restoration, upload the restored copy with a consistent filename system (the older uploads to commons generally have rather non-descript filenames), and then... I have to put it in wikis to replace the low-resolution image. It's far easier to use the "find" tool on my browser to locate the filename of the image I'm replacing, then pasting in the new filename, than it could ever be to look for the image in VisualEditor, delete the old one, copying the caption, add the new one, pasting in the caption, and rescale the new one to the same size as the one being replaced.
And I think you'll agree that's not a problem with VE. It's simply not a function VisualEditor can, nor should, support; it's just far more practical to use Wikitext.
By the way, this is an aside, but... can turning off VisualEditor will be a globally-supported user preference? Because file replacement in that manner isn't always one wiki, and whilst we have bots for that, CommonsDelinker has regular periods of downtime. It's hard enough finding the edit button on Wikis that use a language you don't speak, some of which are right-to-left languages, without needing to avoid the VisualEditor edit button.
Anyway. So, long story short. Some of us should almost never use VisualEditor. But your mouse automatically goes to the "Edit" button, because it's gone there for the.. let's see.. seven or so years you've been editing Wikipedia. And so it's better to shut it off. Unless someone can make a gadget that puts the link to VE somewhere safe, like over in the left hand column or something. And even when not doing image work, I can often type out long-memorised template names, ref tags, and the like faster than I could ever use an automated tool, if using the tool meant I had to keep lifting my hands off the keyboard to use the mouse.
What went wrong
Two things. A member of the WMF added a line to the FAQ stating that we'd be able to turn it off in editing preferences, which stayed in up to three weeks before the launch. Broken promises never end well. Added, removed.
Secondly, when the functionality was removed, a hack was created. Now, had the WMF kept its promises and told people where to find the off-switch that had been promised, all would have been fine. But the sitenotice didn't mention it at all. When I came up with a simple message, and suggested it as a sitenotice, Okeyes threw a fit, for example, " I feel it would totally undermine the software proper to fire everyone at an instant switch to permanently disable the VE" Context if you look at the rest of that link: Okeyes didn't know what Sitenotice's features were, and basically presumed it had exactly the opposite features to what it had. Now, remember, this is the switch that a member of the WMF had promised would exist.
It's fine to launch new features, but when rearranging the site interface, muscle memory is going to get screwed up, and, remember, when launched, you had to hover over edit for a bit to get the edit source button.
That hovering over "edit" to get the "edit source" button - and, yes, of course it's gone now - was particularly bad in muscle memory terms. If VisualEditor wasn't right for you, the least disruptive thing you could do was turn it off so you could stop complaining, and let those it was meant for have the benefits.
But that was precisely what the WMF was trying to prevent.
Bugs in Wikieditor
This one's actually quite simple. When it became clear that VisualEditor had bugs that were screwing up articles, it should have been temporarily turned off until at least the first fixes could come in, and relaunched. It was frankly shocking that the WMF was willing to damage Wikipedia.
These bugs still aren't fully fixed.
No-one wants to see the site they volunteered for damaged because insufficient testing was done. The moment the WMF knew it was damaging articles, the schedule should have gone out the window, leaving only sufficient people still using the tool to help them find out whether bugfixes worked.
This one really amped up the us-vs.-them mentality. "We made this site. All you're bringing to the table is code that's damaging it. GET RID OF THAT DAMN THING."
And the thing is, there was and is no sitenotice about this. No warning that people need to be extra careful with VE, particularly during the early days, when the bugs were severe. I mean, the bugs are relatively harmless now, but weren't they stripping references and such at first? And didn't VE launch without the ability to add references?
Okay, now, that said, the really bad bugs were fixed pretty quickly. But the WMF did a really, really bad job of communicating. As an example. On Commons, CommonsDelinker, which helps manage file renames, went down a while ago. A sitenotice went up warning to be careful about moving files, giving explicit instructions about the need to clean up after yourself.
Never at any time did the CentralNotice about VisualEditor say anything more than it had launched. So far as I recall, it didn't even warn people to check all edits made using it, even during the most buggy phase.
The WMF's communication was terrible. Absolutely unforgivable, and gave the very strong impression the WMF didn't care. Now, I presume you were actually working on bugs or the like, but you can't shut up at times like this.
Yes, users were angry. They had a right to be: their site was being damaged. Unfortunately, fuel was poured on those flames. Adam Cuerden ( talk) 09:14, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
As the VisualEditor change management document notes, James Forrester is the Product Manager, reporting to the Director of Product Development Howie Fung and the Vice President of Product Development Erik Möller (who is also the WMF Deputy Director and VP of Engineering), but I do not know how the schedule was set (if all of them were involved, or a subset, or what others might have been part of the chain) or why; I'll bring you more details as soon as I get them, unless they deliver them directly. :) -- Maggie Dennis (WMF) ( talk) 18:40, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
I just noticed there were some questions I never answered about my previous post. So in case people are still interested:
Why does the Tab key behave like Page down? Still doing that. — HHHIPPO 19:50, 8 July 2013 (UTC)
When I go into "edit" mode and press "tab", it jumps from wikilink to wikilink. "Page down" pages down. -- Maggie Dennis (WMF) ( talk) 15:53, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
When marking a block of text, empty lines are not shown as marked. Still the same. — HHHIPPO 19:50, 8 July 2013 (UTC)
@ Hhhippo:, I'm not sure what you mean by "marking a block of text". Can you clarify? -- Maggie Dennis (WMF) ( talk) 15:53, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
Beta menu:
It's not at all obvious that Leave and Feedback aren't two different entities. Still the same. It's the second link in the "Beta" flyout. — HHHIPPO 19:50, 8 July 2013 (UTC)
Found the "Leave feedback". They look like one link to me. :) Can you clarify how this is confusing or how it looks different to you? -- Maggie Dennis (WMF) ( talk) 15:30, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
Why is the feedback link grayed out? Ditto. — HHHIPPO 19:50, 8 July 2013 (UTC)
Don't know - once we work out the above, I can track this (in case I need to say something about that, too.) -- Maggie Dennis (WMF) ( talk) 15:30, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
Okeyes (WMF) recently said the functional specification is "the VE should do what the markup editor does". In terms of very precise, fine-grained analysis of "button X, when clicked, goes to state Y", we apparently don't have that, indeed, for reasons that boil down to "we're not a government operation". The VE team is using the Agile cycle (
diff).
Skipping over the implication that describing a UI state machine is somehow not Agile, I wonder whether this is a broader symptom of the problem we have here. Agile aims to deliver a cycle of frequent releases, where each release is small, works well, has minimal bugs and delivers some incremental benefit(s) to delighted users. It's great when you need to discover requirements incrementally. The Visual Editor project isn't anything like that. The requirements are vast and already known. VE touches all our existing data and editing processes so it requires thousands of features, which are effectively being delivered in a single "big bang" release. Because it's so big, it has far more bugs than a typical Agile iteration. The potential benefits will accrue to new users, but the risk of damage to existing articles is borne by current users, who aren't in contact with the developers anyway.
I could go on, but you get my point. If WMF wants to roll out Visual Editor to all users then it's a traditional big bang "bet the business" software project which necessitates the traditional painful software engineering cycle. If WMF prefers to use Agile practices, then they have to accept an incremental release approach which means having fewer features per release but making sure they work safely (e.g. you can't create a citation, but you can't delete one either). You can't have it both ways. Don't make Visual Editor the Dreamliner of software projects. -
Pointillist (
talk) 22:05, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Can I suggest you make VisualEditor opt-in rather than rolling it out and making it anything but obvious how to disable it.
Those that I have spoken to universally dislike it and I myself find it very un-user-friendly, especially when it comes to infoboxes and categorisation. For saying wikipedia is supposed to work on consensus, there appears to be very little of anything close to that in the way visual editor has been rolled out.
The fair option would be not to force it on people and allow people to opt-in if they want to experiment with it. -- Rushton2010 ( talk) 01:26, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
If I go to Cooking, edit the page, and then cursor to the very last line, backspace once removes {{Link FA|kl}}. Backspace two more times then removes {{Use dmy dates|date=April 2012}}. There's no indication these templates are even there—no box or transclusion symbol. For all I know, I'm just removing blank lines. FF 22/Win7Pro SP1. -- Atethnekos ( Discussion, Contributions) 07:46, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
Images which are not thumbnails can't be edited properly using VE. If there is a single image, it can be selected, but the resize handles don't appear and the media icon doesn't appear. Moving the image around works and deleting the image works. When there are two images like this, the mouse pointer turns into a "forbidden" symbol (the mirror image of ∅), with the tooltip "Sorry, this element can only be edited in source mode for now.", and semi-tansparent shading covers both images. The images can't be moved, and can only be deleted as pair - you can't delete only one image. I am using Chrome (v. 28) on Windows 7, and was playing around with VE on List of freeways in Victoria, Australia. - Evad37 ( talk) 10:41, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
The more I look at the Filter 550 log, the odder the things that turn up. Here what looks like a simple rearrangement of one sentence has scattered eighteen pairs of nowiki tags throughout the article, none of them actually enclosing any wiki markup. I tried without success to reproduce this by copying the whole source text into a sandbox. JohnCD ( talk) 14:06, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
I reverted the edit at Adygea that resulted in 18 nowiki tags, and then tried to duplicate what the editor did, assuming he/she only was trying to rearrange one sentence. The good news is that VE didn't (at least for my edit) gratuitously add nowikis to subsequent paragraphs. The bad news is that although what it showed me, just before I saved the page, looked fine, what VE saved as wikitext resulted in a nowiki tag between a wikilink and the subsequent word, rather than the space that should have been there (and looked like it was). In short, VE isn't very smart when text is being moved around near existing wikilinks. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:24, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
Hi,
Trying to reproduce a bug reported above, I did some manipulations just before a table :
-- NicoV ( Talk on frwiki) 16:32, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
When editing Fowey Gallants a {{ cornwall-stub}} the image in the stub template is massive. This seems to be the same for other cornwall stubs but I'm not sure it applies to other stub templates as well.-- Salix ( talk): 17:24, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
Hi,
If someone is interested in spending time fixing the hundreds of articles with nowiki tags, I made some modifications in
WPCleaner to help on this. To activate this detection, edit
Special:MyPage/WikiCleanerConfiguration and add the following contents (with the <source>...</source>
tags, so clearly with the wiki markup editor):
# Configuration for error 518: nowiki tags
error_518_bot_enwiki=true END
After that, in WPCleaner the Abuse filters button lets you choose which Abuse filter you are interested in (choose 550) and gives you the list of pages having triggered that filter recently. When you analyze a page, <nowiki>...</nowiki>
tags are found and suggestions are given to fix them. It's quite basic, so if you think of any enhancement, tell me. --
NicoV (
Talk on frwiki) 17:28, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
I did some edits in the Visual Editor (which is very, very nice, by the way!), but then switched to Edit Source for more fine control on my edits. All my Visual Editor modifications vanished, and I couldn't get them back even when I tried to go back to the visual editor. Very annoying! Ochado ( talk) 18:55, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Shiva&oldid=564830932 -- Redtigerxyz Talk 19:27, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
When a user makes an edit in the visual editor and then clicks the "Cancel" button, a dialog comes up asking whether the user wants to leave the editor without saving. The two buttons on this dialog are "OK" and "Cancel". Some users might find it confusing that clicking the "Cancel" button on the web page leads to a "Cancel" button on the dialog that cancels the cancellation. 128.84.98.128 ( talk) 19:55, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
Changed tracking to new bugzilla:51655. Ignatz mice• talk 03:17, 19 July 2013 (UTC)
I made some edits to an article with VE, but when I tried to save (after final review), nothing happened. Well, the moving blue and white stripes appeared for a second, but then nothing, still looking at the save dialog. I discarded my edits (this is one of the least fun features of VE) and went to the source editor and tried to make the changes. Found that the database was locked so the slaves could catch up. Waited a minute and made the save. I wouldn't have discarded my first efforts if VE had let me know what was going on and let me wait and retry. Currently, Blown save is a redirect to Save (baseball) (and it's not a statistic any player desires); we may soon need a hatnote there to mention the VE variety of blown save. Chris the speller yack 20:53, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
If I try to use VisualEditor on the most recent version of Firefox, version 22.0, I get You are using a browser which is not officially supported by VisualEditor. Pseudonymous Rex ( talk) 03:11, 19 July 2013 (UTC)
I've hitherto more-or-less limited my input to describing bugs - albeit many of them are what are termed "enhancements", ie requests to regain some of the functionality hitherto available which is lost in VE. I see I've been in the top 10 contributors to this page, so perhaps it's time for something of an overview.
I'm with the many others who reckon VE is not yet ready to be made the default editor for new and inexperienced editors, registered or IP. There are too many facilities missing. It seems likely to lead them into making bad edits, which other editors will have to fix after them. I'm sure that the problems already identified - including our "enhancement" requests - provide enough work for the development team for the foreseeable future, without the need for more eyes to find more bugs yet.
My ideal scenario at this point would be: new and IP editors use Edit Source by default, but are given a prominent announcement on the lines of "A new Visual Editor is under development but not yet bug-free: if you would like to use it instead of the long-established Text Editor, click HERE. If you have any comments on the new editor, please click on the FEEDBACK button." Existing editors get the choice but are told clearly how to choose whether VE or Edit Source is their default editor. Announcements about MAJOR step-changes in VE are made to all editors, using Echo (brilliant suggestion someone made above), so that they can make an informed choice to switch to use it at a future point when it's good enough.
I can see that "bugs" which will actually crash the system or totally mess up someone's editing session have to be a priority, but many important aspects of the editor experience are "enhancements": areas where VE does not yet match the editing experience we had with the old Text Editor plus our various gadgets, browser-dependencies, etc, and where the developers' response sometimes seems pretty negative.
Things where VE seems dangerous include:
Some of the things which make VE editing sessions harder work than Edit Source, or mean that I make less good edits, are:
{{Şanlıurfa-geo-stub}}{{Coord missing|Turkey}} {{DEFAULTSORT:Cilikya}} [[Category:Populated places in Şanlıurfa Province]]
No blank lines, two templates on same line, generally grotty to read and edit.
I'm struggling on, using VE most of the time (but occasionally just going straight to Edit Source when I know it'll make life a lot simpler, or want to copy and paste a ref from another article, etc). I don't think VE is yet good enough to make it the default editor for our newest recruits. It has massive potential, but it's not ready. I'm doing my best to help, by carefully pointing out bugs, as are many other editors (though it's a pity that one of the sharpest minds on the project, who figures on the list of feedback page contributors, was banned for a month on 4th July so can't currently help).
Very few of the articles on my watchlist seem to be being edited using VE, and even when stub-sorting I don't seem to be finding many VE edits, but if use of the current VE becomes more common I fear that there will be a lot of cleanup to be done, or a lot of grotty edits going past un-noticed and damaging the encyclopedia.
Please let's all concentrate on getting more of the bugs/enhancements fixed, bringing VE up to the standard we ought to be offering to new editors, and please revert the decision to make it the default for new and IP editors, postponing this until it's a better product. Pam D 22:03, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Fifthed, or sixthed, or whatever. Hoping (in response to Wittama) that higher-ups at the WMF will use some common sense and roll with the punches. Ignatz mice• talk 04:02, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
I agree and thank PamD for pulling quite a lot of the 'near critical' problems together into an essay. Regarding templated messages like {{ Use British English}}, see bugzilla:51322, and for geocoords and {{ top icon}} see bugzilla:51420. We need to find or file bugs for the other problems that PamD has raised. John Vandenberg ( chat) 05:08, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Fully agree the essay above. -- WS ( talk) 10:48, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
+1 on Pam's essay and thanks to her for her careful work in compiling it. I have been working on a list of reasons why, though still experimenting with VE, I go straight to Edit source when I want to do something accurately or quickly, but she has covered most of it. JohnCD ( talk) 11:13, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
you can't tell whether you got it right or not and are likely to assume it's all gone horribly wrong.A system should never, ever, make its users wonder about whether it worked or not. Until such time as VisualEditor can be used without the fear of any kind of uncertainty, it is not ready for general usage. — Scott • talk 11:36, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Trying to edit list of references and it fails (no list). Try editing individual reference and there is no explanation of title= and HREF=. Can't hide URL. "What are the rules for references" should be accessible from the dialog. "Edit reference list" should allow easier updates. tygrus ( talk) 06:58, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Not sure if this belongs here but here an IP user complained that there was no possibility to add an mdash: http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=DDT&diff=564582042&oldid=564436694 and consequently s/he had to use the non-VisualEditor. Greetings -- hroest 09:24, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
T53683 I've just tested VE with adding a reference, then cleaned up the resulting mess. It wasn't exactly intuitive, as slow as one has come to expect of VE, and afterwards I had to manually add a retrieved date and add the square brackets. Before this is ready to come back for a fresh round of beta testing I would suggest adding a question "did you check that site today" and then add the retrieved date. Better still simply tip people back into the classic editor when they do complex stuff like adding referenced content. Ϣere SpielChequers 21:27, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
This page is an archive. Do not edit the contents of this page. Please direct any additional comments to the current main page. |
I'm continuing to have problems with rendering references. I attempted to include five citations to an article I'm developing on my user page, involving four references and one split citation. For some reason, only the first reference rendered, the second, which I attempted to split, ended up with some rendering error, and the third and fourth never appeared at all. I have no idea what happened, but here is a link to that version of the page, and these are the references I attempted to cite: http://reachrecords.com/about, http://reachrecords.com/artists/show/Lecrae, http://www.allmusic.com/artist/sho-baraka-mn0001000605, http://allhiphop.com/2012/04/08/five-christian-hip-hop-acts-you-should-know/.-- ¿3fam ily6 contribs 00:19, 7 July 2013 (UTC)
@ 3family6:, I have no clue what the issue is, but I do know how to open a bug report. :) Are you able to replicate the problem so that it happens again? Can I ask what browser and operating system you are using? -- Maggie Dennis (WMF) ( talk) 17:08, 8 July 2013 (UTC)
Different but somewhat related error: I'm finding when I split a reference (if it works), the citation appears not on the line where I want it, but at the beginning of that paragraph. Here's an example, fifth paragraph in the History section. This bug occurs much more consistently (like pretty much every time) than my above problem.-- ¿3fam ily6 contribs 01:41, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
It seems that the issue with bug 49854 has resurfaced. Whenever I edit any parameter in an infobox (doesn't matter on which page), some (but not all) piped links and files are displayed as plain wikitext like "[[Capital city|capital]]" instead of " capital". If the infobox contains references, a cite error in red about a missing reflist also appears near the top of the page (as previously discussed at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive_2013_07#Table.2FTemplate and possibly related to bug 50423, but not entirely the same). Is this a known issue or have I missed it? thayts t 16:33, 9 July 2013 (UTC)
@ Mdennis (WMF): Yes, sorry I wasn't too clear about that, it doesn't affect the save indeed and is only a displaying issue. I found the pipe link bug still to be present though, but it's been only one and a half hour after associated bug 50801 was declared fixed and it probably needs some time to back-port. It also seems that the reference bug is not really fixed, but that the error message is simply being suppressed: if you hover over the infobox after editing it or if you click it, an empty bar as wide as the article body will be highlighted at the top of the infobox. Previously, this bar contained the error message. I'm using Firefox 22.0, perhaps you can reproduce it with that. thayts t 17:41, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
The new editor is basically useless. I have been waiting for 10 minutes for it to accept an insertion point. Patrickwooldridge ( talk) 04:11, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
I don't see the number of editors who have disabled VE as meaning much of anything, other than that editors familiar with wikitext editing can do most things much or quickly in the old editor than in VE, and, more importantly, can do everything in the old editor, while VE has limits (can't edit tables, other than contents; can't edit blockquoted material, etc.), and also is still producing quasi-random errors.
VE is a beta. It shouldn't matter, now, whether 2% or 20% of edits are done with VE - what should matter is whether the VE team is getting the feedback it needs to see where the bugs are, and how serious those bugs are. Eventually VE will be able to do everything that the wikitext editor can, and there will be minimal bugs; at that point - and only at that point - should we be concerned if VE isn't attractive to experienced editors.
In short, I think anyone at WMF who looks at "percent of edits using VE" as a measure of success is making a mistake. And I think anyone in the Wikipedia community who looks at "percent of edits using VE" as a measure of failure is also making a mistake. The goal as this point - the measure of success - should be to get to a stable, relatively bug-free, fully-featured WYSIWYG editing interface. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:20, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
This revision [2] contains some junk text "QuickiWiki Look Up QuickiWiki Look Up QuickiWiki Look Up" at the very bottom of the page after the authority control, person data and categories. When you try and edit with VE you cannot actually see the junk text. I've play about in my sandbox and the actual conditions for the text not to appear seem to be quite sensitive, at one point new line character appeared. The text remains after VE finishes the edit.-- Salix ( talk): 09:06, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
Hi - sorry if this is an FAQ or anything but is it normal behaviour in this VE-tagged edit that, afterwards, the infobox worked fine but its layout, if you wanted to see it in the source, was trashed (line feeds stripped, I think?) so you couldn't really read it, and you certainly couldn't compare it with the previous? As I say, apologies if it is covered elsewhere and please feel free to point me in the right direction if so. Cheers DBaK ( talk) 21:40, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
I have just edited my first template: {{
cite web}}
in a reference. I was able to edit the template successfully but have the following comments:
trans_title
in this case). Thus I cannot use the filter to select a parameter unless I already know what its name is, which rather defeats the object of a GUI...value2|name3 = value3|name4 = ...
:
...value2 |name3=value3 |name4=...
with spaces before each delimiting solidus and not around the equals would avoid these problems.-- Mirokado ( talk) 22:38, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
...value2 | name3 = value3 | name4 = ...
if we're going to change it at all. So, to go mea culpa for a minute; I explicitly requested that normalisation should normalise with, rather than without, spaces. This is because ultimately normalisation is for the sake of markup-editors; name3=value3 is somewhat hard to read for long templates with lots of values.
Okeyes (WMF) (
talk) 10:40, 11 July 2013 (UTC)...value1 |name2=value2 |name3=value3 |name4=...
.)
Looie496 (
talk) 13:59, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for the responses. I have looked again, using shift-refresh in Firefox to get, I hope, the latest version. Please see File:VisualEditor template dialog 20130712-0245.png.
I can upload more screenshots if anything above is not sufficiently clear... -- Mirokado ( talk) 01:50, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
author link
is not a valid parameter in {{
cite web}}
, it gives a nice red error message: Unknown parameter |author link= ignored
.I would like to suggest that all of the editing dialog boxes should have help page links (probably via an embedded icon) that open a new window with help information appropriate for that dialog. Dragons flight ( talk) 02:04, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
What happened to the "author" parameter for the cite-web template? Online journalists often use pseudonyms, and the author parameter works better in this case then first or last name.-- ¿3fam ily6 contribs 14:05, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
Your save changes popup is so tiny I have to blow up the page 5 times to see what I type. Then I have to do the reverse afterwards. I hate this. Please leave such things alone. It has worked for years. If it aint broke, dont fix it! Torturella ( talk) 17:17, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
The Save Page bubble/box/dialog thing is really annoying. I wanted to review my changes (as I'm not sure how the visual editor does things yet). I had no idea how to do this, so I clicked "Save page". And then I found the preview changes button...
Even so, this leaves me with an overlay of the diff with the darkened background of the page I was editing. In most content display styled like this, clicking in the darkened area closes what you were doing in the foreground and re-focuses on the main page. This is not the case with the visual editor. This then prompted me to look for "x"s in the top right corners of boxes. As no x's exist, I had to stop completely and look at the entire UI.
It's also not immediately clear that the arrows across the top of the changes preview dialog and save changes dialog exist, nor clear what they do. Commonly "exit dialog" is reflected with an "x" in the top right corner. This is instead, an up arrow.
I understand that this isn't at all confusing once you get used to it. It's a new thing and humans don't like new things. However, my brain is trained to look and act on specific cues on how computers tend to work. Clicking on an unfocused area should focus it. x's close things. Neither currently holds true for the visual editor. -- SnoFox( t| c) 17:25, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
I've been around Wikipedia. I make small edits -- correcting notes that should be a template, moving things to talk pages, fixing typos and stray characters. I know what a transclusion is as I sit and read things about Wikipedia. However, I have never once said "transclusion" in conversation when talking about Wikis. I use the word "template". Everyone I know uses the word "template". It's a simple word and everyone knows what it means.
When mousing over all of the new toolbar icons, the context menus told me what they are. I hovered over all of them and then thought, "Okay now where's the template button?" A few moments later, "Oh, derp. Transclusions."
A new editor or inexperienced editor will never make that association, and will likely (if ever) find out how to add a Citation Needed template by simple trial and error - clicking all the buttons until he get what he wants. -- SnoFox( t| c) 17:42, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
Can someone help explain to me what I did wrong in this template data that I'm getting this error, "Syntax error in JSON"? I've gone over it 10 times and can't seem to find the problem. (I had to add nowiki tags or else it wouldn't let me save the page. Also, though this is in my sandbox, it gives me the same error when I try to copy and paste it into Template:Infobox attraction. Can someone help me please? Thanks!-- Dom497 ( talk) 22:47, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
\"
) or just use single quotes within the string. —
This, that and
the other (talk) 00:54, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
I've been playing around with VE and when it comes to putting infoboxs in an article, it takes way too long. You have to click on the puzzle piece, search the template, click a parameter, fill in the parameter, go back, click another parameter, fill it in, repeat. It is way faster to just search for the template on wiki, copy and past the syntax (or code; whatever it is called) and fill in each parameter quickly. All in all, my point is that inserting infoboxs using VE is extremely inefficient and should be addressed.-- Dom497 ( talk) 00:12, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
When editing a template:
Also, initial capitalization of the parameter names seems to act strangely. -- Ypnypn ( talk) 02:50, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
I edited All-Ireland Senior Camogie Championship 1992 to fix a simple typo, and VE duplicated a simple table way down the page. I saved it to demonstrate the bug, then undid the edit. Chris the speller yack 04:05, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
What is the point of this "new" tool again? Or is there actually no real reason for it other than the fact that someone created a "tool" with the hope that it would be used because they had nothing else to do that day, and there was nothing on TV and the "new" video game they were awaiting had not been released yet. Otherwise, aren't "new" technology tools supposed to offer some advantage to their old counterparts - not reduce functionality or reduce the capacity for productivity. Why was this rolled out? Isn't there some means or process of Quality Assurance for application development on Wikipedia? Stevenmitchell ( talk) 10:16, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
Doesn't seem to have an obvious way to sign or leave a note about what you've changed. Celia Kozlowski ( talk) 10:51, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
Is there a script or a setting to make it say [edit | source] instead of [edit | edit source], and show it all the time instead of only on hover? Sometimes I click "edit" by instinct, before the "edit source" button is displayed, so it would be nice if both buttons are displayed to avoid confusion. It would be even better if the order could be changed to [edit | visual], because sometimes I click "edit source" accidentally when I want to use the Visual Editor, and vice versa.
The placement of the edit summary box is not very intuitive. I looked for it for some time before checking the documentation and reading that I should click "Save page" to see the box, and click "Save page" again to actually save my changes. It would be nice if the edit summary box is always shown; if the purpose of hiding it under "Save page" is to make people write summaries more often, then maybe a red box could be added around an always-visible unfilled box, or a dialogue box could ask editors to confirm if they were sure about leaving a blank summary.
The time it takes to load the editor and save changes for long pages is way too long. Maybe this is because it loads the whole page for editing when I want to edit just a section. I hope that this will also be fixed.
-- Joshua Issac ( talk) 10:55, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
Just used it for the first time today, on Apixaban. It seems intuitive enough but I had a problem when I tried to fix a wiki-link that I thought I inserted wrongly after looking at my edit. When I tried to remove the wiki link, it deleted a whole section. I tried it a couple of times, cancelling to avoid saving changes each time it went wrong. After about the fifth attempt, it seemed to reload and show my original wiki-link was okay. I'm assuming it's just a small bug that will be fixed in time, but it's a bit confusing. Red Fiona ( talk) 13:52, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
Editing Gol Transportes Aéreos Flight 1907#Criminal proceedings I added two cleanup templates, {{ update}} and {{ prose}}. In the visual editor the two templates were differently left-aligned and different lengths, despite saving and displaying correctly. Reopening the page in the visual editor, the templates appear at their correct size and alignment, but do appear with an apparent blank line between them. Thryduulf ( talk) 14:04, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
This new version is really confusing and it has barely half the functions of the old editing capability. I'm not able to make a table, and many other things. J. A. Zwierzcowski ( talk) 14:11, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
Please read: Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#VisualEditor tag not working correctly
It appears that that "Tag: VisualEditor" label on revisions made with Visual Editor has been (accidentally?) deleted from all older edits. As a result, we presently have no way of tracking most of the VisualEditor edits made during the first week of deployment. Dragons flight ( talk) 17:23, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
I wrote the phrase In 1962 the ''[[Elizabethan Express|Elizabethan]]'''s six-hour schedule between London and Edinburgh.... If you open this in Visual editor then everything from the 's is in bold.
I experimented further and tried writing the sentence in VE. Changing to italics and then linking gave
Linking before changing to italics gave
(See User:Edgepedia/VE/Bold for sandbox) Edgepedia ( talk) 19:11, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
I'm on a relatively good computer (the one I use for all my Feature Pictures work) with a good internet connection (BT Broadband).
I thought I'd see if VisualEditor had improved at all. Just scrolling down a largish page was jumpy, awkward, and laggy, even now, after supposed improvements.
Jumpy, awkward, and laggy are just going to put users off. Adam Cuerden ( talk) 23:36, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
How can an editor insert a sortable wikitable in the new VisualEditor format? Bullmoosebell ( talk) 01:14, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
Some templates are really rather complex. I'm trying to write the template data for {{ Infobox World Heritage Site}} and parts are just too complex to explain in the short json format. Really a it would be good to have a link to the full template documentation. Maybe a "Documentation" field could be added to json and that interpreted as a clickable link in the dialogue.-- Salix ( talk): 10:52, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
Drag-and-drop appears to work, but there are oddities about what seems to happen, and in the end the transfer doesn't actually happen.
Demonstration: start with this test page. We will attempt to drag and drop to the bottom of the page the line "L3 header" and the line below it. Strange things happen which I have called "Oddity" rather than "Bug", because I am not sure whether this is supposed to be working yet; if not, it is confusing that it appears to.
1. Select the first L3 header and the line below it by placing the cursor to the left of "L3 header" and dragging down to the left of "Another L3 header" (so as not to leave an unwanted blank line).
2. Place cursor on highlighted area and depress mouse button to "grab". (Oddity 1: cursor does not change shape until you start to drag)
3. Drag selection down to bottom of page. (Oddity 2: the "Another L3 header" line, which was not selected, ceases to be a header)
4. Release the mouse button: the selection appears at the bottom of the page, with formatting correct. (Oddity 4: but it is displaced one indent's worth to the right, and it is not possible to move it left. I think this one may be connected with Bugzilla:50353, inability to put the cursor below the last line of a page.)
5. Try to save the change. {Oddity 5: though it appears to have happened, it hasn't. The "Save page" button is greyed out and inoperative. If you make another change and then undo it, the "Save page" button becomes operative but "Review your changes" produces "Could not start the review because your revision matches the latest version of this page". If you actually make another change, that change happens but the drag-and-drop does not.)
JohnCD ( talk) 17:29, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
(@ JohnCD:, apologies for my unclear language. :) What I meant was that the ghostly image trails my cursor, but the original content remains in place, and when I release my mouse button the ghostly image disappears, leaving the original unmoved. I see this is tracked and updated, but I just wanted to clarify! -- Maggie Dennis (WMF) ( talk) 14:52, 12 July 2013 (UTC))
This is just terrible. Way to complicate things and make me never want to edit. Fog Devil 16:52, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
I was playing around with adding an image to an article in my sandbox. I note seven issues:
-- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:40, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
When I edit the External links section of Bossalinis & Fooliyones, the {{ Discogs master|523614}} template vanishes from view. It's still there and I could even get VE to that template, but it's not displayed. Huon ( talk) 00:02, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
I am unable to edit tables and the background colors used in it. Saha.rj ( talk) 05:24, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
I spent a little time tweaking a screenshot of VE using GIMP, to show some thoughts about the direction the UI might go in. I'm adding a picture at right. This is not a product of deep thought, more an attempt to provoke some sort of planned design process rather than the haphazard evolution that seems to be taking place. In particular, I expect there might be a need for additional "Edit" and "Tools" menus. Experienced editors will recognize that I've placed the CharInsert gadget on the second line. That gadget wouldn't be usable directly (even if gadgets could be used in VE), because it includes markup functionality, but its UI seems to me very similar to what is needed for inserting special characters. Looie496 ( talk) 03:18, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
The village of Follifoot is approximately 4 miles from Harrogate not 2 miles as stated in the article. My attempts to edit and save the alteration have been unsuccessful. Perhaps someone with more knowledge could correct the article for me. Janebly ( talk) 11:44, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
FlashSheridan ( talk) 16:30, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
For the template data for Infobox species
Template:Taxobox/doc I want to indicate in a parameter description that two single quotes should be used around an argument e.g. ''H. sapiens''
however I can't distinguish this from double quotes e.g. "H. sapiens"
when looking at the produced template data.
An infobox for plants, animals and other biological taxa
Parameter | Description | Type | Status | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Species | species | Species taxonomic rank. Should be given in abbreviated forms and in italics, e.g. ''H. sapiens''. | String | optional |
Bad Species | badspecies | Species taxonomic rank. Should be given in abbreviated forms and in italics, e.g. "H. sapiens". | String | optional |
When displayed its impossible to distinguish this from a double quote in the wiki doc page. In the VE dialogue box its also impossible to distinguish the two.-- Salix ( talk): 16:47, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
"<code>''italic''</code>"
. With the switch to
HTML5, the code-tag is still being supported ("forever") in wikitext, but I am unsure how the VisualEditor could recommend the use of code-tag font in these cases. -
Wikid77 (
talk) 20:12, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
I was reading an article yesterday, saw errors in it, but it was late, so I waited until today to fix them. Today I hit 'Edit', made the changes quickly, but when I tried to save, got a message that the edit session had expired. I suspect that what expired was not whatever got set up when I clicked 'Edit', but something that got saved yesterday when I loaded the article for viewing. It struck me as user-hostile behavior. This appears to be different from bug 50424, but what do I know? This should be easy to recreate, if you don't mind waiting about 15 hours before you begin editing. Chris the speller yack 20:08, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
I want to go back to the old way, please. I don't see this option in my account settings (under "editing"). Startswithj ( talk) 05:32, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
There is actually a proper off switch for VE. It was chosen to disable the off switch for en:wp, and instead have a half-hidden option that the VE breaks every now and then. Enabling the off switch is apparently an "enhancement". The patch is awaiting deployment. Anyone from WMF have an idea if/when this change will go through? - David Gerard ( talk) 08:54, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
Dear Wikipedians:
Cheers, Startswithj ( talk) 17:47, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
I've spent 3 hours editing a page and adding citations but now it wont save saying: Error: invalid error code. So disheartening. Makes me not want to bother spending so much time trying to improving things... Fieldstones ( talk) 07:11, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
At User:Thryduulf/Hierarchy of content decisions I have an incomplete table (it's part of an unfinished user essay) with the table opened, some headers and rows defined but no closing syntax.
When making an unrelated edit, VE deleted all the table syntax apart from the the opening line
[3] e.g. changing !Level!!Process!!Appeal process!!Notes
to LevelProcessAppeal processNotes
.
I know VE doesn't deal with tables properly yet, and this is an unusual use case, but there is no reason for it to be deleting syntax. As in the example above deleting the exclamation marks (and pipes on other rows) doesn't even result in cleaned up plain text (replacing them with space instead might do). Thryduulf ( talk) 08:05, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
Anish7 ( talk) 11:02, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
Despite having hid VE, I've just discovered that it's back. The whole "Edit" and "Edit source" nonsense is back. When I was editing the Iván Hindy article it even automatically chose VE for me. Why? Is the opt-out malfunctioning? Manxruler ( talk) 12:52, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
Why would you change Wikipedia like this? Do you think that users are going to bother trying to learn a whole new system of editing. This is clunky and I don't understand it. I will stop editing this site if this is not changed. Kuzwa ( talk) 14:56, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
In case of Doubleclick on the template, should show a Transluction dialog. Rezonansowy ( talk) 20:00, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
I go away for a month and I no longer know how to edit!? J04n( talk page) 00:11, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
I'm finding the icons on the little buttons to do various things (add wikilinks, add references, add a template) are not clear or intuitive, the only exception being perhaps the add-an-image icon. I think some of them simply have obscure design that could be improved, but that can only go so far to make things clearer. A mouseover of any of these buttons should display a brief text explanation for what that button does, and/or the VE should have an option to toggle the views of its tools between icon, icon w/text, or just text, just like browsers do. postdlf ( talk) 17:27, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
This whole VE venture is really the most perplexing and seemingly insane development in the nearly ten years I've been editing here. The insistence of the WMF that it be foisted on everyone when it is clearly not ready for prime time really makes me question their judgment and basic competence. postdlf ( talk) 17:55, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
I've made a mockup of one idea, at File:VisualEditor - Toolbar - Reference-edit1.png - That image includes the original, and two adaptations that use a snippet of grey text and a blue superscripted number [1]. The grey text could be made into abstract letterforms (rather than the letters REF) in order to make it usable by all languages. Or could use a grey + sign and the blue number. (Only problem is RightToLeft languages. Not sure how to solve that.) Just a thought. – Quiddity ( talk) 05:49, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
For a new editor who, in theory, will never touch the "edit source" button it makes sense to wrap nowiki tags around double brackets, etc. But for editors used to typing in wikitext, the nowiki tags are unnecessary and a cause errors. Can there be a opt-in preference somewhere to suppress VE from "helping" by adding nowiki tags to text entries? VQuakr ( talk) 03:30, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
A warning is really a different solution than a selectable preference. This interface is complex enough that is surely merits a dedicated preferences screen anyways, why force editors used to Wiki markup to slow down and click buttons if they wish to opt out of the nowiki tags? VQuakr ( talk) 21:32, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
I think this is the first goddamn time I've said fuck on Wikipedia. It's a great idea for quick ce edits and like a goddamn fucking idiot I just keep trying to make it work only ending up, as often as not, spending twice or more time on an edit. One time I reviewed an entire article with ce edits and more complicated reorganization of material only to find, when I was all done, that nothing had actually been processed. I never did that again, but I still, like an idiot, keep using it--that's how it goes when one is the eternal optimist. If you can't fix this goddamned thing please admit it and throw it out. Please accept my profanity in the same lighthearted spirit in which it was used, but for christ's sake, this is just plain nuts. Gandydancer ( talk) 18:32, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
I seem to be having difficult in addin a web link so going back to normal editor Glh54 ( talk) 08:40, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
When the first reference is in an Infobox it is correctly numbered and shown as 1. However, the first reference in the text is also shown as 1 in the text but numbered as 2 in the reflist. See East Toowoomba, Queensland for an example. Downsize43 ( talk) 10:24, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
This is all very confusing and counter-intuitive, and it doesn't even seem to work the same way twice. I can't help but think that something isn't working correctly! There doesn't seem to be a way to add new references, for example. Yes, there's a "create new reference" tab, but all it does is create a blank reference that can't be edited - presumably it isn't meant to do this!
Templates sometimes let you add new parameters, and sometimes don't, and the ones I've tried to use (convert and cite journal, so far) either output gooblidigook or nothing at all. It doesn't even behave the same way with the same template on repeated attempts. Obviously, I haven't saved any of the edits I've produced so far with VisEd, because nothing I've tried to write with it was functional.
Something is clearly screwy (and possibly at my end, not yours), but I can't figure out what. I get that wikimarkup isn't intuitive for new users, but I can't help thinking that neither is this.
At the very least, the instructions on the Help page need to be greatly improved. Half the time, I can't figure out what they mean. "Add parameters", for instance, isn't really sufficient as the entire description of a particular step. Add parameters how, exactly? Anaxial ( talk) 17:03, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
Hello, dear colleagues!
Add the parameters form template to see all the options. For example, you can add a button to "All parameters", then he is not with regards to TemplateData, or not come to all the template parameters (in brackets {{{}}}). I still need to add the ability to edit the template TemplateData, once in this form with the words: "This parameter has no description ',' This template has no description ',' This parameter is not specified "required", "Please, add them", ... . -- Xusinboy Bekchanov ( talk) 04:38, 14 July 2013 (UTC).
Inside <TemplateData> impossible to use interwiki? https://uz.wikipedia.org/?title=Andoza%3ABilgiquti_aholi_punkti%2Fdoc&diff=1576912&oldid=1576911 -- Xusinboy Bekchanov ( talk) 17:22, 15 July 2013 (UTC).
Attempted to make this fairly simple edit, the VE spent ages trying to save and came back with "Error: Invalid error code". I pressed the second "save" button again, it came back with the same. Gave up and did it in wikitext - David Gerard ( talk) 09:06, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
Possibly this is related to the server issues I've just discovered we're currently having. I understand they aren't related to VE, but will certainly impact it. -- Maggie Dennis (WMF) ( talk) 13:30, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
You already know this, but I'll repeat this every few days until you fix it: get the opt-out out of "gadgets" and make turning on VE involve javascript. Being off should involve nothing. Right now, your code is repeatedly turning on VE despite very very very clear instructions in my preferences for it to go bugger off. — LlywelynII 11:43, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
Moments ago, while I was editing an article using the editing tool that works properly, the properly-disabled mess misnamed Visual Editor restored itself as my default editing tool. It seems to have been returned to its well-deserved grave after I resaved my "gadget" preferences, but why should any editor have to watch out for this dysfunction to recur? Hullaballoo Wolfowitz ( talk) 12:59, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
If its needed again the following css can hide the visual editor.
div#p-views > ul > li#ca-edit:not(.istalk):nth-last-child(4) { display: none; }
.mw-editsection-link-primary { display: none; }
.mw-editsection-link-secondary { visibility: visible !important; content: "source"; }
.mw-editsection-bracket { visibility: hidden !important; }
It's supplied with no warranty, expect it to mess up on some namespaces and hide normal edit links as well, kill section 0 edit links. It may also break if you have any custom css js or gadgets or if any software changes.-- Salix ( talk): 17:23, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
This new system won't let me copy from one edit to another Jørgen88 ( talk) 13:22, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
There are now two sets of apparent endnotes in this article, created by different forms in the WYSIWYG editor. Please update the help to make it clear whether to use Transclusion for citations. Thank you. Mragsdale ( talk) 16:04, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
I don't believe there is any situation where it's acceptable to have two identically-named parameters within a template ("url=", "url=", for example). But VE doesn't prevent that from happening. It should. -- John Broughton (♫♫)
I didn't find one, so I opened one. :) -- Maggie Dennis (WMF) ( talk) 22:38, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
The Edit transluction button should follow with window frame. For example: if I showing a second half of any infobox, the popup button should appear on the current visible place of the infobox, not stay on the header. Rezonansowy ( talk) 20:51, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
I just wanted to point this discussion on MediaWiki which would indicate that we will, once again, be unable to disable VisualEditor once Flow arrives to replace our current talk pages.— Kww( talk) 21:46, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
This comment (from the person leading the Flow project at the moment) is particularly interesting: "Parsoid does not do well with templates. Ergo, we are designing with the assumption that we can't use templates." And for performance reasons, consideration is being given to not storing talk pages as a set of edits (diffs). I'm not sure how all this will impact bots and automated tools like WikiEd, but I do know that those are used a lot outside of articlespace. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:07, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
(1) Click the "transclusion" icon
(2) In the lower left of the resulting dialog box, hover over the "+" sign until the bracket pair ("[ ]") is visible; click on that.
(3) Click on "[ ] Content"
(4) Click on "Apply changes"
Now none of the "insert" icons work, and a number of other icons on the tool bar also don't work. (The user guide is silent as to what these brackets are supposed to do.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:33, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
The process of adding information (parameters) to a template, in the dialog box (popup window) has a number of issues that make editing significantly more confusing:
Let be honest, it's pretty rare that the nowiki tags are used. The Visual Editor should allow the contributor to use wikicodes. In my opinion, the more simple would to have a tick box where one can tick it on or off if he wants the Visual Editor to assume "nowiki" for its contributions or to allow wikicodes (i.e. mainly [[ ]] or {{ }}) to work for its contributions. Thanks, Amqui ( talk) 03:20, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
The way I imagined it being coded is that the non-default "power user" mode would behave exactly the same as existing, except that after the user clicked "save changes" the program would remove any nowiki tags from the change before saving. Since this behavior would only be for users that requested it, there would be no need for changes to the on-the-fly rendering. Intentional use of nowiki is pretty uncommon; a "power user" that wanted to add them could use the "edit source" or temporarily change their preference settings. VQuakr ( talk) 22:56, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
The {{ coord}} templates makes heavy use of Function overloading with a variety of different syntaxes:
the format depends on the arity of the unnamed parameters. The template data for this is quite awkward but simplest to have the 2nd, 3rd and 4th parameters as optional and the 5th parameter for longitude degrees. There is a T51743 for this but its been closed as WONTFIX with a suggestion that we split coord up into a number a separate templates with a different syntax for each. Argh.-- Salix ( talk): 07:21, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
I added {{ unref}} to PRITV: while in VE, it sent the content of the article right to the bottom below the infobox and the existing {{ uncat-stub}} template. Looked ridiculous. I saved it with appropriate edit summary - and on saving the page the result was poor but not as bad: the "unref" template was appearing level with the top of the infobox, so centred within a narrower area rather than across top of whole article, but much better than it had appeard while editing in VE. So two different problems:
Pam D 07:43, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
I've looked at T51603 but that seems to be inconclusive discussion which hasn't been added to since 17 June. Is there any progress anywhere on this vital facility: the ability to leave messages in an article, as Hidden Comments, which will be seen automatically by every editor who goes to edit that article, or that small section of that article (so, no, an edit notice popping up for the whole page does not do the trick)? This seems to me to be a very important feature we mustn't lose, but the discussion at that bug seems extremely relaxed about it. Is there another bug I'm missing? Is it regarded as a priority? Is it likely to get fixed anytime soon? Pam D 08:06, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
It's nothing like as important as the hidden comments issue, but it was annoying on day one of VE and is still b****y irritating for a regular wikignoming editor:
Is it un-reasonable to ask to be able to see the content of a page while choosing stub templates or other transclusions, or while choosing categories (eg Category:1937 births or Category:Villages in Żyrardów County)? T51969 isn't showing much/any progress. Pam D 09:18, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
Superb! Much better and easier and visual. Super48paul ( talk) 11:37, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
VE was working as expected in Safari on an iTouch, despite it not being a supported browser yet. (Until Safari decided to crash, that is. But I am using an iOS 7 beta.) Ignatz mice• talk 12:29, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
While making
this edit, the added parameter (website=[[iOS 7]]
) showed up, once I'd changed it in the transclusion-editor, in the ref-editor. However, clicking "Apply changes" in the ref-editor did not make it appear in the WISYWIG displayed text; I thought I'd have to go into source and add it. It did show up once I'd saved the page, though! (Note: I could not reproduce the problem with
these
edits to my sandbox—the new parameters did appear after applying changes.)
Ignatz
mice•
talk 12:58, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
When the user edits for example, a {{ Legend}} template, color picker may be very useful. We should also think about adding there a table of basic colors. -- Rezonansowy ( talk) 13:32, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
See edit. Is there a way as yet to add text to an external link, rather than dropping a bare link into an article? I couldn't find one in the interface - David Gerard ( talk) 13:51, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
Wormshill:a FA : correctly detected a spurious */blockquote* line 83- then mangled the markup on the last lines. On watchlist- not edited the evidence -- Clem Rutter ( talk) 14:53, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
where do i write my edit summary? Kingturtle = ( talk) 15:23, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
Good luck with the visual editor... the users I support have been hoping for this or years! I just hope this doesn't hide things like using templates and other more advanced functionality too deep. But I like that the regular edit is still there. Tenbergen ( talk) 19:17, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
In adding geocoordinates to Brooklyn Preparatory School I failed for half an hour to understand how to do it with VE, and finally fell back on Edit Source and did it the old way as outlined in MOS:COORD. Will someone add the links from there to whatever page tells how to do it with VE? Jim.henderson ( talk) 19:41, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
Hi, I created a new user page with VE. Upon Save I clicked [Review your changes]. But the review presents a plain <pre> tag, so the wiki source extends way off to the right.
VE could apply a named style to this pre tag that sets its wrap style to something more useful, like white-space: pre-wrap;
. This is
T52180, although it sounds like behavior changed since June when that was filed. Thanks for VE! --
S Page (WMF) (
talk) 21:09, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
Not sure if this has been reported already. Noted on an IP's edit [4] Risker ( talk) 00:57, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
After saving an V-edit on Shiva, I saved the page. From contents, I clicked on a section. Instead of going to the section, it went in Vedit mode. -- Redtigerxyz Talk 09:48, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
The dustbin/trashcan icon doesn't seem intuitive for "unlink". An icon of a breaking link (on the lines of the one here) would be more natural. The dustbin seems as if the linked word or phrase might be deleted completely. I remember seeing someone complaining about this, and Maggie asking for ideas for a better icon, a while back, but can't find it in Bugzilla so not sure if it went any further. Sorry to be vague. Pam D 17:59, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for the weighing in and such, folks. I've made a request for this change. PEarley (WMF) ( talk) 19:22, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
What is going on? How come I can't see the markup on this page? Please, turn it back to the simple system that previously existed. I've made thousands of edits and I don't know what to do here. The old way was so user-friendly.
Please do not make this the default editing system. I really enjoyed working on Wikipedia and would rather not quit. 69.125.134.86 ( talk) 21:50, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
Did WMF actually turn this thing on for all IP editors on schedule despite the amount of opposition that plan has received?— Kww( talk) 23:18, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
This sucks, change it back! GGib ( talk) 21:56, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
So, I'd like to be able to figure out whether I like VE - but I can't, because I've never seen it, and I don't know why. I've still got a single "edit" button, which still leads to the wikitext editor. I don't have the gadget to suppress it checked off in prefs. I'm using a browser that, according to the FAQ, should be supported (Firefox 22). Anybody have any ideas why this editor doesn't exist for me? (I suspect, based on the description, that I wouldn't like it, but it'd be nice to be able to confirm that). Nikkimaria ( talk) 01:35, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
It was a nice attempt, but please get rid of it, also, if you are going to have a public beta, don't make it the default edit option as it is now. Sephiroth storm ( talk) 04:15, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
In VE, adding wikitext (let's say, for example, an asterisk at the beginning of a paragraph) results in a warning popping up. That's preferable to no warning at all, but:
The warning should pop up over wherever the cursor/focus is, or, if that's too difficult, in the middle of the screen, similar to the positioning of the "Add media" or "Add template" dialog boxes, but smaller, of course.
Even if an article is so short that scrolling won't push the warning out of sight, if an editor is focused on what he/she is typing, it's quite easy to not notice the pop-up as it appears. When it eventually is noticed, the editor may well have difficulty figuring out what triggered the warning.
Obviously fixing the positioning of the warning is critical, but there are other ways that the warning could be improved; I'll list those for the sake of completeness:
burn the visual editor, dont want to click edit source every time Cake ( talk) 06:11, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
md_5 ( talk) 08:23, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
I've noticed changes in the behavior of the Template Editor. Now, required parameters are already selected for value addition. This helps quite a lot. --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me) 09:32, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
And I've added Bugzilla:51436 to request the template's description at the search results. Diego ( talk) 14:36, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Do any of them make VisualEditor look bad?
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if some of them did, and, honestly, if so, it's probably not because of anything inherent in VE, but because it was extremely, extremely buggy at the time of the A/B test. I still can't scroll the screen using VE without it lagging, and that's after some speedup-bugfixes.
The results are apparently known. I know they won't be written up yet, but I think we have a right to know: Does VE actually look good in them?
If it doesn't, I do think we should continue work to debug it; it's reasonable to presume it *will* be better in future. But, given the results were meant to be released before the deployment to IPs, I have to ask: Where are the results? Adam Cuerden ( talk) 09:39, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Does leave feedback work anonymously? 63.255.24.6 ( talk) 12:57, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
editing
Tricyclic_antidepressant (general overview) page, near the end of Overdose section, paragraph on treatment:
tried to edit initial text "Treatment" to "Treatment of TCA overdose" then link that to the #Treatment section of Tricyclic_antidepressant_overdose (dedicated) page - would only allow link to
page, not
section-within-page!
(at least that's what the visualeditor gui 's popup said, & appeared to be the literal case too... standard firefox 22.0, xp64, all scripts/ads/cookies allowed...)
ymmv, but until that part works for me, i'll stick to edit source :P
gui , user guide & searching feedback archives didn't help me on this at the time, shame 'coz otherwise excellent editor
-
203.194.42.58 (
talk) 15:24, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Every time I click edit, it's crashing my computer, crashing the internet browser (Firefox) or simply doing nothing. Not a fan of this at all. 217.42.46.111 ( talk) 15:33, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Hi,
I just tried to edit a page on mediawiki.org, and the behavior of VE was really strange. I don't know if it's relevant because mediawiki.org is probably different, and I don't even know if they use the same version of VE.
Try editing mw:Help:TemplateData/fr :
-- NicoV ( Talk on frwiki) 17:57, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
In
this edit, <nowiki>...</nowiki>
has been added without even wiki markup... --
NicoV (
Talk on frwiki) 18:36, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
In the figure, the original carbons are numbered, but not the products. It would help to number the product carbons. The text reports 3 negative charges at both ends, but plainly shows only 2 negative charges at each end. Lrunge ( talk) 20:15, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
I'm going to keep this short, mostly because I assume someone else has already brought this up. (I didn't read through the archives or the 70+ entries in the Contents.) As a programmer and Vim user, I personally don't plan on ever using the VisualEditor. Still, I've ran into a problem. Talk pages, Wikipedia policy pages and similar pages have an "Edit" tab where other pages use "Edit source". This is inconsistent. If I don't pay close attention and accidentally hit "Edit" where "Edit source" exists, I'm entering a world of pain. Not only do I not get what I want, but the VisualEditor is so slooow... even when editing a section I need to waiiit, and when it's finally done, I still need to go back to select the correct tab. Yeah, it's all new and I'll get used to it I'm sure, but it's inconsistent - which it shouldn't be. -- 82.170.113.123 ( talk) 23:20, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Also, the delete button and arrow keys had no effect. It was still possible to add characters though. Tommy ( talk) 23:20, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
May I suggest that if VE recognizes it cannot understand an edit, it shouldn't save it. The < nowiki> examples above are among the best examples, but some of the quasi-math HTML errors could also be corrected that way. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 01:21, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
When viewing an article you have permission to edit, you see two tabs at the top - "Edit" and "Edit source". When viewing an article you don't have permission to edit, you see only one - "view source".
This is not good UI design There needs to always be the same number of tabs displayed. Ideally there should be a view-source equivalent so that people can see the page as if the could edit it. It should allow them to interrogate things like template, so they can find out which template is producing what they see and how it does that. When VE can cope with copy+paste, then this will also allow them to copy and paste the relevant image/template/whatever to whatever article they are working on.
If the read-only editor is not possible (and given the workload of critical bugs it will likely be a while) then that tab needs to pop up a message saying that editing is restricted currently/until xx:xx for <log entry> and that they can view the wikitext source if they want (linked to an explanation what that means). Thryduulf ( talk) 02:38, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
"Wikipedia is happy to announce the live Beta of VisualEditor"? What announcement? Might I suggest an unambiguous notification in the new "edit this page" process that points out the new "edit source" tab for the old system? The first notice I got about VisualEditor (which I'd never heard of) was actually editing a page like always, only to find a visual editor (didn't see the name or a link to info) which wouldn't let me add and preview a citation, my most common WP work besides copyediting. I only found Wikipedia:VisualEditor by clicking on the mysterious "BETA" that appeared at the top of the page. ("BETA" what?) Yes, I eventually found "edit source", but given WP's recent proclivity for adding and moving around top-page tabs, I didn't notice it initially. Even without using VE yet, from my quick look, I suspect VisualEditor will be a tremendous help for all editors. But dropping it on everyone by default without warning is bad practice. (If there was a warning, I didn't notice it, which suggests it wasn't a very effective "notice".) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:27, 3 July 2013 (UTC)
This issue is not answered. It has been ignored.-- Paul McDonald ( talk) 15:26, 5 July 2013 (UTC)
"But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."
"Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."
"But the plans were on display ..."
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That's the display department."
"With a flashlight."
"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."
The last thread above makes me think it would be useful to add a class of Echo notification which produces a highlighted banner (similar to what happens when your user talkpage is edited). While the effect for each user would be the same, their talkpages would not be updated (just a single "notify all" page of messages would be updated) so there wouldn't be 19 million page edits, RC/watchlist updates, &c. Most sitebanners are less personal than this and might not trigger such a notice. But "message everyone personally the next time they log on" messages -- such as major interface changes, major licensing changes, a sea of fire, &c -- could be handled this way. – SJ + 07:33, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
It's realy slow and annoying. Just like every new introduced feature, there should be an easy way to disable it, for example on click on the information box above the page that shows enabling this tool. Qtguy00 ( talk) 14:17, 4 July 2013 (UTC)
Why does no standard user preference to disable VisualEditor exist?
|
---|
VisualEditor is the new default experience for all users. We recognize that it still in beta and has issues, including lack of support for some aspects of wikitext. Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. Developing VisualEditor into a tool that can meet the needs of all our users will take time. Therefore, we encourage all users (including power users) to regularly check in VisualEditor's progress, and we're running VisualEditor in parallel to the traditional Wikitext editor. Power users will find ways to disable VisualEditor completely, e.g. by means of user scripts and gadgets. However, to encourage continued testing of VisualEditor as it develops, completely hiding it from the user experience will remain a non-trivial task. The current experience is designed to be minimally intrusive for users who want to continue to use wikitext indefinitely. Both at the page and section-level, editing as wikitext should require no additional action other than selecting the "edit source" option. We would rather make VisualEditor's availability through the UI interfere less with the experience of power users rather than introduce a new preference: For example, resolving bug 50542 could make the integration of VisualEditor less noticeable. Please let us know about similar issues. We hope to hear from users who could never imagine using VisualEditor as their default editing environment. Fixing bugs aside, we want VisualEditor to be as efficient and powerful as wikitext while being discoverable and easy to use, and we highly appreciate your feedback on what improvements could make it so. |
How do I disable VisualEditor?
|
---|
To continue to edit the wikitext directly, simply click the "Edit source" button instead of "Edit". On section edit links, you can open the classic wikitext editor for that section by clicking "edit source" instead of the regular "edit" link. If you would like to remove VisualEditor from the user interface, then you can go to the Gadgets tab of your Preferences page, check the option "Remove VisualEditor from the user interface" in the "Editing" section, and click the Save button near the bottom of the page. (Note that gadgets are community-developed and not supported by the Wikimedia Foundation.) |
Put an "edit source" link on the help box, or lose copy editing of short sections of long articles from occasional users. These users expect to fix a comma or awkward wording in a short section by clicking on "edit" and finding an edit box right there after a page load. They don't expect to have to wait for "edit source" to appear after hover. They don't expect to find very sluggish scrolling and failure to reach the bottom of page in one try and failure of the "End" keyboard key and absence of an edit box at the bottom of page. They might keep trying long enough to find the help box. At least, the help box should mention the fact that "edit source" will appear after hover, and at least, that "edit source" should be linked to edit the section in an edit box. — Pifvyubjwm ( talk) 21:03, 9 July 2013 (UTC)
I'd like to say a genuine thank you to whoever put the yellow box at the top telling me I can enable a gadget to disable VE. However, I'd also like to say that editors shouldn't have to rely on an unsupported third-party extension to do this - instead, there should be a check box in the Editing tab in Special:Preferences (which is where I first looked, and is the obvious place) which if CHECKED means that VE is turned on and if UNCHECKED means that VE is turned off and inaccessible just as if we turn this gadget on. I don't mind whether the default is on or off - but ticking a box to disable a feature is counterintuitive, as is having to go to an "experiments" page to do so. ~ Keiji (iNVERTED) ( Talk) 18:38, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Hi. I don't see an option to go back to normal editing mode. I just want to make a quick change and prefer not to deal with a visual/WYSIWYG-ish mode. An option to use the "bare-metal" original syntax would be nice. My original edit would take 30-45 seconds this way. That's a good thing. It is a wiki, after all. Wantnot ( talk) 10:30, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
If you refuse to accept an apology and refuse to explain your views when asked, then there is not much more that I can say. I will leave it at just registering my disappointment at your lack of good faith. Thryduulf ( talk) 18:32, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
How does a user preview their edits before submitting them, like with the old standard for editing? I made a edit, but there should be a way to preview edits for QAQC / PCC-PCI purposes. Bullmoosebell ( talk) 01:01, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, PEarley (WMF). I'm just used to editing with the codes, but I did find the Edit Source link. As long as Wiki doesn't get rid of the Edit Source link, I'll be alright. VE is new and innovative, and will take some getting used to, but I'm not seeing the benefits yet. Thanks for your help with this change, I see a lot of users are poopy-faced about having to use VE and you (and all the all the supporters) are quite professional and patient. Keep up the great work! Bullmoosebell ( talk) 01:52, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
This may have been reported, but it seems that leading spaces are rendered differently in VE than on the Wiki page. With the Wiki page they cause the text to have that dotted box around it, and to appear as single line. In VE it displays just as a leading space, with no indication of problems. I saw some IPs having issues with the difference between the two. - Bilby ( talk) 02:04, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
There's another bug, possibly; I don't know if this has already been reported. If a page already contains text, followed by a template (not necessarily on the same line) and the next line has a leading space, attempting to remove the leading space using the backspace key also removes the template. The space can only be removed by moving the cursor beyond the end of the template on the same line and using the delete key. Peter James ( talk) 22:57, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
I think VE is a good idea. However, I think that there should be an easy way to turn it off, so you don't have to retrain your muscle memory, and think Wikimedia did it a huge disservice by the manner of its launch - it's buggy and largely unusable as it is now. I can't even scroll down to the bit of text I want to edit in it because it slows to a crawl when I slow. It damages the code of the site. It's not ready.
But it's a good idea, and, were, for instance, the WMF to switch it out of default to "opt-in" for now, and stop the hugely counterproductive pushing forwards with the schedule before fixing the bugs - do you really need another several million editors using it to tell you it's still massively buggy? - I'd look forwards to a relaunch in a few months, and would likely give it another try then. (Hell, another wiki I'm on already has a working Visual Editor, and I think that one's pretty great. MoinMoin-based, for the record. Of course, the big difference is that one works perfectly, is quick, uses minimal resources, and feels natural to use.)
But you can't launch buggy software, make it the default, ignore it's causing damage to the code of articles, try to prevent people from turning it off - a problem because misclicking, a.k.a. clicking exactly where you used to click, means a 15-second loadtime and an unusable interface because I can't scroll without massive lag - and expect happy users.
A way that would likely have gotten everyone on board would have been to announce that VisualEditor would be tested by a one- or two-month trial, during which time it would become the default for all editors, but could be turned off using simple instructions that were put in the sitenotice for the first few weeks or first month of the run.
After the period, turn it off, but tell everyone how to turn it back on in the sitenotice.
You now have a bunch of enthusiastic users, and a lot of bugs. Patch it up. Make it work better. Get a really good product ready. Then turn it back on for everyone, again, telling them how to turn it off. Muscle memory is an awkward thing, and Visual Editor, after all, puts the VE-edit link where the Wikimarkup link was - but a lot of people will use it. [By the way: Edit (Text) and Edit (GUI). That's what the MoinMoin wiki I like uses, and which are far clearer terms than the unclear-at-best and actively-misleading-at-worst "Edit" and "Edit source".]
Anyway. Yes, I do think you should make VisualEditor Opt-in only for now. You've screwed up the launch really badly, and backing off a bit will show you listened to the community. Of course, you should make a sitenotice to help people willing to put up with the bugs to keep using it, and you'll almost certainly get enough users still using it to keep the bugchecking up.
Should you run out of bugs, or reach a stage where you don't have enough testers to know if you've got everything, just turn it back on for everyone. So long as you're actually responsive to the community, and know the difference between "test of potentially buggy software" and "suicide pact to launch our software permanently, even if it causes damage", you should keep the support of the community, barring, perhaps, the ones you got too upset by this PR disaster.
However, eventually, you're going to have a great product. And at that time, you want to have the right to turn it back on for people. You don't want to be in a situation where everyone's already turned it off, because when you did turn it on, it was too buggy to use.
In short, I think you should take VisualEditor away. But I want it back later. Adam Cuerden ( talk) 07:28, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
[Unindent]:For that matter, Please, I beg you, cancel the rollout to the other big wikis until such time as you've sorted out more of the bugs.
There's no need to cause problems in more places. You'll just upset those wikis, and how on earth will you defend yourself? You need more data? More data than en-wiki can provide? Adam Cuerden ( talk) 09:22, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
And for anyone who says "throw more people at the problem", that has its limits. A team like this, can absorb about 1 highly qualified 'outsider' per 2-3 months, without it hurting the team productivity (and remember that people can and do leave as well, further limiting your growth factor). — TheDJ ( talk • contribs) 17:27, 16 July 2013 (UTC)By the time en.wp would be satisfied, we would be 3 to 4 years down the road, and keeping up to date with the rest of MediaWiki would occupy much of that time. We don't have this amount of time. So instead, we will USE them (our most diverse and complicated scenario) as reluctant beta group to get the quickest to where we need to be. They will curse us now, but the net effect will be positive.
I made this into its own section, since it is a different idea than those made above. The relevant part of the roadmap:
98.243.174.235 ( talk) 20:51, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
If you place the cursor after the last character of a link and start typing then your text becomes part of the displayed text for that link: [[Fish]] → [[Fish|Fish and chips]] rather than the intended [[Fish]] and chips or [[Fish and chips]] which would be expected from a WYSIWYG editor (even if it isn't what is wanted).
There is no way to edit part of a link at all, the only way around it is to unlink the whole phrase and relink the part you want linked.
This is not usually a problem, as you can work around by starting from after the space after the link rather than before it (i.e. start from position 9 rather than position 8:
0123456789AB [[Fish]] and
However, this is counter intuitive if you want to add punctuation after the link (add it after the space, delete the space, add space after the punctuation). It also means it is impossible to add unlinked text when the link ends the line, as happens often on disambiguation pages. For example try adding context to the links at Mandi#People.
It is possible this is the same as bugzilla:50945 but I don't think it is.
Additionally, when your text becomes part of the extended link when you didn't want it to, pressing ctrl+z to undo it sometimes (but not always) results in the last character you typed being replaced by a white pawn (♙). I have a feeling this one might have been reported before but I can't find the report if it has. Thryduulf ( talk) 19:28, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Is there an edit filter yet that detects pawns? - David Gerard ( talk) 06:58, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
At this sandbox page I experimented to see how the VE would cope with the {{ od}} template (Ignore all the text, it is left over from a previous test). I actually found myself experimenting with indentation. It seems that where text is indented, VE renders one blank line before and after the indented section for every line that does not exist. i.e. section 1 of the sandbox page is rendered with five blank lines between the line starting "Fiji" and the outdent template. Section 2 had two blank lines at the end of the section (2 colons indenting), Section 4 is illustrated right, there are 5 blanks lines (one for each level of indentation) before and after the indented section (the Roman numerals are just to show the indentation and were not produced by VE, the line marked 0 was a pre-existing blank line).
If you try to delete any of the blank lines before the indented text, that level of indentation is deleted and subsequent lines moveed left one indent:
i i ii ii iii iii iv v Text 1 Text 1 Text 2 → Text 2 Text 3 Text 3 v v iv iv iii iii ii ii i i
If you try and delete a new line following the indentation, then the entire indented section and all associated VE lines are deleted. This cannot be undone. Thryduulf ( talk) 01:54, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
The Teamwork Barnstar | ||
Hi, This is a Barnstar for all those developers who worked on MediaWiki software and various MediaWiki extensions.Special mention to VisualEditor, Universal Language Selector, Edit Filter as milestones which helps achive wiki moto access for all , and many more extensions which are user freindly.Thanks to all you developers Mahitgar ( talk) 03:45, 17 July 2013 (UTC) |
Of the last 5000 edits, 201 (4%) were tagged as "nowiki added". Dragons flight ( talk) 05:04, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
At the bottom of a conventional editor has a qiuckly insert bar. I would like the same with the visual editor, but more elegant. — ƒora jump, 07:02, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Way back on 30 June I complained that I couldn't follow links from within hatnotes or refs while editing articles in VE (I'd been using ctrl + left-click) and Oliver pointed out that with right-click and menu choice they should work. I'm sure that advice worked at the time. But today I'm finding that even right-click isn't getting me anywhere useful. I may be missing something but it feels as if this is a change, that right-clicking used to work OK - eg to follow a link in a hatnote (eg the link to PLI in the hatnote while editing Pli). Pam D 09:26, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
I've added edit filter 573 to test for the addition of multiple blank lines to articles. Looking at the results from last night, this is not strictly a VE issue (many people and tools using source editor also do this), but people using VE may account for 50% or so of the cases it traps. Dragons flight ( talk) 12:40, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Can't add rows to tables 94.142.172.21 ( talk) 14:27, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
I tend to use Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation popups a lot. Mainly to check that the link I'm inserting is actually the right one. I can just hover over a link a small popup window will appear with the first line of the article being linked. This allows me to readily confirm the link target is correct. Without this I feel like I'm editing blind, the link I've just inserted might be the right one but I can't confirm it until I save the article and hover over the link.
This raises two questions. 1) Could some popups like function be applied to give a better indication of where a link is pointing? 2) is there going to be any way gadget can work with VE? -- Salix ( talk): 14:39, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
When editing lumpectomy, when you make a selection that includes the block of references at the end, and then press ctrl+x, it crashes the google chrome tab (chrome 28). WS ( talk) 15:32, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
I'm not sure what the user intended
here, but I'm sure that <nowiki />
was not supposed to be part of it. --
Redrose64 (
talk) 16:32, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Toolbar is really big relative to the size of the screen. 199.212.27.245 ( talk) 17:00, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Has someone brought up Template:Album ratings? This is an instance where the transclusion option on VE, while it does work, is more inconvenient than just wiki-markup. In wikimarkup, if you want to insert a new review into the middle of the template, i.e. between reviews 3 and 4 (rev3 and rev4), you just change rev4 to rev5 (and rev5 to 6 and so on), then insert the new score. With VE, you have to add a new rev parameter to the bottom, and move the content of ALL of the parameters affected through copy-paste. This is much more time consuming than editing the wikitext.-- ¿3fam ily6 contribs 17:44, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
An editor made a change to the Danny Worsnop article using VE - but the changes haven't showed up in the article (even when there is a diff). What on earth is going on here? Insulam Simia ( talk/ contribs) 17:58, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
I'm beginning to get the hang of it, and learning all the idiosyncrasies of the software. (What to the < and ^ arrows on dialogs do, why do I need to click on the template name to show the list of parameters, why does the newline and tab not work as expected in template dialogs).
Working on a Cornish parish involves creating a lot of small interlinked articles, and I've noticed that link dialog does not know about recently created articles, I created Penpol Creek (River Fowey) about 30 minutes ago and I'd like to link to it. However its not coming up in the hints and it I enter it in manually VE thinks its a new page, shown in red in the dialog. How long does it take to recalculate the list of articles?-- Salix ( talk): 18:43, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
After hitting the save button and then the final save button (bring back finish editing). It looks like none of usual javascript is working, popups does not work, neither does the wiki min atlas links (you can't see the little round globe). You need to reload the page to get anything working again.-- Salix ( talk): 18:55, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Ah, you were marginally quicker than me! I've marked the bug I opened as a duplicate :) Thryduulf ( talk) 19:14, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Still corrupting articles. See [11]. There seems to be a major problem between VisualEditor and template:Episode list, I don't care which one is at fault, and I am getting weary about constantly fixing these. Until this is fixed please disable VisualEditor from making change to the attributes in this template if it is unable to suppress exposing internal details of the template. Geraldo Perez ( talk) 19:04, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
"Edit source" has an easy option to type in the ISBN or doi number and have the details of the book or paper automatically filled in. The visual editor needs this if I am to use this. J1812 ( talk) 19:48, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
It has been noticed on the plwiki ( [12]) that the dialogs (especially References and Page settings) are like modal windows: they are unmovable, huge, they are at the center of the screen and, unfortunately, they cover the content. It confuses users who have small-resolution screens and those who want to compare the data they're adding with content without losing added—but not applied—changes (for ex. when adding categories:year births/deaths with the introductory text or when adding a reference with the info being sourced). Tar Lócesilion| queta! 22:16, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
I found an example of this in the Filter 550 list. If you enter "In 2012 he was included in Variety's Legal Impact Report 2012" and some following text, and then select "Variety" but not the following "apostrophe-s" and click "Italic", you get this. The result actually looks like what was intended, with only the word "Variety" in italics, and if the closing </nowiki> was immediately after the apostrophe it would make sense; but it is confusing (and might cause other problems) to have it so far downstream. JohnCD ( talk) 22:44, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
This is madness. VE is not yet ready for primetime, and I suspect the devs do not speak every language there's a Wikipedia for, meaning that this won't even provide useful data back.
People should be fired over this. Adam Cuerden ( talk) 23:03, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Hate to butt in here, but I would like to echo Adam's original point (less the calls for firing)—rolling out VE, in its current state, to any languages that at least two people on the WMF dev/liaison/whatever team do not speak (type) fluently is sheer madness. Unless you'd like to have the discussions that have been going on here for the past weeks all over again, only filtered through Google Translate. Ignatz mice• talk 03:05, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
I can't figure out how to insert or properly edit tables. BuddylBat ( talk) 00:54, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
Alright. While I'm being calm and collected. Here's why I - and I think a lot of others -got so upset.
Let's ignore the Flow issue: I think it's clear now that all statements that were causing so much upset were Jorm's opinions alone, and pretty much exactly opposite to those of the WMF.
So, what was wrong with the launch? I think it can be divided into two issues: 1. muscle memory and 2. the fact that bugs in VisualEditor were, objectively, damaging the site.
Muscle memory This introduction is rather long, in retrospect. Feel free to skip to "What went wrong", below. One develops habits as a long-term wiki editor. And some of us have special needs - but I'll get to those in a minute. Long story short, the VisualEditor tab is where the old "edit" tab was. In early days, you had to hover over it to get the edit source tab. I do a lot of tasks that VisualEditor can't support. I'm heavily involved in both images and templates, and, even when VisualEditor supports images better, I'll still be better off using Wikitext, because I do image restorations, and, for example, a rather common situation is that someone, four or five years ago, went to the Library of Congress, and grabbed a low-resolution copy of an image, because the high-resolution images there are TIFFs, and no indication is given that the TIFFs are higher resolution than the JPEG. So I take the high-resolution version, do some restoration, upload the restored copy with a consistent filename system (the older uploads to commons generally have rather non-descript filenames), and then... I have to put it in wikis to replace the low-resolution image. It's far easier to use the "find" tool on my browser to locate the filename of the image I'm replacing, then pasting in the new filename, than it could ever be to look for the image in VisualEditor, delete the old one, copying the caption, add the new one, pasting in the caption, and rescale the new one to the same size as the one being replaced.
And I think you'll agree that's not a problem with VE. It's simply not a function VisualEditor can, nor should, support; it's just far more practical to use Wikitext.
By the way, this is an aside, but... can turning off VisualEditor will be a globally-supported user preference? Because file replacement in that manner isn't always one wiki, and whilst we have bots for that, CommonsDelinker has regular periods of downtime. It's hard enough finding the edit button on Wikis that use a language you don't speak, some of which are right-to-left languages, without needing to avoid the VisualEditor edit button.
Anyway. So, long story short. Some of us should almost never use VisualEditor. But your mouse automatically goes to the "Edit" button, because it's gone there for the.. let's see.. seven or so years you've been editing Wikipedia. And so it's better to shut it off. Unless someone can make a gadget that puts the link to VE somewhere safe, like over in the left hand column or something. And even when not doing image work, I can often type out long-memorised template names, ref tags, and the like faster than I could ever use an automated tool, if using the tool meant I had to keep lifting my hands off the keyboard to use the mouse.
What went wrong
Two things. A member of the WMF added a line to the FAQ stating that we'd be able to turn it off in editing preferences, which stayed in up to three weeks before the launch. Broken promises never end well. Added, removed.
Secondly, when the functionality was removed, a hack was created. Now, had the WMF kept its promises and told people where to find the off-switch that had been promised, all would have been fine. But the sitenotice didn't mention it at all. When I came up with a simple message, and suggested it as a sitenotice, Okeyes threw a fit, for example, " I feel it would totally undermine the software proper to fire everyone at an instant switch to permanently disable the VE" Context if you look at the rest of that link: Okeyes didn't know what Sitenotice's features were, and basically presumed it had exactly the opposite features to what it had. Now, remember, this is the switch that a member of the WMF had promised would exist.
It's fine to launch new features, but when rearranging the site interface, muscle memory is going to get screwed up, and, remember, when launched, you had to hover over edit for a bit to get the edit source button.
That hovering over "edit" to get the "edit source" button - and, yes, of course it's gone now - was particularly bad in muscle memory terms. If VisualEditor wasn't right for you, the least disruptive thing you could do was turn it off so you could stop complaining, and let those it was meant for have the benefits.
But that was precisely what the WMF was trying to prevent.
Bugs in Wikieditor
This one's actually quite simple. When it became clear that VisualEditor had bugs that were screwing up articles, it should have been temporarily turned off until at least the first fixes could come in, and relaunched. It was frankly shocking that the WMF was willing to damage Wikipedia.
These bugs still aren't fully fixed.
No-one wants to see the site they volunteered for damaged because insufficient testing was done. The moment the WMF knew it was damaging articles, the schedule should have gone out the window, leaving only sufficient people still using the tool to help them find out whether bugfixes worked.
This one really amped up the us-vs.-them mentality. "We made this site. All you're bringing to the table is code that's damaging it. GET RID OF THAT DAMN THING."
And the thing is, there was and is no sitenotice about this. No warning that people need to be extra careful with VE, particularly during the early days, when the bugs were severe. I mean, the bugs are relatively harmless now, but weren't they stripping references and such at first? And didn't VE launch without the ability to add references?
Okay, now, that said, the really bad bugs were fixed pretty quickly. But the WMF did a really, really bad job of communicating. As an example. On Commons, CommonsDelinker, which helps manage file renames, went down a while ago. A sitenotice went up warning to be careful about moving files, giving explicit instructions about the need to clean up after yourself.
Never at any time did the CentralNotice about VisualEditor say anything more than it had launched. So far as I recall, it didn't even warn people to check all edits made using it, even during the most buggy phase.
The WMF's communication was terrible. Absolutely unforgivable, and gave the very strong impression the WMF didn't care. Now, I presume you were actually working on bugs or the like, but you can't shut up at times like this.
Yes, users were angry. They had a right to be: their site was being damaged. Unfortunately, fuel was poured on those flames. Adam Cuerden ( talk) 09:14, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
As the VisualEditor change management document notes, James Forrester is the Product Manager, reporting to the Director of Product Development Howie Fung and the Vice President of Product Development Erik Möller (who is also the WMF Deputy Director and VP of Engineering), but I do not know how the schedule was set (if all of them were involved, or a subset, or what others might have been part of the chain) or why; I'll bring you more details as soon as I get them, unless they deliver them directly. :) -- Maggie Dennis (WMF) ( talk) 18:40, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
I just noticed there were some questions I never answered about my previous post. So in case people are still interested:
Why does the Tab key behave like Page down? Still doing that. — HHHIPPO 19:50, 8 July 2013 (UTC)
When I go into "edit" mode and press "tab", it jumps from wikilink to wikilink. "Page down" pages down. -- Maggie Dennis (WMF) ( talk) 15:53, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
When marking a block of text, empty lines are not shown as marked. Still the same. — HHHIPPO 19:50, 8 July 2013 (UTC)
@ Hhhippo:, I'm not sure what you mean by "marking a block of text". Can you clarify? -- Maggie Dennis (WMF) ( talk) 15:53, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
Beta menu:
It's not at all obvious that Leave and Feedback aren't two different entities. Still the same. It's the second link in the "Beta" flyout. — HHHIPPO 19:50, 8 July 2013 (UTC)
Found the "Leave feedback". They look like one link to me. :) Can you clarify how this is confusing or how it looks different to you? -- Maggie Dennis (WMF) ( talk) 15:30, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
Why is the feedback link grayed out? Ditto. — HHHIPPO 19:50, 8 July 2013 (UTC)
Don't know - once we work out the above, I can track this (in case I need to say something about that, too.) -- Maggie Dennis (WMF) ( talk) 15:30, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
Okeyes (WMF) recently said the functional specification is "the VE should do what the markup editor does". In terms of very precise, fine-grained analysis of "button X, when clicked, goes to state Y", we apparently don't have that, indeed, for reasons that boil down to "we're not a government operation". The VE team is using the Agile cycle (
diff).
Skipping over the implication that describing a UI state machine is somehow not Agile, I wonder whether this is a broader symptom of the problem we have here. Agile aims to deliver a cycle of frequent releases, where each release is small, works well, has minimal bugs and delivers some incremental benefit(s) to delighted users. It's great when you need to discover requirements incrementally. The Visual Editor project isn't anything like that. The requirements are vast and already known. VE touches all our existing data and editing processes so it requires thousands of features, which are effectively being delivered in a single "big bang" release. Because it's so big, it has far more bugs than a typical Agile iteration. The potential benefits will accrue to new users, but the risk of damage to existing articles is borne by current users, who aren't in contact with the developers anyway.
I could go on, but you get my point. If WMF wants to roll out Visual Editor to all users then it's a traditional big bang "bet the business" software project which necessitates the traditional painful software engineering cycle. If WMF prefers to use Agile practices, then they have to accept an incremental release approach which means having fewer features per release but making sure they work safely (e.g. you can't create a citation, but you can't delete one either). You can't have it both ways. Don't make Visual Editor the Dreamliner of software projects. -
Pointillist (
talk) 22:05, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Can I suggest you make VisualEditor opt-in rather than rolling it out and making it anything but obvious how to disable it.
Those that I have spoken to universally dislike it and I myself find it very un-user-friendly, especially when it comes to infoboxes and categorisation. For saying wikipedia is supposed to work on consensus, there appears to be very little of anything close to that in the way visual editor has been rolled out.
The fair option would be not to force it on people and allow people to opt-in if they want to experiment with it. -- Rushton2010 ( talk) 01:26, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
If I go to Cooking, edit the page, and then cursor to the very last line, backspace once removes {{Link FA|kl}}. Backspace two more times then removes {{Use dmy dates|date=April 2012}}. There's no indication these templates are even there—no box or transclusion symbol. For all I know, I'm just removing blank lines. FF 22/Win7Pro SP1. -- Atethnekos ( Discussion, Contributions) 07:46, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
Images which are not thumbnails can't be edited properly using VE. If there is a single image, it can be selected, but the resize handles don't appear and the media icon doesn't appear. Moving the image around works and deleting the image works. When there are two images like this, the mouse pointer turns into a "forbidden" symbol (the mirror image of ∅), with the tooltip "Sorry, this element can only be edited in source mode for now.", and semi-tansparent shading covers both images. The images can't be moved, and can only be deleted as pair - you can't delete only one image. I am using Chrome (v. 28) on Windows 7, and was playing around with VE on List of freeways in Victoria, Australia. - Evad37 ( talk) 10:41, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
The more I look at the Filter 550 log, the odder the things that turn up. Here what looks like a simple rearrangement of one sentence has scattered eighteen pairs of nowiki tags throughout the article, none of them actually enclosing any wiki markup. I tried without success to reproduce this by copying the whole source text into a sandbox. JohnCD ( talk) 14:06, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
I reverted the edit at Adygea that resulted in 18 nowiki tags, and then tried to duplicate what the editor did, assuming he/she only was trying to rearrange one sentence. The good news is that VE didn't (at least for my edit) gratuitously add nowikis to subsequent paragraphs. The bad news is that although what it showed me, just before I saved the page, looked fine, what VE saved as wikitext resulted in a nowiki tag between a wikilink and the subsequent word, rather than the space that should have been there (and looked like it was). In short, VE isn't very smart when text is being moved around near existing wikilinks. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:24, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
Hi,
Trying to reproduce a bug reported above, I did some manipulations just before a table :
-- NicoV ( Talk on frwiki) 16:32, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
When editing Fowey Gallants a {{ cornwall-stub}} the image in the stub template is massive. This seems to be the same for other cornwall stubs but I'm not sure it applies to other stub templates as well.-- Salix ( talk): 17:24, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
Hi,
If someone is interested in spending time fixing the hundreds of articles with nowiki tags, I made some modifications in
WPCleaner to help on this. To activate this detection, edit
Special:MyPage/WikiCleanerConfiguration and add the following contents (with the <source>...</source>
tags, so clearly with the wiki markup editor):
# Configuration for error 518: nowiki tags
error_518_bot_enwiki=true END
After that, in WPCleaner the Abuse filters button lets you choose which Abuse filter you are interested in (choose 550) and gives you the list of pages having triggered that filter recently. When you analyze a page, <nowiki>...</nowiki>
tags are found and suggestions are given to fix them. It's quite basic, so if you think of any enhancement, tell me. --
NicoV (
Talk on frwiki) 17:28, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
I did some edits in the Visual Editor (which is very, very nice, by the way!), but then switched to Edit Source for more fine control on my edits. All my Visual Editor modifications vanished, and I couldn't get them back even when I tried to go back to the visual editor. Very annoying! Ochado ( talk) 18:55, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Shiva&oldid=564830932 -- Redtigerxyz Talk 19:27, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
When a user makes an edit in the visual editor and then clicks the "Cancel" button, a dialog comes up asking whether the user wants to leave the editor without saving. The two buttons on this dialog are "OK" and "Cancel". Some users might find it confusing that clicking the "Cancel" button on the web page leads to a "Cancel" button on the dialog that cancels the cancellation. 128.84.98.128 ( talk) 19:55, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
Changed tracking to new bugzilla:51655. Ignatz mice• talk 03:17, 19 July 2013 (UTC)
I made some edits to an article with VE, but when I tried to save (after final review), nothing happened. Well, the moving blue and white stripes appeared for a second, but then nothing, still looking at the save dialog. I discarded my edits (this is one of the least fun features of VE) and went to the source editor and tried to make the changes. Found that the database was locked so the slaves could catch up. Waited a minute and made the save. I wouldn't have discarded my first efforts if VE had let me know what was going on and let me wait and retry. Currently, Blown save is a redirect to Save (baseball) (and it's not a statistic any player desires); we may soon need a hatnote there to mention the VE variety of blown save. Chris the speller yack 20:53, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
If I try to use VisualEditor on the most recent version of Firefox, version 22.0, I get You are using a browser which is not officially supported by VisualEditor. Pseudonymous Rex ( talk) 03:11, 19 July 2013 (UTC)
I've hitherto more-or-less limited my input to describing bugs - albeit many of them are what are termed "enhancements", ie requests to regain some of the functionality hitherto available which is lost in VE. I see I've been in the top 10 contributors to this page, so perhaps it's time for something of an overview.
I'm with the many others who reckon VE is not yet ready to be made the default editor for new and inexperienced editors, registered or IP. There are too many facilities missing. It seems likely to lead them into making bad edits, which other editors will have to fix after them. I'm sure that the problems already identified - including our "enhancement" requests - provide enough work for the development team for the foreseeable future, without the need for more eyes to find more bugs yet.
My ideal scenario at this point would be: new and IP editors use Edit Source by default, but are given a prominent announcement on the lines of "A new Visual Editor is under development but not yet bug-free: if you would like to use it instead of the long-established Text Editor, click HERE. If you have any comments on the new editor, please click on the FEEDBACK button." Existing editors get the choice but are told clearly how to choose whether VE or Edit Source is their default editor. Announcements about MAJOR step-changes in VE are made to all editors, using Echo (brilliant suggestion someone made above), so that they can make an informed choice to switch to use it at a future point when it's good enough.
I can see that "bugs" which will actually crash the system or totally mess up someone's editing session have to be a priority, but many important aspects of the editor experience are "enhancements": areas where VE does not yet match the editing experience we had with the old Text Editor plus our various gadgets, browser-dependencies, etc, and where the developers' response sometimes seems pretty negative.
Things where VE seems dangerous include:
Some of the things which make VE editing sessions harder work than Edit Source, or mean that I make less good edits, are:
{{Şanlıurfa-geo-stub}}{{Coord missing|Turkey}} {{DEFAULTSORT:Cilikya}} [[Category:Populated places in Şanlıurfa Province]]
No blank lines, two templates on same line, generally grotty to read and edit.
I'm struggling on, using VE most of the time (but occasionally just going straight to Edit Source when I know it'll make life a lot simpler, or want to copy and paste a ref from another article, etc). I don't think VE is yet good enough to make it the default editor for our newest recruits. It has massive potential, but it's not ready. I'm doing my best to help, by carefully pointing out bugs, as are many other editors (though it's a pity that one of the sharpest minds on the project, who figures on the list of feedback page contributors, was banned for a month on 4th July so can't currently help).
Very few of the articles on my watchlist seem to be being edited using VE, and even when stub-sorting I don't seem to be finding many VE edits, but if use of the current VE becomes more common I fear that there will be a lot of cleanup to be done, or a lot of grotty edits going past un-noticed and damaging the encyclopedia.
Please let's all concentrate on getting more of the bugs/enhancements fixed, bringing VE up to the standard we ought to be offering to new editors, and please revert the decision to make it the default for new and IP editors, postponing this until it's a better product. Pam D 22:03, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Fifthed, or sixthed, or whatever. Hoping (in response to Wittama) that higher-ups at the WMF will use some common sense and roll with the punches. Ignatz mice• talk 04:02, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
I agree and thank PamD for pulling quite a lot of the 'near critical' problems together into an essay. Regarding templated messages like {{ Use British English}}, see bugzilla:51322, and for geocoords and {{ top icon}} see bugzilla:51420. We need to find or file bugs for the other problems that PamD has raised. John Vandenberg ( chat) 05:08, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Fully agree the essay above. -- WS ( talk) 10:48, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
+1 on Pam's essay and thanks to her for her careful work in compiling it. I have been working on a list of reasons why, though still experimenting with VE, I go straight to Edit source when I want to do something accurately or quickly, but she has covered most of it. JohnCD ( talk) 11:13, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
you can't tell whether you got it right or not and are likely to assume it's all gone horribly wrong.A system should never, ever, make its users wonder about whether it worked or not. Until such time as VisualEditor can be used without the fear of any kind of uncertainty, it is not ready for general usage. — Scott • talk 11:36, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Trying to edit list of references and it fails (no list). Try editing individual reference and there is no explanation of title= and HREF=. Can't hide URL. "What are the rules for references" should be accessible from the dialog. "Edit reference list" should allow easier updates. tygrus ( talk) 06:58, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Not sure if this belongs here but here an IP user complained that there was no possibility to add an mdash: http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=DDT&diff=564582042&oldid=564436694 and consequently s/he had to use the non-VisualEditor. Greetings -- hroest 09:24, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
T53683 I've just tested VE with adding a reference, then cleaned up the resulting mess. It wasn't exactly intuitive, as slow as one has come to expect of VE, and afterwards I had to manually add a retrieved date and add the square brackets. Before this is ready to come back for a fresh round of beta testing I would suggest adding a question "did you check that site today" and then add the retrieved date. Better still simply tip people back into the classic editor when they do complex stuff like adding referenced content. Ϣere SpielChequers 21:27, 17 July 2013 (UTC)