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Citation title= parameter filled in as "pageMetaTitle" in curly braces instead of actual page title

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T123079
Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: I observed this problem in an edit result; I do not use VE myself.
Steps to Reproduce: this diff
Results:
Expectations: The title parameter should be filled in with something reasonable, or if a title is not available, VE should prompt the human editor to input a title. Creating a citation without a title (in en.WP) or with {{pageMetaTitle}} as the title results in a red error message in the saved page.
Page where the issue occurs this diff
Web browser Unknown
Operating system Unknown
Skin Unknown
Notes:
Workaround or suggested solution

I am assuming that this bug is related to VE, since the edit summary was tagged with "Visual Edit" and it doesn't seem like something that a human would type into a citation parameter value. I looked through the open VE bugs and did not see this one listed. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:53, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Can't create a different citation via copy and edit in the same article (works between articles)

Because it is painful to create a template citation (especially without named parameters) in the VE, I decided the easiest way to create another of the same template was to copy an existing one and just edit a couple of parameters (which is relatively easy in the VE). I do this all the time. So I copied and pasted the citation (great, two citations visible). And then I edited the new one (great, two citations visible) and then saved. Unfortunately what the VE did on save is decide that this was only one citation with the details updated (that is, the original citation was deleted). What the VE thought I wanted was to reuse the citation and then change both, whereas I wanted to copy the content of the citation creating a new citation and edit it. Doing this create-citation-via-copy-and-paste normally works for me because in the past I am doing the copy-and-paste from one article to another. But this time I was copying from within the same article.

Here's the edit where I destroyed my Magistrate Court citation as a byproduct of creating my Small Debt Courts citation: [1]

Is there a way to copy the citation content rather than the citation itself? Otherwise it is easy for the VE user to destroy an existing citation without intending it (another of those "enrage the community" scenarios). I had assumed that there was a difference in the semantics of copy a citation (via copy and paste) and "Cite > Reuse" but it seems the behaviour is the same? Kerry (talk) 22:43, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Kerry, this is do-able, but you have to copy the contents of the ref tag, rather than the entire thing. Select your footnote and click the "Cite" button in the toolbar (must be the one in the toolbar). Choose Manual > Basic, and then select and copy the contents of the ref tag. Cancel that, and open a new Cite > Manual > Basic, and paste in the contents. Now you can edit them, without the ref tags themselves having the same name or being linked in any other way. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:25, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T118796

You've already said on Redrose64's talk page you will not fix this. I posted T118796 and it was closed for unknown reasons that nobody will explain. Messes like this are ridiculous. Why in tarnation does it add the magicwords on the same line as section header. It's getting worse as I'm seeing these more and more. Why in the world are NOEDITSECTION or INDEX even an option? I keep seeing FORCETOC on articles with no section headers or more than four. I've yet to see one used properly with VE. Bgwhite (talk) 06:45, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Found another one. Adding a FORCETOC to an article with 15+ section headers already and a {{toc}} template. The edit before that is also full of VE's barf. Bgwhite (talk) 07:02, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Hungry Rabbit was speedied, so I can't see the diffs.
  • Why not add the magic word on the same line as the section header? It's not what I would do while hand-formatting wikicode, but it does appear to work there (to my surprise; wikitext is usually quite picky about having section headings begin on the first character of the line).
  • Does it truly matter if there's a pointless FORCETOC on a page? Sure, it's pointless, but is it a bad enough mistake to be worth searching for and reverting? As a practical matter, I really don't think that it's possible for any software to figure out whether someone added FORCETOC for a valid reason. You can't even say that it should be suppressed if there are more than four sections, because my next edit might be to split the article. (This problem might be reduced when visual editor starts displaying and updating TOCs.)
  • The Apprentice (UK TV series) includes hrefs and colors, neither of which can be added in VisualEditor's table tool; I assume that this means that the table was copied from another website.
  • As previously explained, NOEDITSECTION and INDEX are options because (a) some wikis, including some Wikipedias, actually use them, even though this one doesn't; and (b) because if the boxes to change those settings are taken away, then it will be impossible to remove those codes from inside VisualEditor (e.g., when someone types those codes in the wikitext editor, or when someone imports a page from another Wikipedia where those are used). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:26, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Why not add magic words on same line as section header? Adding multiple magic words in the middle of an article is fine for you? It is not easy to find them.
  • Yes it matters. Adding FORCETOC in an article where it is not needed is cluttering up the article. Having thousands of articles with these tags is ok? Having a newbie figuring out why the TOC is showing up for an article with one section is ok?
  • Table copied? Why is it ONLY showing up in VE? I've never seen it in a manually edited article. It's also showing up in other tags, not just tables. If it is only in VE, then VE is doing something wrong.
  • NOEDITSECTION and INDEX are not needed on enwiki. Not having the edit link show up is ok? Having crap littering up the article is ok? It is NOT impossible to remove them... 1) it is not needed on VE 2) An if statement makes the "add" non functional, but not "delete" works fine.
I'm getting tired and worn down from fixing VE's and CX's crap. I'm getting tired of spending 1-2 hours a day just fixing VE and CX's mistakes. Not just minor ones like magic words. Bgwhite (talk) 22:28, 15 December 2015 (UTC)
Part of the problem here is that editors are changing something, with which they are experimenting, but they probably don't realize that their experiment is being saved, because they see no VISUAL difference after dismissing the settings dialog. At the same time nothing in the edit panel is telling them: "The following options should rarely be changed and doing so might violate policy". I think that should and can be better communicated to the user. I do think the options should be available however. I mean, if they aren't there I'm sure people would also be screaming murder. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:59, 15 December 2015 (UTC)
With FORCETOC in particular, it's also possible that they're trying to make the TOC display inside the visual editor. If that's the case, then this problem will be solved when the dynamic TOC is finally moved to production (no ETA on that project). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:27, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Wbm1058's general comments on VE editing of magic words

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T122884
  • FYI, I just became aware of this issue due to an article on my watchlist. See Talk:Electropop#"New section", and observe the recent edit history and User talk:67.101.6.127 to see the drama that this VE feature is causing. Observe that it took eleven months for the __NEWSECTIONLINK__ on that article to be detected and removed. Is there a way to get a complete list of all namespace 0 pages on English Wikipedia that have __NEWSECTIONLINK__ on them? If you must keep this VE capability, I suggest implementing an "advanced features" switch which activates stuff like this, which is turned off by default. The whole premise of VE is to give new editors a less complicated, more intuitive editing experience, and stuff like this is running counter to that goal. Before long, if you keep going this direction, you will have an editing experience that is just as complicated as Wikitext! I would guess that 99% of Wikitext editors are blissfully unaware of __NEWSECTIONLINK__, and thus would never accidentally add it. Wbm1058 (talk) 19:35, 25 December 2015 (UTC)
  • FYI: Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-05-08/Technology report: New magic word __NEWSECTIONLINK__ was introduced, which allows users to add a "new section" link (shown as a tab in Monobook) to pages which aren't talk pages. — Wbm1058 (talk) 20:02, 25 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Searching for this, I get about 82 hits, but none in article-space. I'm dubious. I think the search here on namespace zero is failing for some reason. Observe from many of the links in this list, that the way most legitimate NEWSECTIONLINKs get added, is by an expert (power user, if you will) in response to a village pump query. – Wbm1058 (talk) 20:22, 25 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Aha, I figured it out! You need to search on insource:"NEWSECTIONLINK", about 72 hits in article-space – Wbm1058 (talk) 20:33, 25 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Per Wikipedia:Controlling search engine indexing, __NOINDEX__ and __INDEX__ are disabled in article space, the Draft namespace, and the Draft talk namespace; they have no effect there. This is controlled by the MediaWiki software setting $wgExemptFromUserRobotsControl. On other projects, the exempt namespaces are the same as $wgContentNamespaces, which is set to main space on almost all Wikimedia projects – see here and here. — Wbm1058 (talk) 13:53, 26 December 2015 (UTC)
  • While VE shouldn't be tagging articles with __NEWSECTIONLINK__ in the first place, note that WP:AWB thinks it should be placed elsewhere, and moves it, e.g. diff and diff. – Wbm1058 (talk) 14:30, 26 December 2015 (UTC)
  • VE should not save edits which attempt to use {{DISPLAYTITLE}} in a way that does not actually change the displayed title. See this edit which I reverted. Perhaps, ironically, Template:DISPLAYTITLE has the best documentation for proper use of this magic word. DISPLAYTITLE changes the fullpagename in a simple and limited way. Most changes to the "displayed title" will require a page move to implement. – Wbm1058 (talk) 16:05, 26 December 2015 (UTC)
    • OTOH, if you set DISPLAYTITLE intentionally, immediately before moving the page, then I think you'd be upset to discover that your correct action had been automagically reverted because The Computer Knows Better Than You. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:48, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
      • No, I would not be upset. Just show the user an error or warning message that tells them they need to move the page to change the title in a way that's more than cosmetic (i.e. beginning with a lower case letter or using italics). They're probably more upset when DISPLAYTITLE doesn't do what VisualEditor implies it will. Wbm1058 (talk) 00:25, 6 January 2016 (UTC)
  • This example demonstrates the various issues here, with allowing inexperienced editors to mess with magic words:
    • They use {{DISPLAYTITLE}} to tweak the displayed title, but specify no changes from the default display of the title
    • They use __NOEDITSECTION__ to suppress the ability to edit individual sections – why?
    • Yet they also use __NEWSECTIONLINK__ to force the "new section" tab to allow the addition of a new section at the end. Though whether it's conceivable that there could be another valid section after External links, I don't know of any
    • A pointless addition of __INDEX__, which is ignored in article-space
    • A pointless addition of __FORCETOC__ to an article that already has ten sections, and many more subsections
    — Wbm1058 (talk) 19:08, 26 December 2015 (UTC)
  • There are only about 80 hits in article-space on __NOEDITSECTION__. Not sure whether there is any style guidance on what the appropriate uses of this are, but at least many of these were not placed by visual edits. – Wbm1058 (talk) 20:47, 26 December 2015 (UTC)
  • I'm cleaning up the last dozen or so article-space __NEWSECTIONLINK__s using VE. This diff shows acouple of places where VE should have left newlines for better Wikitext source readability, but did not. What the diff of that edit should have looked like. And why didn't the references have a section heading? Wbm1058 (talk) 16:32, 27 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Perhaps at some point this should be refactored to separate sections on each magic word, but for now I'll just keep adding comments sequentially as I work through this.
  • Only about a dozen unnecessary uses of NONEWSECTIONLINK in article space. Likely all of them were placed by visual edits. – Wbm1058 (talk) 04:14, 28 December 2015 (UTC)
  • THIS shows the absurdity of putting "New section" tabs in article-space. I added a new section, and it put it at the very bottom, below the navbox! That is not where a new section for references should have been added! No new sections should be added below a navigation box. – Wbm1058 (talk) 21:35, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
  • I updated and wrote more thorough documentation for Template:INDEX which also covers the magic word. Really, VisualEditor should obey the $wgExemptFromUserRobotsControl variable. In namespaces that this is set to disable, it should not even offer the end-users the opportunity to click any buttons related to indexing. Keep it as simple as possible for the user. Bonus points if VisualEditor automatically removes attempts to set INDEX in $wgExemptFromUserRobotsControl namespaces, as I'd like AWB to do as well, if it doesn't already. Wbm1058 (talk) 01:08, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Citations

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:43.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/43.0

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Isaac_Asimov&gettingStartedReturn=true&veaction=edit

I could add citations to most of the citations needed to this Asimov page as I have a collection of most of his major works but alas, I find your system hard to understand and I am an educated man.

Brian.richard.sears (talk) 02:25, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

@Brian.richard.sears: [Not directly related to VE, admittedly, but still relevant] Direct citations of an author's works are generally undesirable - they are primary sources; Wikipedia strongly prefers secondary sources (see WP:WPNOTRS). Or, to put it otherwise, we have a very strong preference for a citation to a review of a novel in The New York Times rather than a citation to a page in that novel. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:17, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Photographs

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.106 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Middle_Park,_Victoria&veaction=edit&vesection=4 I live locally and have some images to donate. How can I upload? I get a message saying I have to make lots of edits first.

Fmackz (talk) 14:36, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi Fmackz, and welcome to Wikipedia!
Most people upload their images to Commons:, which is a central repository. You can do that directly at commons:Special:UploadWizard.
I'd like to know more about the error message that you were getting. Did you try Insert > Media, and then the upload tab inside the visual editor? Or did you try Special:Upload directly? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:58, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

webkit-fake-url turning up in edits

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T118364

This edit inserts a webkit-fake-url into a page, probably as a result of a image cut-and-paste attempt from a Webkit-based browser like Safari -- see [2]. Insertion of these fake urls should probably be detected, and prevented. This is probably a special case of a more general bug involving wikitext generated by the VE from browsers creating DOM trees with links containing unexpected/peculiar URI schemes, and should be addressed with a whitelist approach for safe URI schemes, not a blacklist approach. (For instance, I wonder what might happen if a data: URI were to get through the VE in a similar way -- at the very least, it would fill the page with base64-encoded grot, and at the worst, might conceivably create a security hole, if combined with hypothetical bugs elsewhere).

Update: webkit-fake-url also seems to be turning up in article titles: see this search. This is probably because of the creation of redlinks like the one created by this revision. My first guess is that this appears to be caused by the same problem as above, followed by the user following that red link, then attempting to drag-and-drop their image into that new page, too.

The dates for the deletion discussions on these articles dates back to August 2015, suggesting that this behavior has originated quite recently, either because of rchanges in VE behavior, or in browser behavior, around that time. -- The Anome (talk) 22:08, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Could someone please file an issue-tracker item for this? It appears to me that this represents, if not an actual security leak, at least an example of stuff from peculiar DOM constructs leaking into wikitext in a way they definitely shouldn't, and investigating and fixing it might reveal other places where more validation might be needed. -- The Anome (talk)
@Whatamidoing (WMF):. I'd put it in Phabricator myself but I don't understand the issue. Thryduulf (talk) 13:34, 7 January 2016 (UTC)
It appears that it was reported back in November at phab:T118364. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:01, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Ref tags with an apostrophe in the name parameter not displayed as references

Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: Edit a section containing a reference containing a name= parameter
Steps to Reproduce: Load any page/section with a reference as described (e.g. Bromsgrove railway station#History or my sandbox) for editing in VisualEditor
Results: The reference is shown as plain paragraph text
Expectations: The reference is shown as a reference
Page where the issue occurs Spotted at Bromsgrove railway station#History, tested at User:Thryduulf/sandbox (permalink).
Web browser Tested in Firefox 43.0 and Chromium 47.0.2526.73
Operating system Xubuntu 14.04 (64-bit)
Skin Monobook
Notes:
Workaround or suggested solution enclose all references containing apostrophes in quote marks.

Thryduulf (talk) 13:32, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

According to WP:REFNAME, ref names with apostrophes are not valid unless they have quotation marks around the name. Strangely, your ref names do not generate an error message. You might want to ask about this on the Village Pump (Technical). – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:03, 7 January 2016 (UTC)
Hmm, given that the parser works when apostrophes and spaces are included, and VE works when spaces are included I'm not sure that that the documentation is correct. If I edit the reference in VE, then it adds a nowiki (curiously not where I edited, but as part of the </ref>) making a mess of all the references[3] - which it really should not do. If I try to put quotes around it, then it just nowikis the entire reference [4] (second part of change), which produces less mess but is less useful. Thryduulf (talk) 16:06, 7 January 2016 (UTC)
The documentation is technically correct. There is a gap between what's officially support and what the parser currently fails gracefully on.
The nowiki tags appear because you're editing a line that is recognized (by Parsoid) as matching wikitext. It doesn't have anything to do with the validity of the ref name itself. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:06, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Template documentation

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T51772

I would like visual editor to link to a template's documentation when you insert a template. This can provide more detailed information than TemplateData can impart. If you try to put links in the "description" field then they are ignored. Ideally the link would appear automatically whenever a /doc page is present. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:37, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

This is a long-standing request that has unfortunately been given the "lowest" priority on Phabricator. Thryduulf (talk) 13:45, 7 January 2016 (UTC)
There is a link when the template has no TemplateData. I don't know why they aren't providing the same link when TemplateData exists. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:10, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

VE appears to put external URLs in citation publisher= parameters

Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: It appears that someone used VE to insert a citation.
Steps to Reproduce:
Results: VE appears to have inserted a URL pointing to plus.google.com into the |publisher= parameter. this diff
Expectations: VE should not insert a URL into the |publisher= parameter. It causes a red error message, and the URL does not accurately describe the publisher.
Page where the issue occurs this diff
Web browser unknown. I did not make the edit.
Operating system unknown
Skin
Notes:
Workaround or suggested solution

– Jonesey95 (talk) 05:19, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

This was discussed, extensively, a month ago; see item #79 of Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive 2015 3. However, I have no idea if there was any consensus as to what (a) whether this was a complete error or just a bad implementation; (b) the extent of the problem; (c) what software was causing the problem; (d) what needed to be done to fix the situation; and (e) what priority to assign the problem. Related to that, I'm not convinced that the Phab ticket accurately describes the issue. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:06, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
If Jonesey95 doesn't mind me butting in, I seem to only get this error if I'm trying to add links to the websites of smaller, local newspapers or organisations. And it's always the google plus thing described in #79 that I get. It tends to happen when I just copy and paste the url from the address bar. (Also, thanks for the error report, I was away for #79 and thought I was copying the wrong thing.) Red Fiona (talk) 23:31, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
This happens because the website has directly defined the publisher as being at that plus.google.com link, in the HTML for that page. It seems to have been related to SEO/promotion efforts. Google's program has been discontinued, so this will only be seen on websites that haven't updated their sites (e.g., smaller, local newspapers).
This is a fundamental limitation of all automatic citation filling systems: If the publisher chooses to provide garbage, then the machine will accurately and precisely copy the garbage into the citation. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:52, 7 January 2016 (UTC)
VisualEditor is not an automatic machine. It is a tool that humans use to edit WP articles. Human editors are responsible for their edits, and VE is enabling them to put garbage into citation parameters, which creates red error messages for other human editors to clean up. VE, if it is to be a clever tool, should refuse to insert URLs in parameters where URLs are invalid. URLs are easy to detect and discard. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:47, 7 January 2016 (UTC)
The citation filling is not done by VisualEditor. It is done by the mw:citoid service. It is every bit an automatic tool as WP:reFill/Reflinks, Diberri's template filler, and the default-on WP:RefToolbar.
I agree that these automatic citation fillers are all tools that humans use, and that these human editors should always check the results to see whether they make any sense, regardless of which of these tools they are using. This may be unrealistic in practice (e.g., a new editor is unlikely to know what "correct" looks like), but as you say, it is the responsibility of the humans who use a tool to make sure that they use it correctly.
If this community doesn't want to see red error messages for URLs in the citation templates, then this community should probably stop making the template produce that error message. That error message is not inherent; it is the choice of the community to have it. One way (not the only way) to do that is to silently omit URLs that are present in the |publisher= field, rather than to add a red error message after them. However, before making that choice, you'd have to think about whether there are any publishers whose actual names are confusingly similar to a URL. (Presumably someone thought that through before choosing to flag any such names as errors.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:40, 8 January 2016 (UTC)
ReFill is a good comparison. When ReFill suggests the insertion of invalid data, we report it on the tool's talk page and its developer typically modifies the tool to help editors avoid inserting that bad data into articles. All I am asking is for VE/citoid to do the same. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:16, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Website

Relatedly, I'm seeing a lot of |website=domain-name-of-url errors from citations added by the VisualEditor tool. It is incorrect to put the domain name in the website parameter of the {{cite web}} template. That parameter should be the name of the site (e.g. "ESPN"), not the name of its server (e.g. "espn.com"). —David Eppstein (talk) 01:56, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

I believe that this happens when no other information is available. If you have a diff handy, please share it; then we could check to see whether I'm right. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:52, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Untitled - Pretty Cure

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 7520.67.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.110 Safari/537.36

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

2601:782:100:5780:C45B:162C:78F4:81CE (talk) 13:03, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

VE helping a new editor

[5]. Editor wants to tag his own creation for G7 speedy deletion (good!), but by using the default VE manages to get it nowikied. Stichting Toekomstbeeld der Techniek (STT) looked like this (in wikitext mode) after his last attempt: <p role="presentation"> <nowiki>{{db-g7}}

</nowiki> which doesn't give a good result. The strange "p role" tags were added [6] here. What a mess. How long has this thing been "live" now? Fram (talk) 15:45, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Copying images between articles using VE (weird stuff happens)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T108504
Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: I had added an image File:Collinsville mine disaster - funeral procession.JPG with caption "Miners marching ..." into Collinsville mine disaster. I wanted the same photo and caption in Collinsville Cemetery.
Steps to Reproduce: So, opening Collinsville mine disaster in VE, I selected the photo (the image and caption went "blue") and Cntl-C to copy. I then opened Collinsville Cemetery in VE, clicked in the text where the image belonged, and Cnrl-V to paste it. I got the photo OK but it had no caption. Later, having manually added the caption, I saved Collinsville Cemetery.
Results: I then noticed that the caption was in the article but in the body of the text, not as the caption of the image. To confirm what I saw, I repeated the exercise with a 2nd photo of the funeral (the one with coffins on the truck), adding it first to Collinsville mine disaster with a specific caption, and then copy-and-pasting it into Collinsville Cemetery. Same result: the caption was put in the text and the photo had no caption. Using the source editor, I found that this is what was pasted in (for the images):

[[File:Collinsville_mine_disaster_-_funeral_procession.JPG|link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Collinsville_mine_disaster_-_funeral_procession.JPG|thumb|Miners marching at the head of the funeral procession from Anzac Hall to the Collinsville Cemetery, Thursday 14 October 1954]]

[[File:Collinsville_mine_disaster_-_miners_flanking_the_coffins_in_the_funeral_procession,_Thursday_14_October_1954.JPG|link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Collinsville_mine_disaster_-_miners_flanking_the_coffins_in_the_funeral_procession,_Thursday_14_October_1954.JPG|thumb|Miners marching beside the truck bearing the coffins in the funeral procession, Thursday 14 October 1954]]

So although the caption is still in the image, it does not render (so it looks like there is no caption in VE), possibly because of this extra link parameter (what's that all about)? Note the caption was in fact duplicated into the text as well.

Expectations: the photo with its caption would be the same in both articles
Page where the issue occurs diffs of the two paste edits (one for each photo): [7] [8]
Web browser Chrome the latest
Operating system Windows 8.1
Skin Monobook/Vector?
Notes: Any additional information. Can you provide a screenshot, if relevant?
Workaround or suggested solution Add one here if you have it.

Kerry (talk) 06:34, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

This looks like a fun little mess. I'll see if I can reproduce it tomorrow in a different browser. You can read about the "link" thing at Wikipedia:Extended image syntax. It lets you change what happens when you click on an image.
Most of the devs were in San Francisco for a meeting last week, so getting a response might take a little bit longer than usual. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 07:21, 12 January 2016 (UTC)
You can find the solution at the page you provided, no need to wait for the devs: "The "link" parameter cannot be used in conjunction with "thumb", as "thumb" is always meant to link to the larger version of the image." As "thumb" is the default (and used in these images), and as "link" does nothing useful here anyway, "link" should never be used for on-wiki (or on-Commons) images. Simple (or not, as can be seen by the ridiculous magicwords discussion above, a problem noted here from the moment these were introduced in the VE toolbox but never acted upon by the WMF collective wisdom). It's depressing that this page hasn't changed one bit since the last time I was here. I checked the actual VE edits on enwiki a few days ago, and the amount of vandalism was disproportional (and the number of experienced editors using VE still extremely minimal). All attempts from the WMF to make it the standard editing experience seem to have had very little impact apart from luring in some newbies. Fram (talk) 08:18, 12 January 2016 (UTC)
Hi Fram, nice to hear from you again !
The problem with link= was reported like 6 months ago (see phab:T116463 and phab:T108504, even triaged as high priority 2 months ago), but nothing seems to be done, leaving the task of cleaning up damaged articles to volunteers as usual. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 14:39, 12 January 2016 (UTC)
Hi Nico, glad to see that you are still around! I notice problems with VE and Flow, I don't fix them any more (vandalism is something else, while it gets facilitated by VE, it isn't caused by it). Since the WMF cares so little about the quality of enwiki (and the others like frwiki) or the happiness of the editors, they can get stuffed. Why they still introduce "features" like "linked" or the magicwords above which are of no use (or even outright detrimental) for Wikipedia without even bothering to check what the effect and the use will be, and with no contingency plan to undo the changes, is baffling. They now have a phabricator discussion about how to remove Flow from one page (without losing the Flow edits), as they apparently didn't think this was necessary at the time they asked us for a few pages to do "temporary" trials. It is an utterly disfunctional organisation with too much money and not enough brains or conscience. Fram (talk) 15:29, 12 January 2016 (UTC)
Looking again today at the edits I did on Collinsville Cemetery, it seems that the "link=" is a bit of a red herring. While it wasn't present in the images in Collinsville mine disaster, it's not causing any problem in Collinsville Cemetery in terms of interfering with "thumb" or anything else (whether its addition is desirable can be debated by others who know more about it). The main bug from my perspective is that the caption text is not copied across as caption text but as body text. Kerry (talk) 21:51, 12 January 2016 (UTC)
It's a dirty diff; it's harmless, but it shouldn't be happening. Based on your comments, I posted steps to reproduce this reliably at phab:T108504. That should help them determine whether their proposed fix will actually fix the problem (or one of the problems; it's possible that this 'symptom' could be caused several different ways, which would then require several different fixes.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:08, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

keyboard shortcut help page is taller than my screen, but no scrollbar provided

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T123775
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.152 Safari/537.36

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

קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 17:06, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for this, קיפודנחש. I've filed a bug. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:35, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

reference names deleted when converting from plain URLs

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T123778
Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: What were you trying to do (and why)?
Steps to Reproduce: Observed in the wild and then reproduced in my sandbox:
  1. Open or create any page that uses plain URLs inside reference tags with names (e.g. <ref name="Example">[https://www.example.com]</ref>)
  2. Load the page for editing in VE
  3. Single click on the reference to open VE's popup.
  4. Click the "Convert" button
  5. When the conversion is done, insert the reference
  6. Review and/or save your edits

Please mention if it's reproduceable/if you attempted to reproduce or not. -->

Results: The name parameter of the reference tag was deleted. If the citation is reused in this editing session, VE will generate it's automatic ":0" etc names in place of the deleted ones.
Expectations: the name parameter is preserved.
Page where the issue occurs Saharan silver ant - diff, diff of sandbox testing
Web browser Firefox 43.0
Operating system Xubuntu
Skin Monobook.
Notes: My guess is that when doing the conversion VE is deleting and replacing the <ref> and </ref> tags. If so, a simple fix would be to preserve them and change only the contents.
Workaround or suggested solution

Thryduulf (talk) 04:55, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, Thryduulf. I posted your diffs to phab:T123778. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:48, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

transclusion (in a table): it's not intuitive, and I could not understand how to add it to a cell

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.106 Safari/537.36

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

Nestashi (talk) 10:39, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

Nestashi, were you trying to add {{yes}} and {{no}} to that table? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:49, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

Crest Got Deleted

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.111 Safari/537.36

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

Eric.morrison1332 (talk) 05:11, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi Eric.morrison1332,
The image was removed by a bot, because the image file was deleted. It appears that someone has left you a message about this at your user talk page on Commons. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:56, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

Tags : time, abbr, ...

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T123774

Can VE stop adding <time>...</time> or <abbr>...</abbr> (exemple). This edit also includes useless and damaging <nowiki>...</nowiki> and useless invisible control characters. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 10:58, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

It appears that w:fr:Template:Ouvrage is adding these metadata tags. The editor seems to have selected and copied a line out of the {{Références}} template. While the editor's method of copying the citation is awkward and largely ineffective (e.g., the title isn't copied), it's probably correct to retain the metadata upon pasting. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:55, 7 January 2016 (UTC)
Whatamidoing (WMF) : the interest of <abbr>...</abbr> is to explain what the abbreviation means: if you look at pages on frwiki using Ouvrage, you will see that each abbr tag has a title parameter, so it's useful (and it's not in the wikitext). Retaining the abbr tag but discarding the title parameter (the only interesting part in it) is just plain stupid and not probably correct... In general, using HTML tags directly in wikitext is discouraged on most wikis, so putting such tags in copy/paste is usually bad. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 20:08, 15 January 2016 (UTC)
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T123782
Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: trying to change the link anti-German sentiment to be anti-German sentiment (link to section Australia) because it more precisely targets the material on the renaming of German-associated place names in Australia during World War 1
Steps to Reproduce: click on the anti-German sentiment link, click Edit in the pop-up box, add #Australia to the end of the existing link, clicked Done and see my desired link displayed. Then Save Page with an edit summary.
Results: Everything seems to have worked until you click on the link in the article and don't end up in the Australia section. Checked using source editor and indeed, there is no #Australia in the link. Reproducible.
Expectations: I can link to sections.
Page where the issue occurs Can't provide a diff as (although there was a Save Page to click and an edit summary -- that is, VE thought something had changed) there was no trace of the change in the history.
Web browser Chrome latest
Operating system Windows 8.1
Skin rather blotchy, got stuck in the sun for quite a while today when my car broke down :-(
Notes: A day or so ago I had a problem with setting up a redirect the other day to 1910–21 Australian region cyclone seasons#1918 Mackay cyclone which didn't seem to work (could be a related problem with redirects?)
Workaround or suggested solution use source editor

Kerry (talk) 14:10, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

Kerry, I'm sorry to hear about the sunburn. I hope that you recover soon. I just got bit by this bug this morning. It's phab:T123782 now. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:08, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

Format Lost

Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: place items in alphabetical order
Steps to Reproduce: no
Results:
Expectations: to get information back in the tile
Page where the issue occurs
Web browser
Operating system Windows 8
Skin
Notes:
Workaround or suggested solution

Essence0503 (talk) 22:57, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

I took a look at the article List of Alpha Kappa Alpha sisters which uses nested templates to create tables. Thus User:Essence0503 (a new user using the VE) was exposed to source syntax via these templates and unable to add a new entry given the complex syntax involved. I have now fixed the broken article (using the source editor). I don't think this is a VE bug as such, but the inevitable consequence of exposing VE users to complex source syntax via fields of templates. FWIW, I don't believe any inexperienced user (using either editor) would be able to add entries to this article given the complex nested template structure. And frankly I cannot see what benefit is derived from using nested templates in this article instead of a straightforward table, which could have been more easily edited by an inexperienced user using either VE or the source editor. Certainly, it's a most VE-unfriendly article! Kerry (talk) 00:17, 16 January 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for the report, Essence. It's a very complicated page.
For those who haven't looked, the page is using this:
{{Mem/f
|name=Elmer Lucille Allen
|chapter=[[Spalding University|Beta Epsilon]]
|nota=ceramic artist; one of the first African-American female chemists in the US
|ref=<ref name="ecallen">{{cite web |url=http://www.carnegiecenter.org/exhibit_elmerallen.html|title=Elmer Lucille Allen: Shibori and Ceramics|publisher=Carnegie Center for Art and History
|accessdate=2007-12-15 |archiveurl = http://web.archive.org/web/20070812225900/http://www.carnegiecenter.org/exhibit_elmerallen.html  |archivedate = 12 August 2007}}</ref>}}
to create this line in a table:
Elmer Lucille Allen Beta Epsilon ceramic artist; one of the first African-American female chemists in the US [1]
  1. ^ "Elmer Lucille Allen: Shibori and Ceramics". Carnegie Center for Art and History. Archived from the original on 12 August 2007. Retrieved 2007-12-15.
The two justifications usually given for this kind of template are that editing a complicated template (in the wikitext editor, which is all that existed when these old templates were created) is easier than editing a wikitext table, and that the templates make it impossible for most editors to change the format of the table (e.g., add an extra row or change the color scheme, for those that add colors), and therefore all pages using the template will match with each other. If the community wanted to get rid of them, then the templates could probably be WP:SUBST'd. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:11, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Small text and rowspan

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T53614

I apologize if this has been brought up before, but here goes: 1. Can small text be added to the text styling options? Right now there does not seem to be a way to create small text in Visual Editor. 2. With templates, it would be great to be able to make part of a row span across multiple rows. You can do it very easily in wikitext with "rowspan=n", but you can't do it in VE.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 16:57, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

3family6, setting rowspans in the visual editor is quick and easy. Select the cells you want to merge, go to the Table menu in the main toolbar, and choose "Merge cells".
The request for small text is phab:T53614. Code has been written for it; I don't know what's causing the delay. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:27, 18 January 2016 (UTC)
Okay, thanks!--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 20:28, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Reference names

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T92432
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52568

It's extremely inconvenient when VE automatically gives references names like ":0", ":1", ":2", etc. I could go on at great length as to why it's inconvenient, but trust me, it very very much is. Is there any way to prevent or remedy this? Could users be warned against doing that? DS (talk) 04:06, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

What do you propose as a better solution? Would the "auto1"/"auto2" reference names like the ones reFill generates satisfy you? – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:51, 13 January 2016 (UTC)
It would be nice if it could generate something vaguely meaningful by a human, e.g. smithjones for something with author surname(s) (usually available for books and journal articles), maybe a concatentation of the first 2-3 words of a title for a website or news which often don't have an author, eg. davidbowiedies (to pick a recent news heading). Of course, for uniqueness, there may need to be random digits added to the end, or meaningless names used for citations that just don't seem to have any field that usable as a source of meaningful names. With arbitrary templated citations, you might need to take the name of the template and combine it with the first "word" in the parameters, e.g. citeQPNMackay for {{cite QPN|12345|Mackay|town|accessdate=23 November 2015}}. I used to to generate these kind of identifiers when doing cross-compiling; generally they work quite well in "normal use".Kerry (talk) 08:24, 13 January 2016 (UTC)
No ref name at all is better than ":0", "autogenerated1", or whatever. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 20:15, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Insert Media ignores commons category

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T124709
Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: Add photos to the article Boer War Veterans Memorial Kiosk and Lissner Park
Steps to Reproduce: Click insert media, VE assumes article title as keywords for search
Results: No images were found, despite the article containing {{commons category-inline|Lissner Park}} where the photos resided
Expectations: It would exploit the knowledge of the commons category
Page where the issue occurs
Web browser
Operating system
Skin
Notes:
Workaround or suggested solution Manually typing the name of the commons category into Insert Media search terms

Kerry (talk) 01:09, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

They're talking about changing it to searching for images that you uploaded instead of the article title.
I wonder if something could be built to use Wikidata for searching. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:46, 23 January 2016 (UTC)
I think there's four common use cases (at least for me):
  • the photo I recently uploaded to Commons - easy enough
  • the photo I just found on Commons and for which the "use on a wiki" wikitext is sitting in my paste buffer and can't use it
  • want to grab something from the Commons category (if article has one)
  • want to search more generally (title is as good as any as the initial search)

and I don't usually want anything that's already in the article (maybe deprioritise?) Kerry (talk) 06:05, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

IP problem

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 7520.67.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.110 Safari/537.36

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

2601:782:100:5780:21D9:9679:F9C5:1935 (talk) 22:14, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Your problem is unrelated to VisualEditor. That page is semi-protected, which means that only people with an account and some prior edits can actually change it. This is normally due to too much vandalism by unregistered editors. You can request changes at Talk:Pretty Cure instead. Fram (talk) 07:21, 21 January 2016 (UTC)
Fram, there was no actual question here. Semi-protection was added 61 minutes after the IP posted this. Therefore, semi-protection did not prompt this message. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:31, 21 January 2016 (UTC)
You're right. Any idea what the edit tag "Visual edit: Switched" means? I know the tag "Visual Editor", but I can't recall this one and have no idea what triggers it specifically. Fram (talk) 20:44, 21 January 2016 (UTC)
"Switched" means they switched from Visual Editor to the wikitext editor while making the edit.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 04:49, 22 January 2016 (UTC)
Thanks, that makes sense. Fram (talk) 08:02, 22 January 2016 (UTC)
Or the other way around, and the fact that there's no way for us mere mortals to tell the difference is one of the minor annoyances on my list at the moment. (On the other hand, do we really want visualeditor-switched-to-ve, visualeditor-switched-to-wikitext and visualeditor-switched-back-and-forth?) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:43, 23 January 2016 (UTC)
One could do some encoding: Visual edit: Switched-3-V could mean a total of three switches, with editing initiated with VE; Switched-2-W would be two switches, starting with the the wikitext editor. But if we're not seeing a lot of indications that switching is causing problems, then such extra coding would probably be unnecessary. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:20, 23 January 2016 (UTC)
Not directly related but I'd be amazed if you saw anyone switching from wikitext to VE because, while switching the other way saves the changes you've made, as far as I've seen switching from wikitext to VE loses your changes. Red Fiona (talk) 17:18, 25 January 2016 (UTC)
It doesn't lose my changes. However, if you start in wikitext in a single section, then you can lose the rest of the article, which is Very Bad. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:46, 25 January 2016 (UTC)
The "Edit tabs" at the top of the whole page. There's a bug open if you use this to switch.
The end of the toolbar in the visual editor, showing the [[ ]] button to switch to wikitext
Red Fiona What is your browser and operating system? Because I've had a problem with losing changes when switching from wikitext to VE, but only if done through the tab, not the toolbar option.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 16:34, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
3family6 Most recent chrome on whatever the most recent Windows is. The only method I've ever used is switching via the buttons at the top of the page (which I think is the toolbar but may not be).Red Fiona (talk) 19:20, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
There's the "Edit" tab at the top of the page, and then, once you're in VE, there's also a toolbar button, "[[]]"", that let's you switch that way. I had a problem of switching from VE to source, and going through the toolbar instead of the tab seems to work.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 19:42, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

Switch editor only works twice

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T124708
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T123960
Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: Trying to alternate repeatedly between VE and Wikitext editing
Steps to Reproduce: First I started editing in VE, then I switched to Wikitext to do some template editing I couldn't do in VE. Then I switched back to VE, noticed an error, but when I switched to Wikitext again, all my additions were lost. I have not yet tried to reproduce this.
Results: What happened?
Expectations: What were your expectations instead?
Page where the issue occurs Lecrae discography, User:3family6/sandbox
Web browser Firefox 43.0.4
Operating system Windows 10
Skin Vector
Notes: Any additional information. Can you provide a screenshot, if relevant?
Workaround or suggested solution Use the VE toolbar instead of the tab when switching to source editor

3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 17:06, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

I'm sorry to hear that you lost your work. I suppose it's possible that you accidentally clicked on the "Discard changes" button; there's no "Are you sure you want to lose all your work?" confirmation there. I've requested that at phab:T123960. IMO that should be done even if it has nothing to do with your situation.
You also might have encountered one of the rare bugs in the switching process. I'll talk to the product manager about that, but I'm certain that the first request will be to please let him know if it ever happens again, because they really want to figure out how to reproduce it. The last time I heard them talking about it, they were thinking that it's something with the RESTbase system (=not caused by or controllable by you or your computer), but I don't know what their current thinking is. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:42, 18 January 2016 (UTC)
The discard changes warning did come up, as did a warning in Firefox prior to that. I went ahead with it anyway to test what would happen - at that point, it was only a few minutes of work that was easy to replace, so I felt that it was important to experiment to see what would happen. I replicated glitch just now in my sandbox - it did indeed happen again. For testing, make sure you edit in VE, then switch to wikitext, edit, switch back to VE, edit, then try to switch back to wikitext. I know that this had been an issue in the past.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 20:49, 18 January 2016 (UTC)
I just tried Firefox (on a Mac): four edits that just added plain text (VE, then wikitext, VE, then wikitext again), then switching to VE and saving my changes. No problems encountered. Did the problem edit session involve something more complicated, like adding a citation? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:24, 19 January 2016 (UTC)
On Lecrae discography I was editing a template. However, on my sandbox I just tried blank text, and the same thing happened. I tried this again, just now, on my sandbox, and the same thing happened. Perhaps its a script I'm running?--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 00:29, 19 January 2016 (UTC)
Or maybe it's Windows-specific. Does anyone else have Firefox 43 on Windows 10? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:09, 19 January 2016 (UTC)
I found someone to test this in Firefox on Windows 7; he was unable to reproduce this. Can you try this in a "Private browsing" window (as if you were logged out)? That would help us figure out whether it's something in your account or maybe a cache problem. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:48, 23 January 2016 (UTC)
When I tried it logged in through Private Browsing, the error still happened.--96.236.125.57 (talk) 20:34, 23 January 2016 (UTC)
I have another question for you: When you switch, do you click the icons in the toolbar (the pencil or [[ ]] buttons), or do you click the tabs at the top of the page? (They both should work the same, but...) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:56, 25 January 2016 (UTC)
Ah-haaa! That does make a difference! It seems to work when I switch to source editing through the toolbar.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 21:14, 25 January 2016 (UTC)
Thank you for the quick reply! I have updated the task with this information and pinged the product manager. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:33, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

Deleting table column result in incorrect layout

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T125703
Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: Delete table columns
Steps to Reproduce: #Create a wiki table with the following codes: 
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! rowspan=2|ColA
! colspan=2|ColB
|-
!ColB1
!ColB2
|-
|Field1
|Field2
|Field3
|}
  1. Use Visual Editor to delete the doublecolumn ColB.
Results: Field1 cell go to the right hand side of the table after saving the edit
Expectations: The Field1 cell stay down below ColA cell.
Page where the issue occurs https://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=长沙地铁1号线&diff=38947510&oldid=38607870
Web browser chrome for android ver. one of the recent edition
Operating system android 5.0
Skin vector
Notes:
Workaround or suggested solution edit wikicode after visualedit

C933103 (talk) 10:02, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for this very detailed and organized report. User:SSastry (WMF), since this looks correct in the visual editor, but saves incorrectly, I've tagged it for Parsoid, so you can check. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:46, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

VE doesn't cache an ongoing edit if browser suddenly closes

I was working in my sandbox on VE while also updating my anti-virus software, and the software shut-down my browser without any warning. I re-loaded my browser, but all my progress was lost. Typically, if something like this happens in the wiki-text editor, Firefox has a running cache, and my progress is usually preserved. This doesn't seem to happen with VE. Can this be rectified, or is it an inherent limitation of the application?--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 17:34, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for this note. The devs actually do have an idea about addressing this problem (what if the electricity goes out while you're typing?), but it won't happen for a while. In the meantime, "save early and save often" is still good advice, especially during system upgrades and thunderstorms. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:27, 3 February 2016 (UTC)
Due to the VE freeze-up issue I've noted below, in trying to get to an older, cached version of an ongoing edit in wiki-text, I just accidentally sent about three hours worth of work down the drain. Until the caching issue can be resolved, I will no longer be using VE to make extensive edits, as it is ultimately far less time-consuming to do them in wikitext, as I don't have to worry nearly as much about losing I work. This is disappointing, as VE was finally becoming faster and easier to use for most tasks than the wiki-text editor.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 20:22, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

Very small problem with (hopefully) very easy fix

When the edit session is finished and the page is saved, the page title still reads "Editing [Whatever topic]". To get the correct title, the page must be refreshed. This causes the minor irritation to the editor by erroneously indicating that the editor failed to save the work. Grammar'sLittleHelper (talk) 00:04, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

@Sfarney: It could be very helpful if you would indicate what operating system (Windows 7? Ubuntu?) and browser (IE8? Safari?) you are using. For example, I'm not seeing the problem you mention, at all. (latest Mac OS, Firefox). -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:13, 3 February 2016 (UTC)
Also, does it happen every time, or just some times? I've been having occasional problems with old versions of pages being loaded, mostly on talk pages (where only the wikitext editor is available). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:29, 3 February 2016 (UTC)
Whatamidoing (WMF), I too find the page displayed after saving an edit is not the rendering of the updated page but a re-rendering of the previous version. And I think I experience it with both editors. Is there some "race condition" going on here where the display of the "current" page after edit is kicked off before the updated page has been marked as the "current page"? Or maybe it's something to do with my browser or other local configuration. This is something I've seen on and off over the past several months. It's never reproducible but it happens enough to me that I don't think I am imagining it. But I don't think it's a problem in only one editor. I'm a lot further from the servers so with higher latency, I may more impacted by a race condition than someone closer. So I am not sure if this is the same as the problem being reported or not. Kerry (talk) 01:22, 4 February 2016 (UTC)

ISBN and nowiki

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T110347

When will ISBN be properly handled by VE ? It's been months that this problem has been reported, and VE is still regularly producing ISBN inside nowiki tags, the amount of maintenance work to do after VE is huge... example. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 11:17, 5 February 2016 (UTC) Edit: phabricator ticket opened almost 6 months ago...

I believe that different issues with ISBNs have been fixed at least twice, and the symptom has reappeared again. You're seeing the symptom, not the actual bug; "ISBN was nowiki'd when I typed it in the article" is unrelated to "ISBN was nowiki'd when I copied and pasted it from a Microsoft Word document", etc. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:56, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

how to edit title

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/48.0.2564.103 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2016_Tainan_earthquake&veaction=edit this article needs title editing - spell check

Vishakhamujoo (talk) 23:58, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

Hi Vishakhamujoo,
There is information at Help:Move on how to change the title of a page. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:57, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

edit on title does not launch the VE

I've had a couple of odd incidents recently where the VE didn't seem to launch after clicking "Edit". But I didn't seem to be able to reproduce them. But now I have one that's persistent. Go to Stephen Page. If I click on "Edit" on the top bar (next to View History), the VE opens. If I click on edit next to the page title (the words "Stephen Page"), it redraws the screen but doesn't start the VE. Clicking on edit on any of the sections seems to launch the VE. But this problem does not seem to occur on every article (having tested a few). What is special about Stephen Page? Kerry (talk) 00:37, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

Something definitely is broken. Not only can I confirm that trying to get into VE via the link to the right of the article title doesn't work (Mac, Firefox, both latest versions), but if one opens the lead section using the edit source link, then tries to switch to VE (via the pencil icon), the resulting dialog is broken (only two options - cancel and discard changes). -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:54, 1 February 2016 (UTC)
The section link for the introduction is a local gadget. Problems with it should be reported at MediaWiki talk:Gadget-edittop.js.
(The switch is working "as designed"; if you keep your changes, then everything except one the section that you opened will be blanked.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:09, 3 February 2016 (UTC)
I found another article with the same reproducible problem James Johnston, a disambiguation page. Kerry (talk) 22:46, 8 February 2016 (UTC)
If the gadget owner hasn't fixed the gadget yet, then I think we can safely assume that it's reproducible on 100% of pages. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:09, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
No, it is not a 100% problem. Click edit on the title does work on G:link and Environmental enrichment (neural) (just fixing a couple of random pages from my watchlist). I'm not discussing switching between editors (the discussion above seems a bit of a red herring to me); I'm just talking of invoking the VE on some article that has caught my attention. It may be that the gadget is failing before attempting to launch the VE (i.e. fault in gadget). But it may be that the gadget is attempting to launch the VE but for some reason the VE launch fails on certain articles. There is a definite pause during the failed launch which is similar to the VE launch pause (before the progress bar appears). It is not failing fast. Also the screen redraws a couple of times in quick sucession. While it's hard to see the first redraw because the second one is hard on its heels, it appears that the banner at the top is disappearing, just as it does when you launch the VE. I'm not convinced that this can be written off as a problem in the gadget. Kerry (talk) 22:06, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

Editing unusably slow on long page

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T126348
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/48.0.2564.97 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorsements_for_the_Republican_Party_presidential_primaries,_2016?veaction=edit

Initial load to edit takes ~10s (reproducible) Delay between keystrokes is long: it took 15s to finish typing a 10-word sentence.

The page has almost 1000 cites, this may be related.

– SJ + 16:35, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

SJ, I'm not having the same problem. Loading took seven seconds in Safari 9, and typing was easy.
(As a long-time editor, I question the value of having 852 sources in an article, most of which are primary sources: shouldn't it be relying upon secondary sources to aggregate that information, and then citing mostly the same few sources for most of the endorsements? And the page size is going to be painful for people with slow connections – it's well beyond WP:SPLIT range.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:04, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
Whatamidoing (WMF), update: This happens on all long pages with many cites, on Chrome + OS X, particularly towards the end of the page. Typing at the top of the page, no problem.
Trying again on a faster network with no latency: 21s to load the page for editing. 1s lag typing at the top of the page, before the first letter appears, minimal (0.1s) lag b/t characters. 20s to type a 10-word sentence at the end of the page. – SJ + 21:05, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
I notice the effect that SJ describes, though it's more 0.5 at the top and 1s at the bottom for me. At the bottom it is noticeably delayed however. I wouldn't be surprised if this is because the bottom does not benefit as much from the relayout and redraw optimizations that the browser applies. My macbook air is 3,5 years old. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:48, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

I have a similar machine from 2014. Filed a phabricator task with more details here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T126348#2013990

Notable to me: I don't get lag on Safari; on Chrome the lag is greater at the bottom of long pages, on Firefox it's greater at the top. And the amount of lag varies significantly over a short timespan. – SJ + 03:52, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for filing that. This seems like a very useful set of information. (Naturally, I was typing at the top of the article, which seems to be the least-affected place, too.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:25, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

Self selected special characters

Hello, among the special characters of the VE I use more or less only two (but very often): the (German) typographical quotation marks and the dash. In order to get them I now have to open the special character window, go to the "Symbols" part and then scroll to the character. I would like to select two, three characters so that they appear for me at a more prominent location. Ziko (talk) 16:41, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

Hi Ziko,
This is an interesting idea. Can you tell me what your preferred "prominent location" is? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:06, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
Oh, I know see that there is a "Often used" section at the top. Well, in general I would prefer not to have to open a menu window that costs me quite a buit of my screen space. I would like to have my 2-3 preferred special characters next to the "special character" (omega) icon. Actually I'd also like to get the "good" quotation marks simply when typing, e.g. after having made my choice in the preferences. Ziko (talk) 22:59, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
I'll pass along the idea. Are you on a Windows computer? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:30, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
Thanks! Yes, Windows and Firefox. Ziko (talk) 20:34, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T126487
Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: Navigate using cursor keys
Steps to Reproduce: Repeatedly, I use down arrow to navigate. At times, when I cursor into a link, the link highlights. However, down arrow no longer moves down. Hitting right arrow restores down arrow functionality.
Results: Down arrow had no effect.
Expectations: Down arrow moves the cursor down
Page where the issue occurs WP
Web browser Chrome 48.0.2564.97 m
Operating system W 10
Skin Monobook
Notes:
Workaround or suggested solution Right arrow

Lfstevens (talk) 06:16, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

I can't reproduce this on my Mac. Does anyone here have Windows 10? This link will take you to a random page, using Monobook (just in case the skin is important). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:59, 3 February 2016 (UTC)
Using Windows 10, Monobook, and the same Chrome build, I am unable to reproduce. Arrow keys work fine. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 20:03, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
Lfstevens, are you still having this problem? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:06, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
On Sterile insect technique, click "edit this page". Then press and hold the down arrow key. It gets stuck at Sanibel Island, Florida. Press right-arrow to free it. Press and hold down arrow again. It gets stuck in the table. Cheers! Lfstevens (talk) 22:56, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
Lfstevens, when it gets stuck, is it always at the very start (or end) of a line? (We can update the Phab task as needed later, but I wanted to get something started.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:12, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
Seems to be. Obviously, that would make it depend on the width of your window. Sanibel does begin the line in question.

Mine looks like this:

The sterile insect technique[1][2] is a method of biological insect control, whereby overwhelming numbers

of sterile insects are released into the wild. The released insects are normally male, as the females cause

the damage usually by laying eggs in the crop, or, in the case of mosquitoes, taking blood from humans.

The sterile males compete with wild males to mate with the females. Females that mate with a sterile male

produce no offspring, thus reducing the next generation's population. Repeated release of sterile males can

diminish small populations, although success with dense target populations have not been demonstrated.[3]

The technique has successfully been used to eradicate the Screw-worm fly (Cochliomyia hominivorax) in

areas of North America. Many successes controlled species of fruit flies, most particularly the Medfly

(Ceratitis capitata) and the Mexican fruit fly (Anastrepha ludens).

Insects are mostly sterilized with radiation, which might weaken them if doses are not correctly applied,

reducing their fitness.[4][5][6] Other sterilization techniques are under development which would not affect

fitness. 02:14, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

VE freezes up while switching to source editor

The title is pretty self-explanatory: VE sometimes will freeze up for me when I switch to source editor. The problem is, there's no way to get out of this except re-loading the page. And, as I mentioned above in a different section, right now VE doesn't cache. This pretty much negates the usefulness of the switch editor, since I should just save my work and then open the wiki-text editor to avoid this freeze-up. For bug purposes, I'm running Windows 10, Firefox 44.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 20:10, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

I'm sorry that you're having so much trouble. Is it still happening consistently on the second time you switch to the wikitext editor? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:51, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
I think it's due to a slow internet connection. The freezing issue in and of itself doesn't bother me that much, but that there's no way to abort the switch and wait until my connection issue resolves. With wikitext, if my internet connection goes in the middle of an action, I can just hit the back button. But that doesn't work for VE, as VE stays open.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 01:46, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
Addressing that problem is on the list for "someday", but it's probably going to be months before they even start. I'm sorry. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:17, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
I assumed that this would be low priority, but I'm trying to report any and all issues I have so that they can be documented and, hopefully, eventually worked on.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 06:08, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

Ref autofill allows duplication

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T126488

The reference autofill feature allows references to be duplicated. Shouldn't it instead re-use the old citation? Ugog Nizdast (talk) 17:24, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Hi Ugog Nizdast,
Re-use is already possible; you just click to the "Re-use" tab in the Cite dialog. But if it forces you to re-use, then you might not be able to do things that you want to do, e.g., "duplicating" a citation to a book so that you can change the page number. What do you all think would be best? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:00, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
Yea, aware of re-use option; just that if I can't remember whether I've already used a citation or not, ref-autofill will happily duplicate one already used one without my knowledge. Perhaps some notification would be nice? Ugog Nizdast (talk) 04:49, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
Good idea, Ugog Nizdast. I've posted it to phab:T126488. Feel free to edit the description yourself, if you want. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:22, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
Excellent. Thanks, Ugog Nizdast (talk) 11:25, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

Observations from training classes this week

I ran two training classes this week, my first large group experience with training with the VE. (The previous experience was only 2 users so I was in one-on-one contact with them as opposed to being mostly at the podium.) With perhaps one or two exceptions, these were all genuine new contributors.

(1) Something I noticed is that after you add a link, the pop-up box remains on-screen with an Edit button. While I know to just click outside the box to make it go away, this was not obvious to the trainees, and some were clicking Edit (despite not needing to Edit anything). The problem is that they see the overlaid box and believe they must "satisfy" something to make the box go away so they can continue editing. As the only call to action is the Edit button, they click it. Either the box should not be displayed after the link has been made, OR there is a button on the box that allows them to click Done/OK or a X on the top-right to close the box. A similar thing occurs when adding citations.

(2) Newly added citations don't display in the references list in Edit until you Save Page (well, the first one seems to, but not always the subsequent ones). This causes the user to think "it hasn't worked" and ask for help at that point.

(3) Some were often confused as to whether or not they were in edit/read and frequently did the wrong actions thinking they were in the "other" mode. Alas, it seems that the VE is sufficiently WYSIWYG that they could not spot the difference (which is both good and bad!). Although the tool bar is present when in edit mode, the area it occupies on-screen is a "busy zone" with banners etc in read mode and it seemed not to constitute an observable point of difference between the modes. It seems they are expecting a more obvious visual difference within the main text box. If the toolbar had a colourful outline or something, it might make it clearer that it was present (at least to the non-colourblind user).

(4) I had taught them to click link to remove the link with the crossed-circle icon, but never thought about telling them how to remove a citation. Some tried to remove citations by clicking the citation and expecting to get a similar button to click to remove (but only Edit is offered, not Delete). That seems to be an inconsistency in the interface in handling links and citations. When I showed you could backspace over a citation to remove it, it produced a reaction of surprise that such a little action could "remove so much work" without any kind of more explicit confirmation of intention (e.g. a Delete button or a Do you want to delete this? question).

(5) Infoboxes. Although I have never taught infoboxes in any of my training classes (never enough time and too much information in one session already for most people), there are usually some in the room who ask me about creating an infobox for their article as they see them in similar articles. This urge to create/edit infoboxes is a problem while the VE exposes markup in the infobox fields. I tried to shy away from it in the class situation (I had told them at the outset that the VE could not do everything but was adequate for beginner/intermediate use, but this is clearly not true in relation to infoboxes).

(6) Ditto Talk pages. I didn't discuss them beyond their purpose because I know they can't edit them in the VE. Unlike infobox boxes, new users rarely show interest in the Talk page (which is good for me in VE training) but bad when they start to need to use Talk pages. I know Flow was going to be the solution to Talk pages for VE people but now that appears to be cancelled as a plan, what's the deal with Talk pages and the VE users?

Anyhow that's my summary of issues I saw with genuine new users learning the VE in a classroom setting. Kerry (talk) 22:42, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

Leaving aside the talk page issue, as an experienced editor I sympathize with all of the other issues highlighted here. I figured out workarounds only through trial-and-error. I agree that these all would make it difficult for new editors.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 01:53, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
(2) is a huge problem; I'm sure there is a Phab out there. (3) is easily fixable: when in edit mode, the main editing window should have a background color; it can fairly subtle (I use yellow, via a user script). (4) is a great idea - when you click on a citation, the dialog should include (bottom right corner) a "Delete" button [and yes, it would be good to have a "confirm" pop-up if that button is clicked]. (5) can actually be taught fairly easily: copy, paste, and edit. [Expanded: find a similar article (with an infobox); go into VE mode, and copy the infobox; exit editing and go to the article where the infobox is to be added; go into VE mode, if not already there, and paste the box; click on it to edit it; edit the parameters; save.] Admittedly, changing the image in an infobox isn't quite trivial - but it's not that difficult, either. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 04:54, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
John Broughton - editing infobox parameters is still done in wikitext, just accessed through VE.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 06:09, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
Re copying infoboxes. My experience with Wikipedia edit training (both source and now VE) is that many users (particularly older ones) do not understand copy-and-paste as working across applications (it's just not in their mental model of computing). They understand they can copy and paste text within a single window (e.g. a Microsoft Word document) which they do by selecting the text and using Copy and Paste from the menu. However, to copy (say) a URL from the address bar of another tab in their browser into the URL field of a Wikipedia citation (whether source or VE) is not something they can grasp (they see the world as disjoint applicaitons). However, one in the VE training who was a lot more IT-savvy did manage to create a userbox by copying (see the diff). But as you can see, he did not realise that infoboxes were typed and hence he could not copy just any old infobox (he copied an organisation infobox, not a politician infobox, and hence the fields he added using the VE didn't work because they weren't fields expected by that type of infobox). Unfortunately the VE allows you to add any field without regard to whether it is used in the template (I am not an expert on templates, but I suspect that there is no easy way in general to determine what fields are valid in a template?). In the context of a one-on-one conversation, I was able to explain these things to him, but I am not sure the average newbie alone at home would have figured it out. And I carefully sidestepped a conversation about adding an infobox photo as Insert Media in VE can't do it. The only easy way I can think to do this "visually" would be in the "use this image" dialog where you add the caption would be to have a tick box saying "add this to the XXXX infobox" (for each infobox of type XXXX present in the article, usually only one type of infobox but some articles have 2 or 3) and pray that all infoboxes use the fields image/caption in a consistent way. Kerry (talk) 00:36, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
@3family6: Regarding "editing infobox parameters is still done in wikitext, just accessed through VE", that's not how I'd describe the situation. VE has a dialog for templates that clearly separates each parameter (infobox wikitext, by contrast, is often gnarly), and TemplateData, if implemented, is available to explain each parameter, as well as to limit which parameters are immediately presented. In short, a very different user experience. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:16, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

nowiki surrounds refs

When is [9], [10] and [11] ever going to be fixed? Bgwhite (talk) 09:08, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

In looking at the first, I filed three other bugs but was unable to reproduce that exact problem. The editor was copying from the German article.
User:SSastry (WMF), do you think that the nowiki tags around bare URLs is similar to phab:T121269 (only with ref tags instead of templates)? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:19, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
[2] and [3] look like the known issue of VE not always converting urls to A-tags. VE doesn't convert bare urls to A-tags if you type the url and immediately hit Insert (vs. entering a space or taking some other action that signals that the url-entry is complete -- this then triggers autolinking inside VE which leads to the url being converted to an A-tag). This is very easy to reproduce. However, [1] looks like a case where the editor entered <ref>some-url-here</ref> in the ref box and is unrelated to the other two reports. This is not a VE or Parsoid issue and is more of an issue of the editor entering raw wikitext which Parsoid dutifully nowikied. SSastry (WMF) (talk) 22:55, 21 February 2016 (UTC)

References are not updated inside template

I just tried the VE and worked quite well on the French wiki. However one major issue was that references inside the {{Références}} template were not updated. E.g. one could change the reference, however for the user the old version of the reference would persist which is confusing for new users. I hope that this is something you guys are working on. Example page: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wurtemberg Best --22:51, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

If you want to see the list of citations update as you edit, then you must use the native wikitext <references /> instead of the {{Références}} template. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:22, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Cite book page range en dash

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T85477

When I try to edit a book citation to fill in the page no range (say 17–18), I need to add an endash in it which isn't available at the edit citation option. I'm forced to exit the citation, copy the en dash from somewhere, open the citation again and paste it. Maybe there should be an inbuilt option there to insert the endash. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 00:00, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

This is a known problem. It may be months before it is fixed. In the meantime, you might find it efficient to learn the keyboard shortcuts for the ones that you use most often. On a Mac, en dash is ⌥ Option+- (the hyphen). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:26, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Can't edit content in templates tables

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T128282

I can no longer edit content within templates. If I highlight a template cell, and then click the content, all that happens is that a dialog to edit the template itself appears.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 20:51, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Can you give me an example? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:22, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
Go to 2010 in hip hop music, find the template with the list of released albums. Open VE. Select a template cell. Double-click it. Right now VE will jump to the bottom of the template instead of letting me edit the text.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 18:31, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
Thanks. Did you mean "table" instead of "template"? 2010 in hip hop music#Released albums is a wikitext table. There is a known problem with double-clicking to edit table cells in Firefox 43 and 44. If you single-click and then press Return, you should be able to edit the cells. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:43, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
Yes, I meant tables, sorry. Thank you for the workaround!--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 19:09, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

VE can't drag and drop within tables; has difficulty cut-pasting refs in tables

Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: Part 1: Tried to drag and drop content from one table cell into another. Can't do it. Part 2: I had some very annoying difficulties cut-pasting the refs in table. The refs don't get selected with the rest of the test, and when I right click them, more times than not the table cell is selected instead of the ref. I think what is happening is because you have templates within a table, VE is unsure which one to select, and so tends to default to the table that the refs are listed in.
Steps to Reproduce: For the reference cut-past (or copy-paste) issue:

1. Find an article that uses a table for a list. 2. Open VE, select a cell from which to copy the ref. Try to select and right-click the ref. 3. Get very frustrated until you can manage to do it.

Results: Trouble selecting references. With drag and drop, content can only be moved outside the table.
Expectations: Be able to drag and drop text to any cell within a table. Be able to copy-paste references without headaches.
Page where the issue occurs I was working on List of Turkic dynasties and countries
Web browser Firefox 44.0.2
Operating system Windows 10
Skin Vector (I think)
Notes: Not entirely sure how reproducible the reference issue is.
Workaround or suggested solution If you open up the dialog to edit the reference, you can usually close that out, the ref will stay highlighted, and you can right-click it.

3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 14:41, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Is this about copying contents from a table cell? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:49, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
Yes, sorry, I confused "template" with "table." I've updated the bug report to correct this mistake.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 19:12, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
Apparently there's a big mess in the two most recent versions of Firefox. They're working on it, but it's not clear yet whether the problem is in VisualEditor or in Firefox. (The WMF and the Firefox folks are in contact.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:44, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Not a bug, more of a visual oddity

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T128391
Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: What were you trying to do (and why)?
Steps to Reproduce:
Results: I've notice this a couple of times where I've opened pages with tables in VE when the tables have a flag section, i.e. Eder_Sánchez. When looking at the table the "puzzle piece" icons in it seem to shift the flags down. It's not a problem but it does look confusing if you're not expecting it.
Expectations: Flags to be in the boxes they're supposed to be in, even when editing.
Page where the issue occurs Add URL(s) or diffs
Web browser Chrome 48.0.2564.116
Operating system Windows 10
Skin Vector
Notes: Any additional information. Can you provide a screenshot, if relevant?
Workaround or suggested solution Add one here if you have it.

Red Fiona (talk) 04:36, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

That's strange. It shouldn't be showing the puzzle piece at all. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:37, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for setting up the Phabricator tab. I was worried it was just a single computer problem but then it happened on another. Red Fiona (talk) 21:35, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

UI change: one edit button

Hi everyone,

Would several of you take a look at mw:VisualEditor/Single edit tab and tell me if it makes any sense? Also, just because I'm interested, which of the four options would you choose?

"SET" is being tested at the Hungarian Wikipedia right now, and it's overall going fairly well. The config here would be a bit different (IPs who haven't edted recently would start in wikitext), and there were a few hiccups in the deployment, but it seems to be mostly okay. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:14, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Newlines in infoboxes

I reported the problem of no newlines in Infoboxes last December. You guys said there was already a fix and would be applied after the holiday freeze. As it is still happening to {{Infobox person}}, when is this ever going to be fixed? Bgwhite (talk) 09:12, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

@Bgwhite: As you can imagine, we like to ensure the code fully works before it is put into production. :-) I expect it'll land in the next week or so. As before, you can track progress at phab:T111674. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:54, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
Thank you Jdforrester (WMF). Before you said it would be mid-January and the last comments in the ticket is from mid-January saying added a patch, thus my confusion. Today, there is a good article on BBC. It is about anti-languages. The phab tickets certainly are anti-languages to me.Bgwhite (talk) 22:18, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
@Bgwhite: I estimated it would be mid-January, but we found that it was imperfect back then, and the developers worked on other issues in the mean time that were more pressing. If you click through to https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/264043/ from the Phabricator ticket you'll see it was worked on yesterday. I'd mildly suggest that your use of "anti-language" rather than "jargon", "terms of art" or other less pejorative language is distinctly contrary to civility and AGF, and that you may find it valuable to consider your choice of words in future. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 22:34, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
@Jdforrester (WMF): I never meant anything unkind when mentioning anti-languages. Yes, jargon would have been a better word. Jargon and anti-languages are very similar... Jargon has "preventing people from outside the group understanding it" as a side-effect. It is the main point in anti-language. Both are unintelligible to outsiders. My intention is saying what is in the Phab ticket is confusing for non-WMF employees and it looked like a patch went in mid-January. I read the BBC article today, so that is what popped in my head. Bgwhite (talk) 22:48, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
As I'm not an employee of WMF, I'd like to state that there is nothing confusing about it for non-WMF employees. You just need to understand a bit how software development works, how open source software development works, and how a large website tends to to operate. But, you can find a bit about how this works on life cycle description of a ticket. I've been thinking about how we can better integrate/link such documentation into phabricator, but it's always a bit hard to do this and keep everything effective and transparent at the same time. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:48, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
Well, it might be helpful to understand more than just a bit. ;-)
That's a fun article on the BBC. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:22, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
@Bgwhite: This was deployed today (Fetch and use templatedata while serializing transclusions). SSastry (WMF) (talk) 22:59, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
@SSastry (WMF): Thank you. Bgwhite (talk) 00:00, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
T128337 is related to this. SSastry (WMF) (talk) 20:27, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

creating a draft article - how to add categories

Draft articles aren't allowed to be in mainspace categories, so you have to do

[[:Category:Whatever]]

Is there any way to do this in the VE? I note that new users who are enabled for the VE are likely to create new draft articles. Kerry (talk) 03:22, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

You can make a link to a category, just like a link to any other page. (Type it as ":Category:Whatever", with the colon.) But there's no direct way to convert the link to a functional cat later; you'd have to delete the links and insert proper categories. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:34, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

New date problem

Hi, there appears to be a new problem with adding accessdates in citation templates with visual editor that has appeared in the last day or so. It is leaving the text with |access-date={{subst:Date}} rather than perform the substitution of today's date. As an example this edit shows the situation. Keith D (talk) 17:22, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

I don't use ve, but I noticed the edit this morning. Have anything to do with this issue? Also, there is a similar edit.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 17:31, 4 March 2016 (UTC)
@Keith D: Hey, yes, Trappist the monk got it right – I've reverted those edits by The RedBurn as you can't use subst: inside a reference, and citation templates are only really useful there. :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:59, 4 March 2016 (UTC) I've also fixed up the 12345678910 uses that I could find and fix before you did (and also this oddity from April last year). Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:59, 4 March 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for the quick response to this. Keith D (talk) 21:01, 4 March 2016 (UTC)
Jdforrester (WMF) Can't VE do the subst: itself ? I have similar features in WPCleaner (inserting things with subst: that can end up in ref tags), and I'm simply querying the API to expand such text before inserting it. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 22:14, 4 March 2016 (UTC)
@NicoV: VisualEditor doesn't do anything with wikitext (this is the parser). In particular, we're not going add hacks that change how templates work in MediaWiki but only for VisualEditor users. That'd not be remotely good for our users. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 22:16, 4 March 2016 (UTC)
Jdforrester (WMF) I think you misunderstood me : there's no hack, no parser, ... When a user adds a template with VE, I think it's using the TemplateData to initialize it by default (what parameters should be there by default, what value, ...) : instead of using the raw "autovalue", simply ask the API (or whatever services VE is calling) to expand the subst. There's no change at all on how templates work in MW... --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 22:25, 4 March 2016 (UTC)
Sorry for the mess. :-/ Why is it that subst works on :fr ? Here's an example. As you can see, that template uses subst to add the date. The RedBurn (ϕ) 22:56, 4 March 2016 (UTC)
@The RedBurn: It doesn't work on frwiki either. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 16:54, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

It looks like it's working now. Well I can't seem to reproduce the problem now.

This can be split into several problems.

  1. VE should respect {{subst:}} which has a bug T51904.
  2. VE should allow an easy way to put the current date in. This is part of T100206
  3. Many citation templates should probably use the date type for some parameters.

If we look at the https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:TemplateData#Auto_value we see that you can use a subst for the auto-value defaults. Which gives the example "autovalue": "{{subst:CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}". I've created a test template User:Salix alba/Cite test with two "date" parameters, one using subst: auto values. The datepicker input widget mentioned in the resolved T97425 does not seem to appear when a parameter is specified as "date". --Salix alba (talk): 18:22, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

I see the problem is more to do with the <ref> tag. If you do {{cite web|access-date={{subst:date}} }} outside of a <ref> tag it all works fine. If you do into inside a <ref> you get problems. This happens even in the wikitext editor.--Salix alba (talk): 18:34, 5 March 2016 (UTC)
Hi Salix alba, yes this has to do with <ref> because MW doesn't expand subst in them. But VE could expand the autovalues directly in the template inspector dialog. That's what I'm doing with WPCleaner to handle properly subst even when they end up in <ref> : for me, it's a simple call to the API to expand the autovalue to a readable value. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 19:14, 5 March 2016 (UTC)
I think the underlying problem with <ref> and subst hinges on T4700 "Pre-save transform skips extensions using wikitext". An epic bug dating back to 2006. "The problem here is that MediaWiki treats all extension tags as if they don't contain wikitext, so extensions that do contain wikitext, such as Cite, have to call the parser themselves. And in so doing miss out on the pre-save transformations." --Salix alba (talk): 17:38, 6 March 2016 (UTC)
Salix alba Yes, I am aware on T4700 and for how long it has been opened. That's why I went around this problem in WPCleaner some time ago and was suggesting to do the same for VE : for example, in the template inspector, every time you add a parameter that has an autovalue set, instead of adding the raw "autovalue", you could call the API parse action on the raw autovalue (with onlypst, so that only pre-save transformations are done) to do the pre-save transformations. It will have 2 benefits : first, it will work as expected even in <ref> ; second, it will be a lot more user friendly in the template inspector, as the values automatically inserted will be much more understandable for many users. It seems a simple solution, so unless I'm missing a big limitation due to VE design, I don't see why it couldn't be implemented also in VE.
Edit: Of course, performance wise, you should only call the parse action if you suspect there's something in the autovalue that will get expanded... --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 18:04, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

uncited info

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:44.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/44.0

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

How do I mark information as uncited?

Theabsurdreigns (talk) 04:55, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

  • Go into Edit
  • Click your mouse at the end of the information which is uncited
  • then click on Insert (on the toolbar), then Template from the dropdown
  • then type cn into the box and it will suggest Citation needed in the dropdown list
  • Click on Citation needed in the dropdown list
  • Click on the button Add Template
  • Then press the Insert button on the next screen

You should now see [citation needed] appear at the end of the information that is uncited.

Then Save the page in the usual way.

Enjoy! Kerry (talk) 08:48, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

Unconfiguring the infoboxes.

Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention:
Steps to Reproduce:
Results:
Expectations:
Page where the issue occurs https://pt.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ita%C3%BA_de_Minas&type=revision&diff=45017209&oldid=45014521
Web browser all
Operating system
Skin
Notes:
Workaround or suggested solution Add one here if you have it.

PauloMSimoes (talk) 12:51, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Thank you, PauloMSimoes.
You need to change the mw:TemplateData in w:pt:Predefinição:Info/Município_do_Brasil#Documentação dos parâmetros to say that this template uses "block" formatting (not "inline"). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:11, 10 March 2016 (UTC)
Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF). I will forward to developers.
PauloMSimoes (talk) 00:50, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Broken ISBNs

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T110826

Not sure if this is citoid or parsoid. CX converts ISBN 978-1-4625-0350-6 into [[:de:Special:BookSources/9781462503506|ISBN 978-1-4625-0350-6]]. I just fixed ~100 articles with this. Of course when it doesn't convert it, VE/CX puts ISBNs in nowiki tags, but that's a phab tickets that's been open for a long time.

Example is Alternative theories of the Hungarian language relations.

Bgwhite (talk) 22:55, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

VE ≠ CX, and this comes from CX. (It's definitely not the citoid service, which has never been used on this article, and which always produces a citation template.) I'll pass along the complaint to the correct team. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:36, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Support for wikitext citations

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T129629

My next VE training sessions are going to be at one of the major Trove contributors. Given Australia has a national initiative to make all Australian library content citable in Wikipedia with over 472 million individually citable items, we need to be able to add these via the VE. How hard is it to have Cite > Wikitext to complement Cite > Manual which will omit the nowiki tags, which cannot be removed using the VE once they are in place (or some other solution like a "this is wikitext" checkbox in Cite > Manual). WMF has a strategic plan that talks about the importance of partnerships with the GLAM sector but partnerships need effort on both sides and I'm not seeing any effort from WMF on this issue. Kerry (talk) 23:38, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

  • Since the NLA Trove pre-formatted citations only work on the English Wikipedia, and since they used to contain systematic errors (using |publisher= rather than |via=, which no longer results in erroneous claim that they published the original source), it would probably be better for editors to paste the Trove URL into the automatic citation and use that instead. The result will work at all the major wikis and also be correct.
  • How long has it been since you tried to paste that wikitext into the basic ref dialog? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:01, 7 March 2016 (UTC)
I tried it before asking above. But just to double-check nothing's changed in the last week (hoping your comment was a veiled way of telling me it was now sorted), I just tried it again. See the diff. It still produces nowiki tags and, as you will see, Trove is now using "via" instead of "publisher". Kerry (talk) 22:35, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for arranging the update.
Wikitext-to-HTML conversion has been working for weeks. I pasted exactly the same text and got these results. Can you tell me exactly what you're clicking on, in order? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:06, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

OK, I will repeat the experiment and take detailed notes (here is the edit)

  • Go to Trove and copy the citation {{cite news| ...}} (the same Cane Beetle newspaper article as you used)
  • Go the article in Wikipedia Queensland Recruiting Committee
  • Edit
  • click on position for citation
  • Cite > Manual > Basic
  • paste into the box
  • I see {{cite news| ...}} in the box
  • Insert
  • I then see a box with the page-with-bookmark icon and title Reference appear with an Edit button, it too displays {{cite news| ...}}
  • I click away that box to make it disappear and then SAVE PAGE, add edit summary, SAVE
  • I then see the citation appear in the article as {{cite news| ...}} due to the presence of the nowiki tags the VE added. And if you look in the article history you will see the edit summary

(added citation) (undo) (Tags: nowiki added, Visual edit)

so you see in the Tags that VE is saying "nowiki added"

So if there is a way to add these Trove citations, please tell me as I have to teach VE to librarians at a major Trove contributor next Thursday and I have to finalise the slidepack on Tuesday (my time, Monday your time). At my previous VE training, I avoided the issue of Trove citations because I didn't think the trainees would probably be aware of the Wikipedia-formatted citations in Trove, but this group will be aware already. Using Citoid isn't really an option with Trove URLs. While Trove content can source all manner of topics in Wikipedia, one of its most common uses is to in Australian-content articles where "use DMY dates" applies and Citoid does not respect that. Kerry (talk) 23:07, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

This is working for me. Can someone else with a Windows machine try it out?
You might be interested in |df=, which can be set to =dmy and which correctly displays the dates. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:33, 11 March 2016 (UTC)
OK, I copied what User:Whatamidoing (WMF) did and copied the citation from out of the article text (from the earlier version). When I use that copied text, I too get the converting wikitext message and everything works, but when I copy from the original Trove source and paste it into VE, it is not recognised as wikitext. But I can't see any difference between the two so I thought the culprit might be invisible characters but when I look at the copied string in various utilities that supposedly show me invisible characters, I'm not seeing anything. But there's definitely some difference between text pasted into the source editor and text pasted into VE going on because if you first paste into the source editor and then copy-and-paste into VE, it will convert the wikitext, but if you paste directly into VE, it doesn't recognise it as wikitext. What does the VE code use to detect that it has been given a chunk of wikitext and what would confuse it into thinking it wasn't wikitext? Kerry (talk) 04:36, 11 March 2016 (UTC)
A dev has commented on the bug report that wikitext conversion requires "plain text". So a workaround for Chrome users might be to copy the citation, paste it into a text doc (or the URL bar of your web browser), re-copy it, and paste the now-plain text into the VisualEditor.
Does Chrome have a "paste as plain text" or "paste and match style" option? I wonder whether that might work, too. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:16, 11 March 2016 (UTC)
On a mac ⌘ Cmd⇧ ShiftV will place in plain text in any application. Not sure is windows has something similar.--Salix alba (talk): 19:11, 11 March 2016 (UTC)
According to Chrome's help Cntl-Shift-V should work, but my experiments using Cntl-Shift-V on Windows 8.1 show no difference -- it is not recognised as wikitext in VE. Kerry (talk) 21:19, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

I was editing [12]. In the last entry of all the tables (the one dated 15 September 2015) it says Malcolm Turnbull defeats Tony Abbott to become the 29th Prime Minister of Australia.

If you select the sentence and click "Clear styling" on the character format menu, the link to the Malcolm Turnbull article disappears too. Kerry (talk) 03:09, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

This is the intended behavior. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:55, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

I want to add color for a row in the table, but cannot figure out how, I would very much like to know

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54180
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.87 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Democratic_Party_superdelegates,_2016?veaction=edit

Javert2016 (talk) 15:33, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Hello, Javert2016. This cannot be done in the visual editor at this time. This is being considered for the future. You can open the page in the wikitext editor ("Edit source") and copy the code from another line. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:58, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

How I can write something new myself? Lost my writings((

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T130224
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2490.86 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Abbas_ibn_Firnas&gettingStartedReturn=true&veaction=edit

Inaccessible fellow (talk) 13:08, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Hello, Inaccessible fellow, and thank you for leaving this note. There was a problem at the very top with an empty <ref /> tag being inserted. Do you happen to remember whether you ever clicked the "Cite" button while you were editing? I'm trying to figure out how the visual editor made this mistake. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:06, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Will someone please shade in the Democrats Abroad icon on the map for Sanders? Because He won DA

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.87 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries,_2016&veaction=edit

Javert2016 (talk) 16:05, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Hello, Javert2016. The button that says "Leave feedback about this software" is not the best way to reach other editors. I'll copy your comment to Talk:Democratic Party presidential primaries, 2016, where an editor may be able to do what you want. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:09, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Ctrl+V (pasting) shortcut doesn't paste and misbehaves

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T130739
Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: I was trying to paste text.
Steps to Reproduce: Open page List of RFCs
  1. Click on 'edit' for the section "Numerical list"
  2. Go to last row, click on it, and add a row below by using the "insert below"
  3. Double click in second column to start typing.
  4. Try to paste any text using the Ctrl+V shortcut.
Results: The text is not pasted. Instead the view jumps to the top of the page.
Expectations: I was expecting the text to be pasted.
Page where the issue occurs permalink: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_RFCs&oldid=704509237
Web browser Seen in both Mozilla Firefox (45.0.1) and Google Chrome (49.0.2623.87 m)
Operating system windows 7, 64-bit
Skin Vector
Notes:
Workaround or suggested solution

Siddhant (talk) 18:59, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

Siddhant, thanks for this note. Are you able to paste that text into that page, but outside of a table? If you copy one plain word from elsewhere on the page, and try to paste it into a table, does that work? I'm trying to figure out whether the problem is "can't paste the specific thing I copied" or "can't paste anything into a table". Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:29, 21 March 2016 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF): your hunch was correct. It is only "the specific thing I copied" which I'm unable to paste. What I was trying to paste was the title of the RFC from this page: [13]. I copied the text "An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles" and tried pasting that, and that causes the page to jump around. Anything else I try to paste works. --Siddhant (talk) 08:43, 23 March 2016 (UTC)
We win a bug report. It's phab:T130739. Feel free to add to it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:23, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Changing the title

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.87 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nob_Hill_Masonic_Center&gettingStartedReturn=true&veaction=edit

How can I change the title?

Sbouzelha (talk) 19:13, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

@Sbouzelha: In Wikipedia, changing the title of a page is called "Moving". You don't do it while editing; renaming is an option that you do via a tab near the top of the page (specifically, "More").
Before you rename a page, you should read Wikipedia:Moving a page.
Also, because you're a new editor (just one edit), you're not (yet) authorized to do a page move. If you really think that moving (renaming) this particular article is justified, you should post a request at Talk:Nob Hill Masonic Center; if a more experienced editor agrees with your suggested new name, then he/she will do the move/rename for you. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:34, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Speculation on strange feedback

Just a comment on the now-deleted feedback from the IP editor. While I agree that it wasn't clear what their issue was, how do we seriously expect to get feedback from new VE users while this page requires you to know how to use the source editor? Can we either enable the VE on the Wikipedia namespace (preferable) or (as I have been forced to do with a project page), move it into User space where the VE is enabled (pragmatic). Kerry (talk) 03:29, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

What they see
When the message begins with :<small>User agent:, then they're using the built-in feedback tool. It accepts wikitext, but it pretty much looks like an e-mail form. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:16, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Table Properties dialog uses non-intuitive interface

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0

When editing a table, you can open the "Properties" dialog. This has three boolean options: Wikitext, Sortable, Caption. These options are displayed as ovals with a circle to one side; clicking the other side changes the color to blue.

This is not very intuitive. I think it would be better to use checkboxes, the most common way of making a yes/no choice.


24.105.133.5 (talk) 16:54, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

I need change the title for Javier Echecopar, only

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.110 Safari/537.36

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

Vaiven puerta (talk) 01:58, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Hello, Vaiven puerta. See Help:Move to learn how to move a page. Since your account is brand-new, you will probably have to ask for help. Someone at the WP:Teahouse or the WP:Help desk should be able to help you. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:05, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Why no Visual Editor on Talk Pages?

Dear all,

Coming from here: Wikipedia:Help desk#Visual Editor Talk Pages

My question: Why don't we have a visual editor on Talk pages?

Thankfully,

~Robert orschiro (talk) 19:30, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Hello, orschiro, and thanks for following up here. Yes, as RegistryKey suspected, it's an intentional choice. The team doesn't feel like it is possible to make an editor that is ideal for both circumstances. There are some similarities, but also some significant differences (e.g., WikiProject banners, how references are handled, the need for archiving on larger pages). They believe that adapting the visual editor to talk pages would require making it less suitable for other purposes.
WP:Flow is a project for re-vamping talk pages. If you're used to wikitext pages, it takes a bit to get used to, and it is still missing a few key features, but I'm using it on other wikis and I'm overall fairly satisfied with it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:05, 8 April 2016 (UTC)
So, has there been some new news since Flow placed on ice? Kerry (talk) 09:28, 9 April 2016 (UTC)
That might deserve the prize for the most confusing message of last year. Flow was in "active maintenance" (the devs were still supporting Flow and providing bug fixes, while working primarily on Echo/Notifications). They haven't been adding new features to it for a couple of quarters ("active development"). I believe that Flow the default talk-page style on a couple of wikis right now, including the Konkani Wikipedia. See your talk page there. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:41, 11 April 2016 (UTC)
Dear both of you, I appreciate your comments! I will leave it with this and make myself more accustomed with editing the source directly. At least it is more clear to me now at what stage we are and that it is most likely an intentional choice due to the differences between Talk and Article pages. orschiro (talk) 16:58, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

Issue with applying text formatting to a list of wikilinked items

VisualEditor is close to being really useful in certain situations (e.g. it is much easier to remove bolded text as per MOS:BOLD from a block of text). But one issue I've been having – and I don't know if this is a "known" issue or not – is that when I try to use VisualEditor to apply, say italics, to a list of wikilinked items, like:

...it will render the results in wikicode using piping, like so (note: you'll have to look at the source wikicode to see what I mean...):

...rather than using the much simpler unpiped wikicode:

If a way could be figured out to have VisualEditor do this kind of the thing the latter way rather than the former way, it would be a significant improvement. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 02:01, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

I have this discussion with the product manager every few months. The difficulty is that the "simple" version doesn't permit complex formatting, such as [[The Empire Strikes Back|''The'' Empire '''Strikes''' Back]], so it would be necessary to have code for both, plus code to decide which one to use (which is do-able but, in his opinion, needlessly complex). I'm afraid that he's really quite immovable on the subject right now. Perhaps we'll have better success in the future. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:49, 11 April 2016 (UTC)
I might be wrong, but I believe that piping inside of links is actually the preferred way (per MOS) even when you're editing with source code. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 19:43, 11 April 2016 (UTC)
@The ed17: Would you happen to have the link to that? I'd like to see the specific MOS (even if I intend to mostly ignore it on my end...). But, the problem is, even if the way VisualEditor does it is technically "correct", other editors will still convert to the "simple code" version after I make the VisualEditor edit. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 14:18, 12 April 2016 (UTC)
I don't see anywhere in MOS:ITAL that states a preference for one or the other.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 19:26, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Trove citations now working (or is it just a freak of nature?)

Is the wind just blowing in the right direction or has there been an unannounced success in the matter of pasting wikitext citations into the VE? My Trove citations are pasting beautifully into the VE via Cite>Manual>Basic at the moment, with no apparent change in my universe. Kerry (talk) 05:25, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

It looks like Ed (who is fabulous) found a way to make it work. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:21, 12 April 2016 (UTC)
Excellent! --99of9 (talk) 01:28, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
Fantastic! Please thank Ed for us! 01:48, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Problem with single edit tab deployment

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T132806

Original discussion at WP:Village_pump_(technical)#VE_was_imposed_as_primary_editor.

The WMF gave assurances that VE would NOT be imposed as Primary editor as part of the conversion to a single edit tab. This situation comes across very badly. Hopefully this is merely a deployment bug that will fixed. A response at Village Pump would be helpful, even if it's only to say that someone is investigating the matter. Alsee (talk) 02:45, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Redirect pages are mangled by VisualEditor

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.112 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_impact_of_the_Occupy_movement?venotify=created&action=edit I attempted to create a redirect page here, but VisualEditor did not format it correctly.

Jarble (talk) 18:07, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

@Jarble: It looks like you used wikitext to create redirect instead of the option in the toolbar of VE ? Then this is the expected behavior. VE is not wikitext —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:36, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
@TheDJ: I also tried to add a section anchor in a link using #, but the section anchor was omitted in my edit. Jarble (talk) 19:14, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
@Jarble: You are still thinking in wikitext :) You need to use the Page settings. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:22, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
A while ago, the visual editor was eating #Sections in links. I haven't checked for a bit to see whether that happens (or happened in the past) on redirects. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:20, 14 April 2016 (UTC)
It may be working-as-designed, but obviously the expected behavior was the creation of a working redirect. As an experiment I recently reviewed a batch of recent edits carrying tags for Visual edit and nowiki added. Almost all of them needed fixing of one sort or another. It would take several editors doing nothing but VE-nowiki cleanup to keep up with the rate they come in. Alsee (talk) 04:04, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Comments on Hat note- Do you want one Edit tab, or two? It's your choice

Thanks for the hat note- but where is one supposed to comment? To keep it simple I have created this section.

There is a big issue here. I speak as a trainer working with the sort of adults who have a vast range of professional experience- though usually poor computer skills- and what ever the preferences our newbie has made, I need them to get back to edit source before I can help them. It is pointless to say to them that this works this way- because they will use their embedded habits and I haven't a clue how they got there in VE but have 12 years of wikisource experience to draw on to help them dig themselves out of a hole. They are welcome to use VE if they wish- but when I need to take over their keyboard I need a one-click option to change their preferences to give priority wikisource. As I read your hat note- we need 2-tags set as default- and I would suggest we put a 30day/50 edit break on changing it to 1-tag VE.

I'll give more feedback when I have looked into this further. --ClemRutter (talk) 20:21, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Clem, even if they're in the visual editor, there is a one-click button to switch immediately to the wikitext editor. It's right next to the Save button, and looks like good old link syntax ([[ ]]). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:56, 12 April 2016 (UTC)
Just found that- Wonderful. Exactly what I need. (I got diverted by having to switch to Spanish wikipedia where I have not switched VE off- then I found some great illustrations that hadn't been catted.) I think you can treat me as a savant idiot- whose deteriorating memory means I am revisiting dragons I slew years ago. Before I lose it totally- I am writing this down into training booklets- to fix the knowledge on paper. I write the booklets, and A4 sheets/Slides then revise them after the course.
See: User:ClemRutter/training Equally, these can all be used as VE test documents-
*stage 1 to see if VE has the capabilities,
*stage 2 rewrite the booklet to do the same thing while using VE thinking. (I am about to do that myself. But I will get back to you.)--ClemRutter (talk) 09:48, 12 April 2016 (UTC)
Clem, can I suggest that you make a serious effort to learn the VE if you are assisting VE users? I too had 10 years of wikisource experience behind me (and more years of using other wikis before that). I learned VE because I knew I was going to have to run training in VE. I can honestly say for "ordinary editing" the VE is easier to use than wikitext (100% for new users) and, even with 10 years of wikisource behind me, I now prefer to use VE for my own editing. I only resort to wikitext for working with complex templates and so forth. And yes it is easy to switch between them. I'm converted. Kerry (talk) 05:20, 12 April 2016 (UTC)
I am having a look at this now, but that is not the issue I am highlighting. I can learn it, but is it a suitable medium to teach to apprehensive beginners. Wasn't the story that humans can keep seven facts in their brain concurrently while magpies can manage over 50. Well, I once could manage 7, but now I think it is down to four--- and declining fast. If I have to show them how to use 2 editors rather than 1 that is a complexity too far for them. So, as a simple challenge: I want them to write:
The [[reticulated python]] was {{convert|8.31|m|ft}} long. <ref name=Guardian> [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/11/worlds-largest-snake-a-python-estimated-at-8m-long-caught-in-malaysia Python caught in Malaysia could be the longest ever recorded,] Accessed 12 April 2016 </ref> Pythons have interesting names like Medusa and Fluffy.<ref name=Guardian/>
That is a fairly basic edit for the groups I have met. Before we can do that- we have to explain it in a way that requires fewer concurrent thoughts. Let the discussion continue. --ClemRutter (talk) 09:48, 12 April 2016 (UTC)
The {{convert}} template is difficult for the visual editor (it's a technical thing due to the unusual construction style of the template; the parameters mean different things, depending upon what the other parameters are). But otherwise, it would be easier to create that in the visual editor. Links are made the same way that people make links in e-mail messages or Google Docs/Microsoft Office/etc., and a ref to the Guardian means pasting the URL into the automagic box.
BTW, the user guide at mw:Help:VisualEditor/User guide has lots of pictures, which you should feel free to copy for training guides.
I have the impression that most trainers aren't teaching wikitext for beginning editors, except to say that it exists, can be copied/pasted if you need to, and is still used on talk pages. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:33, 12 April 2016 (UTC)
I am now doing all my Wikipedia edit training sessions in VE. My experience is that people find it much easier than wikitext and I am seeing higher levels of edit activity from the trainees after the training sessions. We start by doing some edits to their user page and then we go off and edit real pages. Kerry (talk) 22:05, 12 April 2016 (UTC)
The one difficulty with VE for basic use is changing links - as there is no separate input for link target and link title the only way you can guarantee that what you want to happen is what will happen is to delete the link and its text, rewrite the text and then create a new link. Relevant ticket phab:555973 was WONTFIXed (without adequate explanation) in February and then reopened shortly afterwards but has since been ignored. Thryduulf (talk) 14:08, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
The explanation is pending; I've got it on my "weekly nag list" right now. The basic story seems to be "I think you'll find that it's a bit more complicated than that", but I'm pushing for a concrete example of what constitutes "more complicated". Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:21, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
I don't want to personalise this- in AE I was providing material that could be used by myself and sessional lecturers that I had not met. Have you got any training material you are sharing- I have mine on my dropbox only because no-one can tell me the best Wikiproject to store it in. Feel free to plunder.--ClemRutter (talk) 08:29, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
Using * Nottingham Correcting or improving an article for the first time

This is one approach I have left for others to use- the first few pages smash a few myths and establish an good editing patterns. The next aim is to harvest all the students user names so we can get back to them, a sort of past student watch list. As VE is not switched on for Talk pages we are in wikitext. Now we encourage them to switch to their User page- and they are dropped into VE. (I dislike Page 4 and page 6- they act as revision notes, when they start editing alone- this needs a real person to do the instruction. They do need to be there to help them on talk pages- and later when they encounter templates.) Speed wise wikitext is the best solution for page 7. but I am now wondering whether that is the best direction to be heading. The aim is to keep the levels of complexity to a minimum. Time is a limitation but I will keep on plugging on. --ClemRutter (talk) 08:29, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

I think that User:Pine might be able to suggest a central location for training docs and tell you about some of the best options available. The best answer for storing pages might be at the outreach: wiki rather than at the English Wikipedia, but Pine will have some ideas. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:21, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
ClemRutter, I'm happy to share mine. Can you send me a Wikipedia email so I can send it back as an attachment. Kerry (talk) 01:41, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Perhaps unnecessary ambiguity?

Early warning is usually helpful when introducing change, but perhaps you've started too soon in this case. The message says (my emphases):

...When this is deployed here, you may be offered the opportunity to choose your preferred appearance and behavior the next time you click the Edit button. You will also be able to change your settings in the Editing section of Special:Preferences... Whatamidoing (WMF) 19:22, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

In my case, I naturally looked in my Preferences to see whether I could maintain the current "show both" behavior. But there's no UI for that yet (at least in my enwiki preferences: I haven't tried elsewhere). Does this mean that I "may not" be offered the opportunity, or that "when" hasn't arrived yet, or what? It would have been simpler all round if you could have said something more like:

...When this is deployed here, we will send a message to advise all editors. You will then be able to choose your preferred appearance and behavior, either the next time you click the Edit button (as illustrated in these screenshots) or via the Editing section of Special:Preferences...

Good luck anyway - Pointillist (talk) 21:44, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Seconding that comment. I want to maintain two tabs as I have preference for different editors for different tasks, and don't want to have to go via the other one unnecessarily. I've scoured my preferences, then read the page on MediaWiki.org, then gone back to my preferences to check again.
If the option to have an option to retain two tabs is still under consideration, then please consider this a very strong vote in favour of having the option, and for having the two tabs as default as this will be the least confusing, particularly for inexperienced and less computer literate editors. In the one tab view, the label should indicate which editor will be loaded by clicking on it - i.e. if VE will be launched it should say "edit" (or ideally something more explicit), if the source editor will be launched it should say "edit source". Thryduulf (talk) 22:24, 11 April 2016 (UTC)
Pointillist and Thryduulf, I apologize for the confusion. The prefs will become available at the same moment that your second edit tab disappears. There is allegedly (<insert rambling technical explanation>) no reasonable way to make the prefs available in advance, nor any good way to set it at all wikis at once.
Not everyone will be presented with the big prefs-setting dialog. However, everyone will (=in the future) have access to the prefs setting, unless they have completely disabled the visual editor. I expect to set my volunteer account to two tabs as soon as I can. Looking at the Polish Wikipedia, though, I'm in the minority: most people are sticking with one tab. I will be interested in finding out whether editors here make the same choices. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:56, 12 April 2016 (UTC)
Where in the Preferences do I look to fix this? I was offered the choice and went for "use the last one" but having lived with it for a day, it is now driving me insane and I want both Edit tabs back again, but I cannot find where it is in my Preferences? Kerry (talk) 02:23, 14 April 2016 (UTC)
Hey Kerry, links above point to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing: look for the drop-down next to Editing mode. Happy editing, --151.42.9.183 (talk) 09:57, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

(Save page) bubble

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:44.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/44.0

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yoga_Sutras_of_Patanjali&veaction=edit >>>For some reason: although I click >edit< and can do same, the (save page) bubble is not turning blue, so I can only revert to clicking >read< and not enter my edit therefore. Answering my own query, it might be poor WIFI reception as there is a LOW weather system in this isolated location.The (submit) button herein IS turning blue (though). I'm puzzled.Sudaama90 (talk) 23:35, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Sudaama90, thanks for this note. I'm not having this problem. Could you tell me if this problem is still happening for you? It might depend upon exactly what you're trying to do. For example, adding an extra space after a word might make the Save button turn blue, but editing a template might not. So please give me as much detailed information as possible. I want to know what the problem is and get this fixed. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:25, 12 April 2016 (UTC)
Whatamidoing (WMF I'm learning so might have this format wrong. I came to Wikipedia through Mozilla Firefox and NOT from task view of Windows 10, which I was doing before, following reading your note. The small square indicating the types of edit possibilities popped up when I clicked edit on Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, specifically the bold letter Dharana a heading in the left field alongside asanas samadhi and etc. The type of edit I then chose or clicked (was not the >Last Edit Used<) -(I've got hot keys running which disable inverted commas, hence > and < were just used) - for the reason it was an edit source (edit) I employed to overcome the matter of the BLUE (save page) button not appearing before. Subsequently after clicking an edit style, I was asked to Login. I did so then clicked edit on DHARANA and the Blue line appeared and the Blue Save Page bubble appeared. i made the edit and it was saved via the save page bubble. So, everything worked smoothly and exactly. It may seem I had the edit style which I don't usually use and wikipedia's popup produced the choice that reverted my end or operating system to what I am used to. talk 15:23, 13 April 2016 (UTC)Sudaama90 (talk) 07:23, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
Thank you, Sudaama90! I've passed all of this along to the devs on the VisualEditor team. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:14, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
Whatamidoing (WMF) My last note was a little oblique. RE my earlier problem: In short I must have selected an edit style I don't usually use. EDIT SOURCE being that option, but it may not have registered immediately as I'm in a zone where the WIFI may be patchy therefore transmission of my edit source choice by "clicking" and wikipedia's response, may have been of an unusual time length - (going on while I read the page preparing to edit) - which would have caught me by surprise when I attempted my usual EDIT. With hindsight I know the blue line NOT appearing meant I was on a page requiring other than plain EDIT style. talk13:22, 15 April 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sudaama90 (talk • contribs)

traducir un artículo

Agente de usuario: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.112 Safari/537.36

Buenos días. No entiendo cómo se puede traducir un artículo. De momento, me interesa solo traducir el nombre y ya lo editaré más adelante. Gracias.

María Forner (talk) 10:16, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Buenos días, María Forner. ¿Quieres traducir un título o un article? (Hello, Maria. Do you want to translate a title or an article?) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:32, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

inability to edit episodes text

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.112 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camelot_(TV_series)?action=edit There are major inconsistencies within the text of the episodes section, but I couldn't figure out how to edit and correct.

WriteinEnglish (talk) 19:07, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Hello, WriteinEnglish. That episode list is built out of a complicated templates-inside-a-table system. I think you will have to edit it in the wikitext (source) editor. Click here to open that page, and if you start in the visual editor, then click the [[ ]] button (next to Save in the toolbar) to switch to the wikitext editor. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:42, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Order of things on a page

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52882

Is it possible that VisualEditor could adhere to guidelines such as MOS:ORDER which dictate the order of different things on a page? For example, categories are currently placed at the very bottom of the article, which apparently upsets some editors and/or bots which are expecting to see them above the stub templates. Thanks — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:46, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

@MSGJ: it's usually handier to link to diffs of exact cases that people consider 'wrong' —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:40, 15 April 2016 (UTC)
I thought I was clear enough. But this is an example, which was later corrected — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:00, 15 April 2016 (UTC)
The short answer is "no". It's possible that if all 800+ WMF wikis would agree upon the order, then we could talk the devs into enforcing it in software, but they haven't, and so we can't. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:33, 15 April 2016 (UTC)
Well as an editor who has worked on HotCat at some point, I'd say that the very least that can be done is to append just below the last pre-existing Category on the page. That shouldn't be too hard to implement, and is something that likely all 800+ wiki's agree on. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:23, 15 April 2016 (UTC)
@TheDJ and Whatamidoing (WMF): Agreed, there is no justification for VE adding a new category in any place other than just below existing categories, if those do exist. And this is an article immediately after a VE edit in which VE (incorrectly) put a new category in the wrong place. (The edit is mentioned in the first post in this section.) Could we get a Phab opened, if one doesn't already exist? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:34, 17 April 2016 (UTC)
They ought to be together, but I believe that Parsoid puts cats at the end (after "content" like templates and magic words, but before interlanguage links). phab:T52882 is the main bug. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:54, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Don't reorder template fields in created wikitext

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T133874

Look at this edit I made. The only thing I did was add a field to a template transclusion. But in the resulting wikitext, the Visual Editor also reordered all the fields of the transclusion I had edited. It would be cool if the Visual Editor would only add a field, without touching the rest of the wikitext. --Distelfinck (talk) 00:52, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

The exact order of the parameters is defined on the template's /doc page, which the software respects. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:56, 18 April 2016 (UTC)
Yeah, but the Visual Editor reordering fields in the wikitext makes the edit harder to understand for humans. This has no effect on the article shown to readers, so why do it? --Distelfinck (talk) 08:37, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

New user loses references when adding an image.

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T133475

Suspect edit

I came across a cry for help- a new users competent article had been rejected, and she couldn't understand what had happened. It seems she had lost the references she had previously entered- and the edit that appeared to have eaten them was using VE to add an image. Is it the widgets fault is it doubly decrementing the edit counter before saving? Would someone like to investigate? --ClemRutter (talk) 15:51, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. I've left a note at her talk page with a request for more information, but I've filed the report with the information that we have now. If anyone else has seen this elsewhere, please (please please please please) let me know. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:49, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Non-inline citations

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T95702

The cite automatic function works beautifully in VE, but is there any way to avoid the <ref> tags when the references are not inline? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:52, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

There is no good way to avoid it. The slightly messy workaround for mw:citoid-generated citations is to make it the usual way, then to copy the citation template out. So: Automagic generation, Insert, Edit if necessary to get the thing; then (to get the thing out of the ref tags) select the blue clicky link, click the 'Cite' button in the toolbar (to edit that citation in the "Basic" ref editor), select and copy the citation template, and paste the results into the body of the article. Like I said, slightly messy, but it works. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:40, 15 April 2016 (UTC)
I will try the method you describe. But what about adding a checkbox for inline citations (default could be yes)? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:57, 18 April 2016 (UTC)
It's been requested, but I don't think it will happen soon. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:55, 18 April 2016 (UTC)
Any link to a bug tracker? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:02, 19 April 2016 (UTC)
phab:T95702. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:48, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

"Fall back to plain wikitext" option disappears after clicking it while making a template

Say I want to make a template; all of its properties can be filled in with each field having a "Fall back to plain wikitext" (symbol: []) button. Right now, clicking it does nothing except remove it. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 17:12, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

That's new. I'll check with the team about it. It's possible that this isn't meant to be showing just yet. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:25, 27 April 2016 (UTC)
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T45037

Many a times, we'll be presented with multiple haphazardly arranged images which should be arranged into a gallery or using {{multiple image}}, right now there's no way to easily "convert" those selected images into the gallery. I can elaborate further if anyone's interested. For instance, selecting those images could be done like drag and drop. This was mentioned before Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive_2013_11#Galleries_unsupported. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 17:21, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

We are actually in the process of implementing gallery support. If you have some ideas on how we could improve it please contribute to the task T45037. Thanks, ESanders (WMF) (talk) 11:40, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Background Colour of Cells in Table

Editing background colour of cells is currently possible only through source editor and I find it hard to edit it. On the next version of VisualEditor, please include a feature to edit background colour of cells in tables in the table properties box.

Table Properties Window

ഏത്തപഴം (talk) 09:47, 1 May 2016 (UTC)

Hello, ഏത്തപഴം, and thanks for this comment.
This has been requested several times before. It is not currently the top priority for the product team, so I do not know when it is likely to be available. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:54, 3 May 2016 (UTC)
@ഏത്തപഴം:Also note that especially in Wikipedia, the Manual of Style on Tables advises against setting such colors. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:28, 3 May 2016 (UTC)
@TheDJ: I'm not seeing anything on the MOS page that you cite regarding background colors in tables, or "advising against" the use of colors, in general. Personally, I find background coloring to be quite helpful in many cases, as, for example, Democratic Party presidential primaries, 2016. The main advice regarding colors seems to involve accessability; that's a matter of carefully choosing background colors, and not relying solely on them to convey information, rather than not using them at all.
More generally, I don't understand why a common feature of tables - different background colors - is considered to be of such low priority. Why force those who prefer VE to have to go to (and learn) wikitext editing for part of what they want to do with tables? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:14, 6 May 2016 (UTC)
As to why that is not a priority. It's likely that something such as Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_145#Template_styles, would mostly make such an ability less necessary (and thus it is probably better to invest into other areas of the editor for now). Also many of these tables that use colors are templated tables, which still wouldn't be supported, since templates and table editors don't really mix. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:53, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Save form not closing

When I try to save, the page is saved by the dialog is not closing. Looking at the console I'm getting an error with VM8132:828 Uncaught TypeError: this.setupSectionEditLinks is not a function.

I'm not sure if its some of my user scripts interfering so it would be good to check if its happening to others. --Salix alba (talk): 14:01, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

I'll second this. Getting the very same message in my console. First I thought it was some kind of feature he he. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 17:21, 8 May 2016 (UTC)
I saved a test edit in my sandbox earlier today and didn't notice this. Happy to dig into it if you can provide specific steps to reproduce and your config details. TY! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:15, 9 May 2016 (UTC)
Just tried. I confirm that it's still happening. Nothing special: just make any edit and click save. Instead of the editor closing with the "your edit has been saved" popup, the editor remains open (though the save button gets disabled indicating that it's already saved).
Browser: Google Chrome Version 49.0.2623.112 (64-bit); OS: Mac OSX Yosemite; Skin: Vector Ugog Nizdast (talk) 21:19, 9 May 2016 (UTC)
This happened to me yesterday (Win 7, Chrome) on every edit; now I can't reproduce it. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:42, 9 May 2016 (UTC)
Chrome on OSX for me. It seems to be EN wiki specific things are working fine on the French wikipedia. I've changed some of my preferences on the editing tab and also gadgets and the problem seems to have gone away. Not quite sure which one it is though. --Salix alba (talk): 22:45, 9 May 2016 (UTC)
Sounds like a race condition —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:11, 9 May 2016 (UTC)
Seems to be working now. Made a few edits and didn't try to change my prefs or anything. Wierd. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 15:03, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

VE converting categories to crap and lists to HTML

See this edit of Friday Foster. Why is VE converting categories into that crap? Why is VE converting wikicode lists into HTML? It also appears VE is converting italic wikicode to HTML, section header wikicode to HTML, adding quotes in ref names where not need (ie <ref name=foo> -> <ref name="foo">), adding in the <p> tags and underscores in wikilinks. VE already has problems with section headers that's been reported and ignored, but that was trouble with adding new section headers. Other examples on enwiki are: [14], [15], [16], [17], [18] and [19]. Examples on frwiki are: [20], [21], [22]

I don't recall seeing this before until this past Thursday, except I haven't been paying attention to quotes in refs or underscores in wikilinks. All others I would notice. Let me guess, VE was "updated" Wednesday. Bgwhite (talk) 06:27, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

Some more... converting refs into crap. This is something I wouldn't look for, so don't know if this is recent or not, but two in one day. [23] and [24]. Bgwhite (talk) 08:23, 7 May 2016 (UTC)
Most, if not all of these are clearly sloppy copy/paste issues. Someone either copying from a VisualEditor textarea or copying a "live" article. Maybe VisualEditor could add a new tag for "VisualEditor-CopyPaste" to identify these cases. It is incredibly hard for VisualEditor to get the original reference, because that would require first magically determining whether a <sup> is actually a reference, and then determining the exact wikitext / template that generated it. So the "crap" as you call it, is inserted by the user error / ignorance. This is often caused by Firefox's strange copy/paste. 12:44, 7 May 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 197.218.89.57 (talk)
Whoever you are... Obviously you didn't actually read my message or look at the diffs. Crap refs are only a small part, so I don't know why you are talking about refs. Why are these copy/paste when the crap is happening in areas not touched by the "main" edit? How is it a copy/paste or reference error when a category all of a sudden becomes crap when the top half of the article changed? Most of these edits happen within a series of edits within a short time. These are NOT copy/paste issues. It also just started, so it is more likely a problem with a recent VE bug than Firefox.
More examples [25], [26], [27], [28], [29], [30], [31] and [32] Bgwhite (talk) 07:05, 9 May 2016 (UTC)
It depends on your definition of "recent". That thing with categories has been in an article for more than a year [33]. That was found using a simple search. This without a shadow of a doubt is a bug, and a copy/paste problem. I managed to reproduce the copy/paste issue with lists here [34]. That was done by copying revision of the MediaWiki:Sandbox page (revision 2123756) from the Wikitext/Source editor to a VisualEditor Text area using Google Chrome Version 48.0.2564.116 on Fedora Core 22. In the past I've managed to reproduce a user mangling a page in a similar manner using Firefox too. It might be a good idea to verify your assertions before assuming that they are fact. The category thing is most certainly a bug though. 197.235.48.18 (talk) 16:40, 9 May 2016 (UTC)
Again to whoever you are, stop assuming. I did check for the category bug in phabricator. It was a bug and was fixed over a year ago. So, no current bug report that I can find lists this bug. I just did a Google search for the bug and no current articles have it on English Wikipedia. I haven't done a dump scan. I don't use Portuguese Wikipedia, so its moot. Isn't this page the place to report problems or not? I reported a problem not listed in phabricator. How can it be a copy/paste when NO CATEGORIES WERE ADDED OR DELETED. Your "mangling a page" reproduction is also bogus as you changed the list. In the examples above, NO LISTS WERE ADDED OR DELETED. How can every wikilink or wikilinks in certain sections have spaces changed to underscores when NOTHING WERE CHANGED IN THOSE SECTIONS. I have programs that specifically look for bad lists and section headers every day. The amount of errors dramatically went up last Thursday. This is not a copy/paste problem. It might be a good idea to verify your assertions before assuming that they are fact. Bgwhite (talk) 20:17, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

The Fantastic Story Quarterly example above was my edit; that was using Chrome on Windows 7. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:03, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Have you seen any new instances of this issue in the last 24 hours? -- GWicke (talk) 18:23, 10 May 2016 (UTC)
User:Bgwhite, this question is probably for you. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:00, 10 May 2016 (UTC)
Responded at the phab ticket. Bgwhite (talk) 21:31, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

Slow/unresponsive script error when generating citations

Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: Add citations during an edit to the black metal article
Steps to Reproduce: I do not know if this is reproducible, but I tried to add citations while adding content to black metal
Results: Citation generator is very slow to load; I get a warning from Firefox that a script is slow or unresponsive
Expectations: Be able to add citations without having to wait around 40 seconds
Page where the issue occurs Black metal
Web browser Firefox 46.0.1
Operating system Microsoft 10
Skin Vector
Notes: I have several scripts running on my commons.js page. These scripts are:

mw.loader.load('//meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Hedonil/XTools/XTools.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript'); importScript( 'User:Zhaofeng Li/Reflinks.js' ); /* User:Equazcion/OneClickArchiver.js */ importScript( 'User:Equazcion/OneClickArchiver.js' );// Backlink: [[User:Equazcion/OneClickArchiver.js]] importScript('User:Ucucha/duplinks.js'); // [[User:Ucucha/duplinks]] mw.loader.load( "https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Zhaofeng_Li/Reflinks.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript" );

These may be interfering with VE, so I wanted to list them.

Note that I was having problems only with adding citations; nothing else was slow or unresponsive

Workaround or suggested solution This problem does not happen when using the wikitext editor

3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 19:23, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

I could only reproduce when re-using a ref, not adding a new one. I filed https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T134975. HTH, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:33, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

Something went wrong

Not displaying the {{fmbox}} correctly. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:19, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll let the devs know. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:39, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

[Fixed] Unable to cleanly exit the visual editor

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T134794
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:48.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/48.0

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jungle_cat&veaction=edit&vesection=8

Shyamal (talk) 08:40, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

@Shyamal: Really sorry about this bug; now fixed, as you say below. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:14, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

[Fixed] data-ve-clipboard-key

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T134680

I reopened Phab T76749 (edit: was split off as Regression T134680) Visual Editor is still inserting junk spans like: <span data-ve-clipboard-key="0.6993786965500879-1"> </span>. A search turned up more than two dozen hits for it. I dug out and checked a half dozen diffs and found they have been steadily showing up since the bug was closed. Out of that half dozen, the most recent was May 3. Alsee (talk) 10:39, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

@Alsee: Thanks for digging those out; really sorry for the mess caused. This is now fixed and will roll out here tomorrow. I found one remaining instance of this and fixed it – I guess you've fixed the rest already. Thank you, and sorry again. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:19, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

[Fixed] Testing feedback form

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:46.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/46.0

Hi,

Just simply testing feedback form uploading since my testing from hi wikipedia did fail I am trying the same from en wiki. Rgds


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

Mahitgar (talk) 08:39, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

@Mahitgar: Hi there. As of yesterday we fixed the feedback for the Hindi Wikipedia; these now go to MediaWiki.org like most other wikis. Sorry this was broken before. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:20, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T73900

While trying to link an author in a ref, this showed as a blue link in the ref edit popup. Later, had to fix link like this. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 15:23, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your report. I believe this is about https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T73900 . Best, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:35, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
@Ugog Nizdast: Hey there; Elitre is right, that's a long-standing feature we will get around to fixing, but it isn't currently a priority, sorry. Though it may seem simple, doing that efficiently is hard, as we wish to avoid making everyone's computers slower just for the more minor edge cases. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:23, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

[Fixed] Copy pasting plain markup references does not work

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T134228

When I try to copy a plain markup reference from one page's source to another page visually edited, it attempts to convert the markup ref. After the conversion gets completed, there is no new reference. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 03:14, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Are you using Firefox? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:12, 3 May 2016 (UTC)'
Forgot to mention, Google Chrome 49.0.2623.112. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 05:56, 3 May 2016 (UTC)
Thanks. I'll find someone to try this out in Chrome. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:27, 3 May 2016 (UTC)
@Ugog Nizdast: Thanks for reporting this breakage; I'm sorry it affected you. We fixed that last week and rush-released it a week ago; it should now work as expected. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:44, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T134593

[Split from above for clarity.]

Also, the visual editor introduced _ between words inside link brackets making [[word gaps]] to [[word_gaps]] without my knowledge. Shyamal (talk) 10:06, 6 May 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for this note, Shyamal. To exit the visual editor, click on "Article" or "Read" tabs, search for a new page, use the 'back' button in your browser, or just close the browser tab. A year or two ago, there was an explicit "Cancel" button in the toolbar, but basically nobody except me ever used it (and I only used it for testing), so the team decided that it was a waste of space.
The introduction of _ between words inside link brackets sounds like a problem, and not one that I'd heard of before. I've filed a bug report for you. Thank you for letting me know about it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:12, 6 May 2016 (UTC)
When I click save, the popup comes up with the option to add comments. Then I see the save action being shown and then it stops, leaving the popup floating. (This is no longer happening, the popup automatically closes after a save today) Also there was an issue yesterday with automatic capitalization of words within piped wikilinks and sometimes unpiped wikilinks too. Shyamal (talk) 01:34, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

@Shyamal, Bgwhite, and Mike Christie: Very sorry for this; I think we've now fixed it (or at least, it's stopped happening), thanks in no small part to your reports and feedback. Thank you. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:48, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

Citing using Visual Editor (same book but different page numbers)

Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: In the Spy Week editathon, we had a reference that we wanted to re-use in visual editor but for some reason we couldn’t change the page number in the reference. It was always listed as p.150 or always p.140 – depending on whatever you set the first reference as essentially. The only workaround we have across so far is to manually put the book details in each time with a difference page number each time. That seems to work but is time consuming. Any suggestions how to do this more simply?
Steps to Reproduce: In speaking to Richard Nevell at WMUK about this, it seems the 'reuse' button means you change the page for every linked citation. What we ended up doing was to switch to source editing mode, copied the reference, pasted it the new location and change the page=140 or 150 field. But that may not be the best way of doing things as it seems to mean avoiding using Visual Editor.
Results: Just ended up using source editing (as above).
Expectations: Wanted to be able to change the page number more simply in Visual Editor.
Page where the issue occurs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lise_de_Baissac
Web browser Mozilla Firefox.
Operating system Windows 7.
Skin Vector
Notes:
Workaround or suggested solution What we ended up doing was to switch to source editing mode, copied the reference, pasted it the new location and changed the page=140 or 150 field. But that may not be the best way of doing things as it seems to mean avoiding using Visual Editor.

Stinglehammer (talk) 14:06, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

Same problem here. I usually end up going to source editing and converting all the duplicate refs with different page nos into {{sfn}}. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 14:14, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

Yup, sadly, it's one of those cases where the fix is more complicated than it seems, although I'll never lose hope about this one. For more info you can see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T96536 and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T96000. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:19, 13 May 2016 (UTC)
Well, there is at least one other alternative, admittedly a kludge, but it does work in VE: the {{Rp}} template.
In VE: (1) position the pointer immediately after a footnote that does not already include a page number, (2) click on the "Insert" menu, (3) select "Template, (4) type "Rp" [capitalization is immaterial], (5) select the Rp template, (6) click "Add template", (6) type the page number, (7) click "Insert".
-- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:03, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

VE should not replace line break with template, nor remove "&nbsp;"

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T96701
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T135667
Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: add a {{refimprove}} template
Steps to Reproduce:
  1. Loaded the Toyota Land Cruiser article in VE
  2. Added the {{refimprove}} template to the blank line between the hatnote and infobox

This is reproducible see [35] and the same changes (among others) at [36]

Results: the refimprove template was added, replacing the line break between the two existing templates; an &nbsp; in a commented out section elsewhere in the article was replaced with a standard space
Expectations: the {{refimprove}} template would be added on a new line between the existing templates (ideal), or on the same line as one of the existing two (less desirable but understandable)
Page where the issue occurs Toyota Land Cruiser ([37], [38]). I haven't attempted sandbox testing.
Web browser Firefox 46.0
Operating system Xubuntu Linux
Skin Monobook
Notes:
Workaround or suggested solution

Thryduulf (talk) 11:25, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

Thryduulf, great to hear from you again :) We'll look into this soon. Best, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:33, 18 May 2016 (UTC)
Hope you noticed my comment in the 2nd task: for the 1st task, just pinged Cscott about it. HTH. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:01, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

Include section anchor

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T112898

On Draft:List of most disliked YouTube videos I was trying to change the link Hello (Adele song) to Hello (Adele song)#Music video on visual editor. It seemed to work, but when I saved the page, no edit was recorded. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 20:38, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, that won't work until the related task is fixed. Sorry :/ --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 07:13, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
Hmm, high priority task open for nearly a year. What gives? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:41, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
PS The nice way to handle this would be when you type Hello (Adele song)# it begins to suggest section headings from Hello (Adele song) from which you could select "Music Video". — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:41, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
Apparently it's hard to fix without breaking other things. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:56, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

VisualEditor reorders parms in infobox

Another editor made this edit using the VisualEditor. I've seen this situation before, where the editor makes a series of seemingly random reorderings to parameters in the infobox. Is this a bug or a feature? Alansohn (talk) 19:42, 26 May 2016 (UTC)

Misfeature, maybe? The visual editor follows the order set by the WP:TemplateData for the template rigidly. There's no clean way to address the problem. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:54, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
Yes, see T133874. I don't wish to add additional complexity to the code beyond what is necessary. SSastry (WMF) (talk) 23:16, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

Citations - adding templates inside ref-tags

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T136679

In an earlier incarnation of Visual Editor, if you used 'Cite' to add a citation, you could after completion of the citation, open content of the material between ref-tags including a version of the just-added citaiton, by highlighting the citation, clicking "cite" then selecting "basic form". This would add a new citation marker transiently, then merge the two and open an edit window which contained the previously added citation and into which you could add additional templates, such as template:paywall. It would be very convenient to recover this functionality. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 14:05, 28 May 2016 (UTC)

To restate the problem, there isn't (currently) any way to open the Reference dialog for an existing citation that was created with a standard template; for such a citation, when one clicks on "Edit", VE opens the template dialog. The Reference dialog allows the addition of other information, such as {{paywall}}, within a citation (that is, inside a pair of <ref> tags); the template dialog (obviously) does not.
Possible ways to add this functionality (ability to fully edit a citation) to VE:
  • Add an "Edit reference" button at the bottom of the dialog that appears (via pop-up) when a citation is hovered over (currently only an "Edit" button is offered). Clicking on that button would open the Reference dialog. Putting that button at the bottom of the dialog would discourage its use; a user who experiments with it won't be harmed.
  • After the dialog (pop-up) appears when a citation is hovered over, if the user (with that dialog still open) clicks the Cite menu, treat that as a command to open the Reference dialog for the citation being hovered over. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:26, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

Copy-and-paste not working in the presence of comments

Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: I was editing this version of Laura, Queensland to move the bullet item for the Stonyville Township in the Heritage listing section to the similar list in the Palmer, Queensland article, as the heritage property was mislocated.
Steps to Reproduce: I went into the VE on the Laura article and cut (CNTL-X) the line out and Saved, which worked. I then opened VE on the Palmer article and tried to paste (CNTL-V) and nothing was added. Thinking I made a mistake I went back to the (now previous version) of the Laura article and did it again. Still nothing happened. Repeated trying with CNTL-C to copy rather than CNTL-X to cut. Still would not paste it into the Palmer article. Tried right-click-Paste, still no joy. Went back and looked hard at the Laura article and noticed there was a comment in the middle of the line being cut/copied. Experimented with copy/paste just part of the line (without the comment) and everything worked as expected. The problem seems to be the paste in presence of the comment. When I pasted into Notepad, I did get the text but not the comments. This is the line (in source) that doesn't want to be pasted.

* Stony Creek (south of Laura)<!-- approx coords -16.26, 144.37 --> : [[Stonyville Township, Water Race and Cemetery]]<ref>{{cite QHR|15208|Stonyville Township, Water Race and Cemetery|600433|accessdate=7 July 2013}}</ref>

Results:
Expectations:
Page where the issue occurs
Web browser
Operating system
Skin
Notes:
Workaround or suggested solution I have not found a workaround, but I can live without the comment

Kerry (talk) 00:44, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

I am continuing to have trouble using copy-and-paste in the Visual Editor. For example, try reordering the items in the list at Cooktown, Queensland#Heritage listings by copy/cut of one line and then paste it elsewhere in the list. I seem to get nothing when I paste. I seem to be able to copy and paste the plain text on its own, the wikilink on its own (but not together) and the citation not at all. An example of a line it does not want to copy/paste is

120 Charlotte Street: [[Westpac Bank Building, Cooktown|Westpac Bank Building]]<ref>{{cite QHR|15194|Westpac Bank, Cooktown|600419|accessdate=7 July 2013}}</ref>

Kerry (talk) 01:40, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

I think it's that Windows/Chrome problem that we talked about a while ago. I can't reproduce those in Safari/Mac (example), except for the missing comments. And it appears that comments get stripped, just like most font, colors, and similar attributes get stripped. (I don't know whether that's "intentionally stripped, because we think it's probably a good idea" or "sort of intentionally stripped, in the sense that they know they're being stripped and haven't changed the behavior yet".) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:39, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

Stub templates

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52882
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T135667

Why does VE make edits like this? They go against the Manual of Style, there are at least three things wrong: (i) stub template placed above cats; (ii) blank lines removed; (iii) we don't put block-type templates in line. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:03, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

I can't replicate that (Mac OS, Firefox, both latest version). When I insert a stub template next to where another stub template was (or is, and is about to be removed), the new stub template stays in the same location in the source version of the page.
I'll also note, for what it's worth, that MOS:ORDER pertains only to the English Wikipedia; since VE now is used in hundreds of different language versions of Wikipedia, we can't expect the developers to read and follow (differing and non-static) policies and guidelines established at (potentially) hundreds of sites.
None of which is to say that categories shouldn't be all together [VE letting them be split, which I've seen, was astonishing], nor that categories shouldn't be last [that's not an issue with the edit involved], or that defaultsort has a definite place [ditto], and since it's related to categories, should be next to them. But I'm puzzled how VE is going to figure out what's a stub template and what's not, or how many blank lines are appropriate. In short, if we're looking for the cause, for this situation, is it VE or is it what the user actually did while using VE? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:45, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

When attempting to delete a cell or row in a wikitable with VE, the dialog is confusing.

I understand that this would probably be low priority, and that it might not even be feasible, but I've found some of the dialog when editing a wikitable confusing. For instance, if I want to delete a cell or row, I have to select the cell or row, then select the small arrow, which brings me to the dialog box. But when I select the cell or row, initially I get the dialog box for the entire template. For someone who is unfamiliar with this dialog system (which at first included me, because I think things changed in an update), it seems like clicking "delete" when you initially select a table or row would delete that row, but in fact the entire table is deleted. I just think for new users, things might be confusing.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 03:43, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

VE freezes up while editing a table

Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: Add entries to a table
Steps to Reproduce: # Find a simple wikitable to which you wish to add a new entry
  1. Add a new row
  2. Start filling out the new content
  3. While still working on that row, try to make changes to a different row
  4. Close down you browser because VE will freeze and you can't even shut it down
Results: This error is sporadic, and I'm not sure how reproducible it is, though it happens about 70%-80% of the time for me. When VE freezes up, I can still move the mouse and click things, but nothing happens. I usually cannot even exit VE and thus must close the browser window
Expectations: Be able to add entries to a table without VE freezing
Page where the issue occurs I was working on Lecrae discography and Circle of Dust when I encountered this error
Web browser Firefox 46.0.1
Operating system Microsoft 10
Skin Vector
Notes: This is something that's tricky to reproduce. I'm also not sure if the problem is simply adding a new row, with columns, to a table, or if it is clicking on another row after filling out the new row.
Workaround or suggested solution The only workaround that seemed to work for me was switching to wikitext editor, if VE allows me to do that after freezing up

3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 14:48, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your report. We'll get to it ASAP! All the best, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:33, 18 May 2016 (UTC)
Hey 3family6 , I looked into this. Some remarks: when you say "While still working on that row, try to make changes to a different row", I'm not sure how to do that. My cursor can only be in one cell at a time :) I also noticed that the table at Lecrae discography needed to be fixed later, so maybe incorrect wikitext may play a role here? Finally, I filed this task to request that switching editors is also possible while editing, via a keyboard shortcut: I don't think it'd help if the editor is really frozen, but still. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:58, 25 May 2016 (UTC)
@Elitre: What I meant by "While still working on that row, try to make changes to a different row" was simply to try an click a different row to start making changes to - for me, the cursor wouldn't switch, and VE would freeze up. I don't think this is an error with the tables themselves, as the tables in the Circle of Dust discography section look fine to me.

Once again, while trying to make an addition to Lecrae discography the editor froze on me.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 04:01, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

I got this error again, this time while editing my sandbox. The second time, I was able to submit my edit, though not as complete as I intended. Usually, though, I lose my work.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 03:51, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

If I'm doing a substantial edit to a wikitable, this error occurs about 90%-100% of the time. I can now sometimes manage to save the page if I see the glitch starting.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 04:18, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

I did just now edit 2015 in hip hop music, and I did not encounter the glitch there, although my edit was also not that extensive. It seems that the longer I edit, the more likely I am to encounter this freeze-up glitch.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 04:44, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Multiple problems on one edit : <h2>, span data-ve-clipboard-key...

Hi, this edit shows multiple problems due to VE:

  • HTML tag <h2>, <h3> for titles instead of MW syntax
  • <span data-ve-clipboard-key...> tags
  • [[File:...:|lien=https://fr.wikipedia.org/...]]

Please fix and stop damaging articles. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 06:43, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Phab T134680 on the Clipboard Key was closed recently, claiming it was resolved. Apparently it wasn't resolved. Alsee (talk) 16:23, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
I re-opened the bug. If the patch solved the problem completely (and if it made the deployment train that it's tagged with), then we shouldn't be seeing those today. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:50, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Reference numbering

Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: Correct ref
Steps to Reproduce: In Salicylic acid, edited the page.
Results: The refs that are specified in an infobox are left out of the numbering system. I.e., in the text what was ref n is now n - the number of refs in the box. However, the refs in the infox box do appear in the reflist. Confusing!
Expectations: That the numbers would match.
Page where the issue occurs Add URL(s) or diffs
Web browser Chrome 50.0.2661.102 m
Operating system Windows 10
Skin Monobook/Vector?
Notes: Any additional information. Can you provide a screenshot, if relevant?
Workaround or suggested solution Add one here if you have it.

Lfstevens (talk) 19:14, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

This is a known bug, and it will be some time before it's fixed. It's complicated.
BTW, I recommend using plain <references /> instead of the local {{reflist}} template. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:52, 15 June 2016 (UTC)
Thanks. Why <references />? Lfstevens (talk) 03:53, 16 June 2016 (UTC)
It's faster for page rendering (unless you're using columns or other advanced features from the template, {{reflist}} is just a slow way to get <references /> on the page), and it auto-updates as you add, remove, or change refs in the visual editor.
Years ago, we used the reflist template as a way to reduce the font size, but the fonts are identical now. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:16, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
The speed advantage for <references /> over {{reflist}} is miniscule compared with the time taken to process the refs that it displays, especially when citation templates are in use. WP:DWAP. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:03, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

When saving, clicking review changes should allow you to continue editing metadata

I just pressed "save", and then clicked "review changes" to see if everything is OK, and before I could enter metadata and edit the description of the change, I pressed "save" assuming I will go back to the previous view, but it just saved. How can I go back from "review changes" to "save"? I think there should be a clear way to go back.

Especially if you have not changed the description of the change, it should prompt you "do you really want to save without describing the change" or something like that. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mitar (talk • contribs) 02:23, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Oh, it seems the button to return is bellow. I missed that. Mitar (talk) 02:54, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
It's easy to miss. I'm glad that you found it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:29, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

When citing a website, how to tell which part of the site is relevant

If I am citing a long website, how can I tell which part of the website is relevant to the statement in the article? Because it might be unclear. I do not see any prompt in the "manual tab" for website for something like that.

(BTW, why I cannot use visual editor to edit this form for visual editor suggestions?) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mitar (talk • contribs) 02:27, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

@Mitar: It's not usually a good idea to cite a website. Most websites comprise several pages, and it's normally best to cite the specific web page that the information is on. For example, I might cite the web page http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36519886 but I would not cite the website http://www.bbc.co.uk/ itself. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:03, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
Sorry if I was unclear. I mean how to cite a smaller section inside a page on a website. So URL points to a page, how to tell which part of that page is relevant. Mitar (talk) 10:11, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
A web page might have internal anchors. These are not always easy to find, and if you don't know how to read and interpret HTML code, it's not feasible. But a page with internal anchors may have a table of contents at or near the top - if clicking on an entry here takes you to the appropriate section of the page, you then have a suitable URL that is more specific than the one for the page.
Another approach is to use the |at= parameter - so I might put |at=paragraph 3 or, if counting is unfeasible, |at=paragraph beginning "As it neared the ground". --Redrose64 (talk) 10:49, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
Is that "at" parameter available through visual editor? Why is it not possible to maybe just paste the paragraph in when citing? Mitar (talk) 10:51, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
Yes, |at= is available in VE. You could use the |quote= parameter, but be careful of copyrights. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:14, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
Hm, but for somebody who started and using only visual editor, how would one know about this parameter? I think it should be clearer in visual editor to supply all possible parameters? Mitar (talk) 19:11, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
|quote= is also available for use in VE. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:11, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
But you have to know to use it, no? Like manually add it to the set of parameters? This is not very user/beginner friendly. Mitar (talk) 20:19, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
In the template-editing dialog, if you scroll to the end, you'll see an item that says "Add more information". Clicking on that will give you a list of the other options (every option that is defined in TemplateData on the template's documentation page). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:34, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

What if there are multiple authors of the website?

Currently it seems to be possible only to supply one last name and one first name. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mitar (talk • contribs) 02:48, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

This may be challenging to accomplish with Visual Editor, but if you take an in-depth look at Wikipedia:Citation template, you will see that multiple authors are supported in the "old school" editing interface. Cullen328 Let's discuss it 02:58, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
I guessed it is possible with old school interface. But it should also be with visual editor? Is this the best place to provide feature requests for visual editor, for long term features like this? Mitar (talk) 02:59, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
In my opinion, it definitely should be possible but in all honesty, I do not fully know the current capabilities. Each time I try the Visual Editor, I see improvements. But I still edit raw wikicode on a day-to-day basis for maximum control and flexibility. And I am not a programmer and I edit on a smart phone and I have visual disabilities. It works fine for me. Cullen328 Let's discuss it 03:11, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
Oh, don't worry. I am not demanding from you to fix this. :-) I would like to make visual editor better and make it so that everything is possible here. So I am reporting issues I find here. And hope that there is some better feature/issue tracker where such ideas are not lost. I know that VE is still in process, but I think it is useful to report issues I find through daily use. Because I am a relative beginner to editing I think that other beginner users are probably stumbling across same VE issues. And it would be really great if they would not have to switch away from VE. Mitar (talk) 03:16, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
I really appreciate your willingness to post every issue that you encounter. I'm planning to send your comments to Design Research, so please keep them coming.  :-)
Including multiple authors is possible. Go to Cite > Manual > Website (that's the one you use the most, right? They all work approximately the same way). Scroll down, and click "Add more information". The second and third items in the list are the ones you want: "Last name 2" (for the last name of the second author) and "First name 2" (for the first name of the second author). Click those to add them to the list. If you have more than two authors, then click "Show XX more fields" to see the full list.
The order of the fields/parameters is chosen manually by the template's editors; usually, for citation templates, they choose to put the rest of the authors' names about three-quarters of the way down the (long) list. But just scroll until you see what you want, and then fill it in. Template:Cite web's /doc page has more details. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:40, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

Incorrect modification of table

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T138338

This edit, which was tagged "Visual edit", seems to have crippled a table. —Kri (talk) 12:52, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. I've filed a bug for that. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:07, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

When citing, for "URL access date", prefill with the current timestamp

When making (especially a web URL) reference, I think "URL access date" should be prefilled with the current timestamp. Because I have to open the URL anyway to get all the information from it.

Or at least make a button to populate it with current timestamp.

Mitar, I agree with you. However, because of a very old and ugly bug (phab:T4700 from 2005), this isn't working yet. Pre-filled dates are no problem for a template such as {{fact}}, but if it's inside ref tags, then we run into this old bug. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:27, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
Hm, I think you are talking about prefilling at the template level. But I am talking about prefilling at the UI level of the VisualEditor. So inside the form which is opened. Mitar (talk) 22:11, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
I was about to say that the template dialog does use TemplateData in its processing; "TemplateData provides context for each parameter", so the context could include something like "Set to current date". But (1) when I use VE to create a citation using the automatic tab, VE does fill in the "URL access date" field for me, so I'm confused about what others are saying doesn't happen. [I don't like the format of the date that is supplied by VE, but that's another issue.] In other words, I am seeing this parameter filled. And also, (2) TemplateData has a parameter option of "Auto value", which (weirdly?) is set to "empty", in the Cite web template, for the "URL access date" parameter. What happens (anything?) if this is set to [the magicword for?] "current date"? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:55, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
I was using manual tab and then selected "web". It does not prefill then. Mitar (talk) 01:58, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
Right. The automatic mw:citoid service provides the dates directly. The manual template would have to rely upon subst:ing the dates using the date-related variables from Help:Magic words, which (due to that old bug) doesn't work inside ref tags. So if you went to Insert > Template and added a citation (e.g., in a ==Further reading== list), then TemplateData could fill in the dates without any trouble. But if you start in Cite, because it adds <ref>...</ref> tags (or gallery, or any similar <tags>...</tags>), then the bug prevents the magic word from subst:ing. You actually get {{subst:CURRENTMONTH}} (etc.) showing in the article (wikitext and read-mode both), rather than the date. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:29, 21 June 2016 (UTC)
John, are you familiar with the new |df= for the citation templates? It will transform the dates to whatever you want. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:31, 21 June 2016 (UTC)
I tested adding the df parameter to a {{Cite web}} template, in VE; it very much didn't like that (nor does saving the change eliminate the "Invalid" parameter error, so this isn't a [purely?] VE issue). As best as I can understand {{Cite web}}, the df parameter is discussed, but it's not in the TemplateData.
I assumed that df should be a separate parameter based on how it is used in mw:Template:As of, but I also tried other approaches, without successs. I'm also confused about df being "new"; it's been included in the cite web documentation for many years. Is there a recent discussion somewhere about the df parameter? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:05, 21 June 2016 (UTC)
You set it to |df=mdy or equivalent, rather than a country code. I thought that |df= was new (to at least one of the main templates) as a result of one of the major updates earlier this year. Perhaps I am mis-remembering it, though. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:04, 25 June 2016 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF): Thanks. It turns out that I want to add |df=mdy-all. I've asked, at Help talk:Citation Style 1, that this parameter be added to TemplateData for various citation templates. It is possible, in VE, to add this parameter, now, but only in a user-unfriendly way. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:27, 25 June 2016 (UTC)
This parameter also seems like the sort of thing that AWB could be written to add, to any articles that have {{Use British English}} or {{Use dmy}} or similar templates. There doesn't seem to be any good way to make the visual editor figure out what those local templates imply for date formats (I've asked), but it seems like it should be straightforward for locally configured bots/scripts to deal with it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:19, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

Problem with common edit summaries gadget when resuming editing

When using Visual Editor with the common edit summaries gadget enabled (Preferences > Gadgets > Editing > "Add two new dropdown boxes below the edit summary box with some useful default summaries" checkbox) every time click "Save page" and then "Resume editing", it adds an extra copy of the dropdown boxes to the "Save your changes" window. By resuming again and again, the number of copies just grows and grows. Jason Quinn (talk) 11:38, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

I hate to feel like I'm just giving you the run-around, but problems with a local gadget/user script have to be solved in the gadget (as a matter of practical policy: there are 800+ WMF wikis with, consequently, 800+ sets of gadgets).
In this case, that means that the report would go to MediaWiki talk:Gadget-defaultsummaries.js, where it was reported some time ago. Unfortunately, I don't think the gadget's original author is consistently active any longer, so I don't think it's likely to be fixed very soon. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 06:03, 28 June 2016 (UTC)
I was unsure where to report this bug. Wasn't clear to me on which side the programming issue lies. But I'll try with the gadget author. Whatamidoing. Jason Quinn (talk) 06:30, 28 June 2016 (UTC)
@Jason Quinn: The gadget could start hooking into mw.hook wikipage_editform. That is a new hook specifically to avoid something like this. (though I haven't tested yet if it actually works when switching between VE and WTEditor. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:33, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

How and when are we going to promote the Visual Editor?

Hey, have a question. The Visual Editor looks good and works well. I see no publicity online about this. Is it still in Beta? Whats the plan to make people aware of it, especially those who maybe put off by wiki markup? Let me know if I can help. Thanks Garymonk (talk) 17:43, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your note. I apologize for the delay in replying; it's recover-from-Wikimania time for a lot of staff. I know that Communications is planning some work around the visual editor and editing in general during the new fiscal year (which began a few days ago). I don't know the details of their plans.
How would you like to help? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:26, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Template:Infobox football biography

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T139489

Editors using VE who edit a page which contains {{Infobox football biography}} seems to result in the infobox formatting going weird (i.e. parameters moved to a random order e.g. [39] [40], [41] [42], [43]. Can this be resolved? The infobox is on tens of thousands of articles so God knows how many have been messed up. GiantSnowman 11:35, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

@GiantSnowman: The order is, I believe, governed by the order in which params are listed in the <templatedata>...</templatedata> block at Template:Infobox football biography/doc#TemplateData. When VE is used to edit a template, any parameters not listed in that block get moved to the bottom; so as that block lists |youthyears1= and |youthyears2= but not higher numbers such as |youthyears3=, those higher numbers get separated out by VE. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:01, 3 July 2016 (UTC)
@Redrose64: - I believe the infobox can accommodate up to 40 instances of each parameter (e.g. |club1= |club2= etc.), how can we get around this without massively increasing the size of the template data? GiantSnowman 17:58, 3 July 2016 (UTC)
For now, the workaround is going to be massively increasing the size of the TemplateData, or at least adding a couple more, to reduce the most common problems. I've filed at request to make this work better at phab:T139489. Please feel free to add your comments or suggestions there, too. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:33, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Visual Editor damaged a table

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T139780
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.106 Safari/537.36

Hey. I was trying to edit the main table of the x86 article with VE. One of my changes was inserting a line break into several of the cells of column one.

Here is the result: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=X86&diff=728898840&oldid=728897826

I can't think of anything else to say. I ended up doing the change manually with the source editor.

Fleet Command (talk) 12:09, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for this bug report. "Things unexpectedly break when you do everything right" is one of my least favorite classes of bugs. I've reported it; I hope that the devs can find a way to fix it soon. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:18, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Problems may have temporarily resurfaced

There was a bug (not in VisualEditor) that prevented some people from logging in, so all the software changes for about two weeks got reverted to get editors back online. After that, the 99% of the changes that didn't cause the problem were reapplied. Everything's supposed to be back to normal by now, but it's possible that some recently fixed bugs resurfaced during the hours between the wholesale reversion and the re-application. The devs apologize for any problems that anyone encountered during this process. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:32, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

I cannot upload a picture.

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.84 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Seicho-no-Ie&action=edit

Hydrocat o (talk) 05:37, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Hey. Please study Help:Upload. That'll get you started. FleetCommand (Speak your mind!) 06:29, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
Hydrocat o, can you tell us what you tried to do, and how it did (or didn't) work?
Also, can you tell us about the picture that you want to upload? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 06:56, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
The user says elsewhere that the problem is gone for them. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 06:11, 14 July 2016 (UTC)
Not sure if this is what the user meant by "upload", but I frequently get the problem of "Insert > Media" sitting there flashing its barber pole for a bit and then saying nothing found. Since I always have a browser tab open on Commons all the day, I do know what images I am expecting to see offered up by Insert > Media, so I know that "nothing found" is an error and I just repeat the Insert > Media which usually works fine the second time. But users who are not looking on Commons may perceive this "nothing found" as actually meaning there are no images, which may well surprise them if they thought they had just uploaded one. I can't see any pattern in Insert > Media not working which is why I've never reported it -- I suspect it may be a time-out on the response from Commons? If so, is it possible to produce a different error message so the user can distinguish between "hey, we looked really hard and there really are no images that match those key words" and "something else wrong and we have no clue if there are images or not, maybe try again". Kerry (talk) 07:50, 14 July 2016 (UTC)
Well, details about user configuration and steps to reproduce are always welcome (there may be issues specific to a certain image or filename for what we know, hence "just try and add any image" usually doesn't do the trick!), then we can figure out what to do. Generally speaking problems with search are problems with the search engine, not with VE, but we can pass the information to anyone who may be interested when have gathered enough info. TTYS, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:27, 14 July 2016 (UTC)
It's never reproducible, so does not seem linked to the characteristics of a particular set of search keywords nor a particular image. I find repeating the action (Insert -> Media) almost always works the second time. So I don't think it is the fault of the search (in terms of the algorithm that maps key words to images), as, when it works, it seems quite stable in the results it returns. But it may be a problem of making/completing the call to Commons as you see the barber pole for a while before it reports no results (suggesting time is passing); is there any exception handling that results in an empty list of search results being returned? That's where my spider sense is tingling. Kerry (talk) 13:23, 14 July 2016 (UTC)
Yeah sounds like a timeout or something. We probably want to tell the user and ask him to try again, instead of saying 0 results. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:13, 14 July 2016 (UTC)
I'll ask James F. about this. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:51, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

Messing up categories

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T140590

I started seeing this on Thursday. Categories are being added as <link rel="mw:PageProp/Category" href="./Category:1827_establishments_in_Michigan_Territory" /> Examples are Lisa Madiganand Sturgis Michigan. I've seen 5 or six of these. VE is also converting lists from * to <li>, section headers from == to <h2> and adding <h2> to new section headers (see [44]). I see these every day. Bug report was filed in 2015. Bgwhite (talk) 05:58, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

It's being mentioned in this Parsoid bug, which unfortunately looks quite challenging. Thanks for your report, BTW.--Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:53, 17 July 2016 (UTC)
It is a bug in RESTBase, not Parsoid. SSastry (WMF) (talk) 20:32, 17 July 2016 (UTC)
My apologies, Subbu the Powerful :) Thanks Magioladitis for your help. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:47, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

The bug is more general. Many wikicode entities are changed in to html. I reported on Phabricator. -- Magioladitis (talk)

When editing a redirect page, put additional content after the redirect markup

Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: changing the target of a redirect and adding a categorisation template
Steps to Reproduce:  
  1. Load a redirect in visual editor (e.g. traplines)
  2. Change the target of the redirect
  3. Add a redirect categorisation template (in this case {{R from plural}}) to the body of the page
Results: VE placed the template before the redirect markup, breaking the redirect
Expectations: VE would place the template after the redirect, retaining it as a redirect
Page where the issue occurs [45]
Web browser Firefox 47.0
Operating system Linux
Skin Monobook
Notes: I haven't tested this to see whether it happens when not changing the target of the page or it happens with non-template additions to the page
Workaround or suggested solution add the template then switch to source editor to fix the order (presumed, untested)

Thryduulf (talk) 22:51, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for reporting this. I put it at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T140599 (should you need to do this action again, you may consider adding an empty line below the redirect). HTH, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:16, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

How to change licensing

I erroneously forgot to select the proper licensing for this image. However, I have found it difficult to figure out how to change the licensing on the image, even after reading through the instructions. Thanks!

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:47.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/47.0

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:W.J._Bush_%26_Co_Distillery_Explosion,_Merton_1933.jpg

Sturgeontransformer (talk) 06:09, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

Sturgeontransformer, the image appears to be a duplicate of File:Essential_Oils_Distillery_Explosion,_Mitcham_March_30,_1933.jpg. Is there any reason we shouldn't simply delete the W.J._Bush version? Alsee (talk) 06:16, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Please feel free to delete the W.J. Bush version. Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sturgeontransformer (talk • contribs) 06:23, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

And yes, this is a complicated process, it's better to just ask someone for help, so please do. :) —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:10, 18 July 2016 (UTC)
After saving, the only obvious way I see of doing it is removing the existing template and adding the correct one (or at least, I'm simulating this on a pic I uploaded, and if I were to change even just the version number of the license I chose, I couldn't do it differently AFAIK. I think it's a pretty common step which certainly deserves good local documentation. Not sure how good Commons' documentation is when it comes to the visual editor though. I'll see if it's worth more space in the general VE one on mw.org. Best, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:49, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Discarding edit summary

Twice today while editing Philippines v. China, visual editor discarded my edit summary. The first time, it cleared the box and did not save the edit. I retyped the edit summary and pressed save again. This time it saved the edit but without my edit summary. I'm not sure if I can reproduce this error, but will report back if I notice anything else. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:32, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

I believe (and a VE dev seems to confirm this) that this is related to some saving issues (some of which are reported above in this page) and which have probably already been fixed-just, the patch needs to be back ported. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:51, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Staying in edit mode after successful save

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T140574

Several times recently I've saved in VE and had the save dialog stay active, as if I hadn't clicked Save. Checking in another tab reveals that the save worked. When I close the tab I was editing in, or go to another page, it warns me I might lose my work, although the save was successful. Windows 7, Chrome 51.0.2704.103 m. Is this a known bug? It's ugly, but not very serious, since the save does work. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:54, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Follow up note: if I just hit Save again, and enter an edit summary so it will let the save happen, it goes back to the article (i.e. it leaves the VE interface) and doesn't actually save. So the workaround is just to hit the save button three times (the third time is to acknowledge the "no edit summary" message), instead of once. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:14, 16 July 2016 (UTC)
I noticed a similar, or perhaps the same, issue occasionally (like 5-6 times during the last 3-4 days). Clicking "Save" with a full edit summary emptied the edit summary, and the editor stays in the "Save" dialog - with no visual indication for a successful or failed save attempt. A second immediate "Save" attempt is usually OK. I didn't do any additional background research - my Internet connection is quite laggy at times, so I didn't really think much about it while it happened. (Specs: Windows XP, Firefox 47.0, Vector skin). GermanJoe (talk) 17:39, 17 July 2016 (UTC)
Can confirm the same issue on Chrome 51.0.2704.106 m. Article is updated though VisualEditor thinks it's not. I don't think it happens because of the Internet connection, since edit is already saved. Also doesn't look like a platform-specific issue. Randomuser0122 (talk) 07:11, 18 July 2016 (UTC)
Sounds like https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T140574 ? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:51, 18 July 2016 (UTC)
Yes, definitely. Added a Phabricator tracking ID. -Randomuser0122 (talk) 16:49, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

freezing

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.103 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.J._Niven_Engineering_Ltd?veswitched=1&veaction=edit&oldid=0

Johnragla (talk) 20:46, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Re-enabling ve

Will you indulge me in a little whingefest. I edit in standard wiki-code and am suspicious of ve- so it is switched off. But- it is summer, and to celebrate I decided to give it another try and rewrite a training ppt using ve. So off I went to preferences to switch it back on.

Enabling

In en- I couldn't find the option. I looked in the documentation- zilch. In meta, I found my preferences were slightly different and I got the clue. But, if we are serious about ve- en preferences need to be redrawn.

At the moment, there is a check box saying disable ve while in beta, and this removes the combo-box that allows choice of which editor to use. This is far to obtuse for the user (perfect sense to the programmer).

Solution 1: A check box 'Enable VE'.
Solution 2: Expand the combobox with new option 'Disable VE' this removes the need for the checkbox and is logical to the user.
I agree with you that the prefs setting is strangely worded. I think that it has to do with some slightly arcane bits of The Proper Way To Describe Preferences™.
The simplest solution is actually to eliminate the enable/disable setting entirely. (Why? Because "Always give me the wikitext editor" looks exactly like "Temporarily disable" from the POV of the user, even though they're separate entries in the database.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 14:30, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Vector skin

Now lets look at the interface on the wp page. We have [edit][edit source] why? They are the wrong way round and edit is the legacy word for edit wikitext.

Solution 1: Rename and reverse- [edit][edit source] to [edit][visual edit].
Solution 2: One click for edit, double click for visual edit- with a a hint given on hover-over

This may be presented as a user choice

Solution 3: Go back to the combobox and add some more options
Show me both edit tabs as [edit][edit source]
Show me both edit tabs as [edit][visual edit]
Enable one click for edit, double click for visual edit

But before you do this- update the documentation so it goes live at the same time. When writing the documentation don't pitch it at the user- but at the trainer who will have to explain it to a newbie, without having the luxury of having seen it in advance.

ClemRutter (talk) 10:22, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

The "rules" for MediaWiki require that the tabs use verbs, because you take an action when you click on them. So you "Read", "Edit", "View history", etc. You could "Edit visually" – but not "Visual edit". On the other hand, there's a lot to be said for consistency across wikis, and it would be unfortunate for new people to encounter "Edit" meaning one thing at the English Wikipedia and a different thing at Meta. And in formal user testing, new people very much believe that the visual editor is the primary and preferable one. They don't think of anything as being a legacy word, because they weren't here for the last decade.
Having said that, any logged-in editor can change any labels via CSS. If you dislike the current labels, you can certainly change them for your own account. (Some days, it's tempting to change mine to "Make mistakes" and "Screw up". ;-) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 14:10, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Diffs

On a diff page reached from my watchlist, I see at the top of the page [edit][edit source] (using the word edit to mean ve) but in the body

Latest revision as of 06:04, 22 July 2016 (edit) (undo)- where edit means [edit source] in ve language.

Solution: See solution 1: in text above, I think. --ClemRutter (talk) 11:31, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

I've had 3 people from VE training classes contact me to say "I can't use VE anymore; it's no there anymore" (or words to that effect). It seems that the introduction of the new preferences has defaulted to disabling the VE from people who have previously used it. Surely the default should have been set to enable the VE or both editors for anyone with prior VE use. Obviously I do not know if any people affected didn't contact me and just gave up on WP when they couldn't access the VE but there's a real risk that this default has lost us VE users :-( Kerry (talk) 23:10, 22 July 2016 (UTC)
The default is "whatever you used last", which means that if you do 99 edits in the visual editor, and one in wikitext immediately before the switch, then you're a "wikitext-only" editor (and the other way around). You should see a dialog box that explains this (although for a little while, that was only available for people whose accounts defaulted to the visual editor, which wouldn't help people who are stuck in the wikitext editor). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 14:21, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Comments on selecting VE as the editor

The entire editing tab in Preferences should be rewritten. Is this something that can be done by admins, or does it require programmers?

As Clem has pointed out, the main choice - two tabs or one, and if one tab, VE or wikitext, is not at all prominent. Moreover, things that pertain only to wikitext editing - for example, the entire Preview section of the tab - aren't identified as such.

The editing tab should be organized something like this: (a) general choices (if any) that affect both VE and wikitext editing; (b) user choice regarding whether to have two "edit" tabs or one, and if one, which editor is triggered [it would be nice to actually see "visual editor" when making this choice]; (c) options that affect only the wikitext editor, such as previewing, and (d) options that affect only the VE editor [if any]. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:41, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

The actual prefs settings (the ones and zeroes in the database) requires dev support. I don't know if the appearance of the tab itself also requires dev support. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 14:02, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Citing DOIs

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T141526

This may have been suggested before but when I put in a DOI via automatic citation, it would be nice if the script can see if it has been cited before and automatically reuse a reference. Perhaps also with other identifiers. Shyamal (talk) 06:44, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

@Shyamal: Unfortunately, the Wikipedia footnoting system considers two citations that are identical, except for page number, to be different. Since the {{Cite journal}} template does have a page parameter, it would be wrong for VE to conclude - simply because the doi parameter is the same - that two citations are going to be identical. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:24, 23 July 2016 (UTC)
In that case making a suggestion and offering to re-use would be helpful - since the current UI seems to depend on the user's memory which might work but only if the article is being entirely written by a single user. Shyamal (talk) 15:45, 23 July 2016 (UTC)
I thought that this had been suggested before, but I couldn't find it in the list. So it's phab:T141526 now, and may be redirected to an earlier version, if any existed. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 14:47, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

CX and ISBNs

I've been seeing the following alot: [//de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/9783412201562 ISBN 978-3-412-20156-2]

Examples from today are: Beate Klarsfeld and Ernst Heirnrichsohn. I see 2-4 a day. Bgwhite (talk) 05:53, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Other languages too. I 've seen Spanish, Swedish equivalents etc. -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:17, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Same in frwiki, reported more than a year on phabricator to the CX team, nothing done about it. some examples for enwiki also. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 08:37, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Again, CX bugs need to be reported to the CX team, not to the VisualEditor team. You can do that by leaving a message at mw:Talk:Content translation. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 14:51, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Cannot add a simple photo, abusefilter error?

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.106 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wings_of_Hope_(charity)&action=edit

WoH62 (talk) 18:43, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

WoH62, what was the name of the photo that you wanted to add? I believe that there are some restrictions on file names such as "Photo.jpg". Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 14:23, 28 July 2016 (UTC)
It seems that all the images that I have added on Wings of Hope (charity) have been flagged as stolen, and I found this out while trying to add an image into the newly built "history" section. The image is properly labelled, the problem is that I have no idea how to give permission to myself to use images from my own website for use on the wikipedia page. I keep getting links with broad information - I just don't understand the whole process, nor do I care to spend a ton of time figuring out what is what. — Preceding unsigned comment added by WoH62 (talk • contribs) 15:43, 28 July 2016 (UTC)
@WoH62: Apparently you work for, or volunteer at, Wings of Hope, and what you're saying is that https://wingsofhope.ngo/ is your own website. The problem, from Wikipedia's viewpoint, is that we have no way of knowing if that's true, and even if it is true, there are formalities to be followed - basically, you've got to revise the copyright. Please notice that on every page of your website, at the bottom, is "Copyrignt © 2016 Wings of Hope. All rights reserved." Images posted on Wikipedia cannot have a standard copyright - see Wikipedia:File copyright tags.
This isn't a VisualEditor issue. It looks like you'll have to send an email to OTRS (see here). I suggest also reading Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials#Granting us permission to copy material already online. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:16, 28 July 2016 (UTC)
@WoH62: Yep, not VE. Discussion about these images is at c:Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by WoH62. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:50, 28 July 2016 (UTC)
WoH62, you may not want to use the upload form in the editing tools, as that gives all other users very broad permission to use your files for any purpose at all (e.g., including purposes opposite the goals of your organization). If you do, then c:COM:OTRS is the place to start for figuring out what to do. If you don't want to do that, then it might be possible to use Special:Upload to upload some of them only to the English Wikipedia as fair-use. This is often done for logos and other unique images. This is kind of a niche question, but you can probably find someone to help you figure out what is best for your situation at the Wikipedia:Tea house, or the regulars there may be able to find a volunteer who knows a lot about this subject to help you. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 06:56, 31 July 2016 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF):Thanks for the input, I will certainly take a look in the Tea House. The "Special:Upload" link was a dud, I only see a "Permission Error" page. Many Thanks!WoH62 (talk) 15:00, 1 August 2016 (UTC)
That link wouldn't have worked for you on the 1st as your account hadn't been autoconfirmed. Your account will have been autoconfirmed later that day, and I see you were able to upload files on the 4th. Hope that explains what happens - we don't allow accounts to do certain things until they have done enough contributions and been here long enough to be autoconfirmed. ϢereSpielChequers 10:34, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

Visual Editor and Twinkle problem

I thought I'd give V/E another try, it is convenient for adding columns to tables. So I enabled it with the option of having two edit boxes, one for V/E and one for the classic editor. But I then lost my prod tab from Twinkle, I've got the tab back, but that meant opting out of V/E and reverting to the classic editor again. ϢereSpielChequers 14:36, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

@WereSpielChequers: I have that setup for years already and do not have your experience. The tab shows up just fine in the namespaces that it supports and works with both monobook and Vector. Try checking if any of your user scripts/gadgets are interfering and causing this problem. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:22, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
Thanks theDJ, good to hear that it is not as widespread a bug as it might have been. I'm not sure I fancy making time to go through all my gadget and script choices to try and narrow this one down. Happy to disclose that I use Monobook rather than vector. The scripts in my monobook.js are all copied from elsewhere and I suspect used by many admins. Not sure if my gadget choices are particularly non standard, though I do display categories at the top of the article rather than the end. ϢereSpielChequers 10:27, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
Do you have Twinkle configured to have a separate tab at the top just for Prod (e.g., Edit this page – History – Move – Prod – Watch)? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:24, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
Yes, when I look at articles I have separate tabs for CSD, XFD and Prod. ϢereSpielChequers 17:41, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

edit summary when switching from visual to source editor

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T144906

I was in VE and had already added an edit summary when I switched to source editor (because I was adding template parameters which is easier to do with copy-n-paste in source than the VE method). When I saved in the source editor, I could see my VE edit summary in the source edit summary box. Good! But the save failed, saying I hadn't provided an edit summary (I have that preference set). It would be nice if it realised that I had provided an edit summary. Kerry (talk) 07:06, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Visual editor edits messing up infobox parameter order

Hi. I've noticed that editors making changes to infoboxes via Visual editor often end up inadvertently changing the order of the parameters in the infobox (one such example here). This can cause problems at a later date because related parameters become separated, making it more difficult for future manual edits to the infobox. Can this be resolved? Cheers, Number 57 11:55, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

@Number 57: This is very closely related to Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive 2016 1#Template:Infobox football biography. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:20, 10 August 2016 (UTC)
Thanks – I believe it's exactly the same. @Whatamidoing (WMF): is anything happening with this? Cheers, Number 57 20:35, 10 August 2016 (UTC)
I'd rather share happy news, but, honestly, I don't think we should hope for any progress on this until at least October. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:21, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
I think there are other solutions to this than enlarging the Template Data. I think some variation of a stable sort algorithm should work (noting most fast sorting algorithms are not stable). Basically if a parameter is not listed in the template data, it remains immediately following the parameter that precedes it in the original order. That preserves the ordering in the Template Data but trusts the user for everything else. Kerry (talk) 08:07, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Spent half an hour editing, now can't save.

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/52.0.2743.116 Safari/537.36

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

Get docserver-http: HTTP 404 error when I try to save my edits. Tons of intricate sourcing lost. Very frustrating.

PageantUpdater (talk) 13:19, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

Edit Section Not Working

Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: I'm adding 2012 Olympic info to some articles, and since tennis articles are long and separated into years, I thought it would be easier to edit it by clicking the 'edit' button next to the section heading.
Steps to Reproduce: Go to a long(ish) tennis article (it's happened to me on Jarmila Wolfe and Sara Errani), and click edit section next to one of the year headings.
Results: Editor does not open.
Expectations: Editor does open.
Page where the issue occurs Add URL(s) or diffs
Web browser Chrome 52.0.2743.116
Operating system Windows whatever the new one is.
Skin Vector
Notes: Clicking the edit tab at the top of the page(s) opens the pages fine for editing.
Workaround or suggested solution Add one here if you have it.

Red Fiona (talk) 17:07, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Edited to add. It's not just tennis articles. Just had the same problem on Joanna Melo.Red Fiona (talk) 17:17, 20 August 2016 (UTC)
Same here (Chrome but on Mac)--at least for these three articles presented, I just went on random article a few times and it seems to working otherwise. Really weird, what makes these three articles special? Ugog Nizdast (talk) 01:41, 21 August 2016 (UTC)
I just tested the three articles, using Chrome, Firefox, and Safari; can't get the error to appear. Transitory? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:43, 28 August 2016 (UTC)
Same here, works now. Maybe it was. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 00:51, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

The pictures do not want to be uploaded

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/52.0.2743.116 Safari/537.36

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

Sandile 2010 (talk) 01:32, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

Looking at the URL you provided, I think your problem is that you invoked the old source editor rather than the Visual Editor. Try again or use this link

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_congregational_church?veaction=edit (notice there is a tiny difference between the two URLs -- "veaction" instead of "action")

Then Insert > Media > Upload to add a photo into Wikipedia, followed by Insert > Media > Search to add the uploaded photo into the article. I hope this helps you. Kerry (talk) 05:54, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

The cross-wik upload tool is in both editing environments (VisualEditor + the 2010 WikiEditor toolbar), and the URL no longer indicates which environment is being opened, unless the user has explicilty opted into displaying two tabs.
Most problems with uploads during the last month or so are due Commons blocking a large fraction of cross-wiki uploads with an Abuse Filter. If memory serves, it blocks all images that have a 3x5 upright ratio, all pngs, and all smaller jpegs. To avoid this restriction, you must have an account that is more than six months old and has 50 edits at Commons (e.g., nothing on Wikipedia counts). (Or you can use c:Special:UploadWizard to upload the same files.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 07:57, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

sort key

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T145339

The most common use of the sortkey in my editing is for people's name, that is, Benjamin Backhouse should have the sort key "Backhouse, Benjamin". Now when you go into the Categories you see the name "Benjamin Backhouse" displayed as the sortkey (fair enough). But since he's a person, I have to change it. The moment you start to type in the sortkey text box, you lose all the text that was previously displayed. I can't remember the name (not hard with Benjamin Backhouse, but much harder where there are hard-to-spell names and lots of middle names). But I need to know this name because it's the name I have to type in. OK, I think I'll just look at the article page title to see the name, but I cannot see it because the Categories screen is obscuring it. And I cannot move the Categories screen on my display to see the page title. As I am doing this to many architect articles without sortkeys, this is becoming very annoying.

In almost all cases, the sort key will be some rearrangement of the article title. Could the article title be made the default for the text box so I could edit it in situ, e.g. cut and paste the surname to the start, add a comma and then OK. I notice that once the sortkey has been manually established, the manually added text does NOT disappear when you go to edit it a 2nd time. Can that be made the behaviour for the first manual edit too.

Thanks Kerry (talk) 04:47, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

The first is an old bug; the second idea needs to be filed. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 08:06, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

docserver-http: HTTP 404 error

Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: Trying to save my edits
Steps to Reproduce: Spent half an hour adding referencing, went to save and got "docserver-http: HTTP 404" error. Trying to change to source text so I don't lose my work gives "Error loading data from server: 404." error.
Results:
Expectations:
Page where the issue occurs [46]
Web browser Chrome
Operating system El Capitan 10.11.1
Skin
Notes:
Workaround or suggested solution

PageantUpdater (talk) 13:21, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

PageantUpdater, I'm so sorry that you lost your work. Thanks for this note. Has this happened since then? Did you happen to try switching to the wikitext editor (that's the "[[ ]]" button next to the "Save" button)? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 07:59, 29 August 2016 (UTC)
Hasn't happened since. I got a "Error loading data from server: 404." message when trying to change to wikitext editor. In the end I just redid some stuff that couldn't be copy/pasted en masse and then copied across about 20 references to a new page - which saved fine. No idea why that particular page didn't want to work! PageantUpdater (talk) 10:41, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

Page jump issue

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T144907
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; InfoPath.2; rv:11.0) like Gecko

The page I am editing jumps to the top every time I press Backspace, making it inconvenient, especially for very long pages.

My Chemistry romantic (talk) 10:00, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

I'm assuming you're talking about 2016 Pacific typhoon season, but can't reproduce (also, I believe you may be using Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 7). Can you give a few examples of specific points in the page where this is happening? Thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:15, 2 September 2016 (UTC)
This issue does not just happen on that page, it also happens when I fetch a random article, open it in VisualEditor and hit backspace. I also tried VisualEditor while logged out and it happens. My Chemistry romantic (talk) 11:59, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

coping multiple citations from one article to another produces strange results

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T144975
Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: I had researched and written a paragraph about the rescue of the survivors of the wreck of the Netherby in the article William Henry Norman with 4 citations at the end of the paragraph. I then wanted to copy the paragraph into Netherby (ship) (the wrecked ship) and HMVS Victoria (1855) (the rescue ship under the command of Captain Norman).
Steps to Reproduce: I opened William Henry Norman in VE and selected and copied the paragraph together with the 4 citations. I opened Netherby (ship) in VE, clicked in the appropriate part of the text and pasted. I fiddled about with some of the wording of the paragraph but did nothing to the citations. Just as I was about to SAVE, I noticed that the end of the paragraph appeared to have 4 citations in the sense of being superscripted numbers in square bracket but only one of them appeared to be linked. Thinking I must have done something to the citations without noticing, I deleted the 4 citations and SAVEd. I then went back to the William Henry Norman and in VE copied just the 4 citations and then in VE pasted them into Netherby (ship). Same problem, 4 superscipted citation numbers, but only the 4th was linked. Sure now that I had not made any mistake, I saved to see what happened and found that there were 2 new citations in the article (and no superscripted but unlinked citations as I saw in Edit mode) -- see the diff. I then messed around trying to copy over the other citations which didn't seem to work (similar problems). Eventually I copied them over 1 at a time. I then wanted to have that paragraph and citations in HMVS Victoria (1855) and, yes, same problems happened again. So it seems to be reproducible.
Results: As above
Expectations: As above
Page where the issue occurs
Web browser Chrome (latest)
Operating system Window 8.1
Skin dunno
Notes:
Workaround or suggested solution copy them one at a time

Kerry (talk) 06:51, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

More problems copying citations

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T144975
Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: copy a set of paragraphs from HMVS Victoria (1855) about the involvement in the First Taranki Wars to the article about the ship's captain William Henry Norman
Steps to Reproduce: Opened HMVS Victoria (1855) in VE. Selected and copied the four paragraphs (with a number of citations all to the same book called Not A Pleasure Cruise by Frame) from the section New Zealand Wars deployment, 1860. Opened William Henry Norman in VE, clicked on desired location in the text and pasted. Made some text changed (nothing to do with the citations). SAVEd.
Results: While in the VE, the paragraphs appeared to copied and (unlike the bug report above) all the citations appeared in the right places and appeared to linked (i.e. were blue) so my superficial impression was that it had all worked OK, but after I saved, on clicking on the citations copied over into William Henry Norman took me back to the HMVS Victoria (1855) article (which on inspection in the source editor was exactly what it said to do). The source code was <sup>[[HMVS Victoria (1855)#cite note-Frame54-5|[5]]]</sup> Note, although I had not realised it at the time, the HMVS Victoria (1855) article was already citing the Frame book (No 2 in the reference list).
Expectations: Added one new reference to William Henry Norman (I would not expect it to be able to re-use the existing reference to Frame's book) and linked the copied citations to new reference in that same article
Page where the issue occurs the diff of William Henry Norman
Web browser
Operating system
Skin
Notes:
Workaround or suggested solution

Kerry (talk) 07:14, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

Tables

Had to make two tables tonight. Used VE. Took about 1/20th the time it would have taken me to make a wikitable (counting the design and the fixing whatever I messed up). Not only was it faster, it was easy. Thank you. Risker (talk) 05:34, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

I agree. Even if someone is a die-hard source editor user, they should consider using VE for tables if nothing else. OK, there are some fancy things you can't do in the VE with tables, but you can do the bulk of creating the table and then switch into source editor to do the fancy stuff. Kerry (talk) 06:23, 5 September 2016 (UTC)

VE spontaneously reordering ref parameters

Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: I was trying to make minor edits to a taxobox
Steps to Reproduce: On article Eukaryote, I clicked Edit and then clicked on the taxobox to edit it. I made a minor change (or thought I did), clicked Save on the taxobox, & then clicked Save on the article. The behavior is reproducible (see below).
Results: The next day, I had a Reverted notification, with a note saying "why changed to a confusing layout of parameters?" When I looked at my edit, it showed a change I had NOT made, nor even been anywhere near: the parameters for the ref by Baurain et al. were listed in a different order. The order chosen appeared nonsensical, or at least poorly human-readable (first author, then title, then last names of all remaining authors but one, then their first names, then bibliographic data, then last author). I did another edit to test whether it was repeatable. This time all I changed was substituting an en dash for a hyphen in the date range of the taxobox. I used number keypad ALT-0150 to insert the en dash. I am abundantly sure I did not make any changes to the paragraph with the ref in question (or to anything else anywhere in the article).
Expectations: I expected that only the things I was trying to change would change; or, failing that, that any automatic changes would be constructive
Page where the issue occurs First edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eukaryote&type=revision&diff=737489549&oldid=736192845. Repeat: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eukaryote&type=revision&diff=737790141&oldid=737510245
Web browser Firefox 47.0
Operating system Win 7E
Skin Vector
Notes: Thanks for any help you can offer
Workaround or suggested solution

Gould363 (talk) 03:19, 5 September 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the detailed report. I've filed a bug report against VE/Parsoid. I haven't looked yet where the problem is. Something for the coming week. SSastry (WMF) (talk) 04:12, 5 September 2016 (UTC)
Super, tnx! The problem also occurs when making simple edits to the main text (changing plain text & wikilinks but not refs or anything else fancy), so the taxobox seems to be a red herring. Let me know if you need a screenshot of that. I'm going to have to switch to Edit Source to do anything to this page.Gould363 (talk) 03:07, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T133255

Add a way to indicate that an url is dead from the cite dialog. A checkbox? Automatically include the date when the editor checks the box. Remove the template when the editor unchecks the box. Thanks! Lfstevens (talk) 16:07, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

I doubt that the devs will agree with the checkbox approach. However, they are planning to fix the general case (adding any sort of extra template or text). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 10:40, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

Please make search work inside templates and references

I use VE as my primary editor but sometimes it drives me crazy. I can see something in an article, go in to fix it and then I can't "Find" it. After spending a moment to go back out of Edit mode to Read mode to confirm I have spelled the word correctly or whatever, I repeat the edit and again nothing happens. Eventually the penny drops that the thing I want to change must be in a template of some kind and that I will have to use the source editor. Unfortunately we have a lot of articles that look like "normal text" but are in fact chock full of templates. Same problem with citations. The Find tool needs a option to enable search inside templates and citations because you have to edit these things. Kerry (talk) 23:40, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

I filed the request as https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T145500 in case it hadn't been reported before. Best, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:16, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

VE needs an autosave function

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T57370

I was working on an article for a good 30 minutes and silly me forgot to save. Adding a citation caused a crash, and multiple paragraphs worth of work went down the drain. Autosave would help a lot. Buffaboy talk 04:07, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

Autosave is definitely among the features that are being considered for the 2017 wikitext editor, so maybe that's not so far after all. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:33, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

empty suggested parameters in templates

I do not use VE. I have learned that VE inserts empty parameters into the wikitext when the TemplateData identifies the parameter as "suggested": true. Why? If an editor chooses to leave the parameter blank, what value is gained by putting the blank parameter into the wikitext? There is sufficient clutter in the wikitext without automated tools adding unused parameters to templates.

The issue arose from a GA review where I questioned why an editor was adding blank |pages= and |via= parameters to {{cite book}}. Both of those parameters are identified a 'suggested' in the TemplateData. Except for clutter, adding |via= is harmless, but |page=, |pages=, and |at= are all mutually exclusive. VE apparently is not aware of this; not surprising really, the cs1|2 templates a not simple templates. The solution that would seem best is for VE to populate templates with parameters that hold a value and leave out empty optional and 'suggested' parameters.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:26, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

If page/pages/at are mutually exclusive, doesn't that mean that the TemplateData needs fixing? Kerry (talk) 01:26, 9 September 2016 (UTC)
If memory serves, other editors asked for the current behavior (a couple of years ago), in the hope that the blank wikitext parameters would encourage someone else (i.e., someone using the wikitext editor) to fill them in later.
TemplateData doesn't currently handle interesting cases such as strongly wanting either |page= or |pages=, but never both. That will probably happen in the future. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:20, 11 September 2016 (UTC)
I spend a lot of time mucking about with cs1|2 templates. It may be that leaving behind blank parameters in the hopes that another editor will fill them will work in the occasional rare case, and there may even be gnomes who like doing that work, but on the whole, empty parameters in my experience tend to stay empty more-or-less forever. Better to leave them out, or if you are working on a template that has empty parameters, remove them.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 23:59, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
I can see your point for citation templates added by experienced editors, but if they remove all the blank parameters, then the infobox people will be angry (again. We've already had that conversation). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:19, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

I love it!

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.116 Safari/537.36

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

93.128.243.40 (talk) 22:40, 24 September 2016 (UTC)

References tag vs. reflist template - status?

Not really a bug report, just curious and I couldn't find the Phab task for it: Have there been any news or updates regarding Template:reflist (incl. columns) vs. the VE-supported "standard" references tag? As far as I know, there has been some discussion to add missing features to the references tag a few months ago, but I am not sure about the details. Currently en-Wiki uses 2 similar but different reflists simultaneously; VE uses references tags by default, but the reflist template is historically far more common. This situation is probably not a big deal for now, but sub-optimal in the long run. Is that topic still on the agenda somewhere? GermanJoe (talk) 15:54, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

I think you are looking for phab:T53260 and/or phab:T33597. Last I heard, it had stalled (I don't know why). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:36, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

I mistakenly didn't capitalize Gina Shay's last name. and can't figure out how to fix it.

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.143 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_shay?action=edit&veswitched=1

kh7 (talk) 18:09, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

Looks like you figured out how to fix it, since the article with the misspelled capitalization is now a redirect.
In the future, if you run into problems that aren't specifically related to VE, I suggest posting to WP:Help desk rather than this page. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:14, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
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