Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive 2016 2

This is an archive of past discussions on Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current main page.

Hi

I've just been running a training for people on how to edit Wikipedia and none of them could see the VE edit option on their brand new accounts. They were all using Apple laptops with the latest versions of Chrome. We made sure that 'Temporarily disable the visual editor while it is in beta' wasn't checked.

Can anyone suggest other reasons why they could not see VE option? Is there anything that could have been disabled on their laptop browser that would mean that Source editor worked fine but VE didn't show up as an option?

Thanks

--John Cummings (talk) 09:23, 4 October 2016 (UTC)

Check JavaScript is enabled—VE doesn't work if JS isn't active. ‑ Iridescent 09:27, 4 October 2016 (UTC)

Thanks very much Iridescent, do you know if this is documented anywhere as a reason it might not show up, I think I looked at all the help pages and didn't see this as a suggestion. --John Cummings (talk) 08:59, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

Can we take this one stage further- there is a push to adopt VE in editathons with new users, and a problem like this is a brick wall. John checked preferences to see if 'Temporarily disable the visual editor while it is in beta'. He but needed at that stage to be reminded that to Check JavaScript is enabled—VE doesn't work if JS isn't active. These are changes that need to made elsewhere in Wiki to enable successful VE integration.

However, I see no problem in having a warning hat-note. Javascript is not enabled on this browser- certain features will not work, for instance Visual Editor. I have to log on to many strange laptops so having a note there would help me too, not just the new user. ClemRutter (talk) 10:07, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

Alas I've checked and Javascript was enabled, any other reasons that could be causing the problem? --John Cummings (talk) 16:28, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

What do you have at "Editing mode" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing? When you make a source edit, do you have a pencil icon at the top right of the edit box with the hover text "Switch to visual editing"? I do and clicking it works. Does https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Example&veaction=edit start VE? It does for me. Do you have a working [show]/[hide] link on this page at the table of contents? That requires working JavaScript. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:17, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

John, at the English Wikipedia, I believe that they're supposed to default to the wikitext editor, with the option to switch to the visual editor. Previously, all new accounts had two tabs ("Edit" and "Edit source"). Now the tabs have been merged (here, and at a couple of other wikis) as part of the Single Edit Tab feature. At enwiki only, as a result of this discussion in May 2016, the default of that single tab is the wikitext editor. New editors should, however, still be able to switch to the visual editor (with the pencil icon on the righthand edge of the toolbar). All registered editors can also use the two-tab system, by changing their preferences (it's the drop-down menu immediately after the 'Temporarily disable the visual editor while it is in beta' option). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:38, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Whatamidoing (WMF), are there any instructions on this that I can send to them? I haven't seen this option anywhere in the documentation, but maybe I missed it? Thanks again --John Cummings (talk) 13:26, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

mw:VisualEditor/Single edit tab has information about this. It's written mostly from the POV of established editors, so it might not be ideal for your purposes. There is also information at mw:Help:VisualEditor/User guide#Switching between the visual and wikitext editors, but it's somewhat out of date.

The Single Edit Tab system is not being actively developed at this time. The team wants to think about whether this design is the right one before changing the configuration at wikis that have been using two tabs for years. I believe that it's supposed to be one of the subjects for discussion at their next major meeting. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:55, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

Thanks very much Whatamidoing (WMF), this is very helpful, I hope that a solution can be found, I'm a big fan of VE, it was just surprising to see it hidden for new users with the change not documented. --John Cummings (talk) 19:15, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

The current version of the mw:2017 wikitext editor can be seen via Beta Features at the Beta Cluster.

Create an account (do *NOT* use a password that you use anywhere else; this is one of the WMF test sites that gets the newest/most broken code, so there's always a chance of a security problem) and login. Go to https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures and enable the "new wikitext editor" item. Then go to http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/World?action=edit (or any article) and see what it looks like when you switch back and forth.

BTW, the devs expect to have a basic auto-saving feature by the time is stable enough to move to the regular projects. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:53, 26 September 2016 (UTC)

I was eager to examine the new wikitext editor concept, but the Beta Cluster wiki blocked me with a blank captcha when I tried to create an account. Alsee (talk) 07:42, 28 September 2016 (UTC)

Alsee, I thought you had created several accounts there months ago. Well, if it's not working at the moment, then I recommend trying again tomorrow. The Beta Cluster is frequently at least partially broken (its main purpose is to give devs a safe place to break stuff), but it usually gets fixed within a few hours or a day at most. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:14, 28 September 2016 (UTC)

Whatamidoing (WMF) I tried to use it, but I don't understand how it works... I tried following the link you gave, I didn't see any difference with the classic wikitext editor : how can we know if we're using the new editor ? I then tried from VE to go to source editing and ended up with a blank page (many lines, but no text displayed). --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 14:01, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

NicoV, here's some screenshots:

• 2010 WikiEditor wikitext editor: c:File:WikiEditor wikitext editor toolbar.png
• 2013 visual editor: c:File:VisualEditor toolbar and start of article.png
• 2017 ("new") wikitext editor: c:File:2017 wikitext editor toolbar and start of article.png

I'm not getting a blank page now (and a lot of the code changed yesterday). Can you still reproduce this? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:59, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

Whatamidoing (WMF) I tried at home, it works, maybe it's because I'm stuck with an old Firefox at the office (I will try again). First remarks:

• It's slow to load...
• Small bug on ==Test== not detected as a heading (maybe the missing whitespace characters ?)
• Disappointed for the moment because of missing features (I hope they will be included before actual release):
  • Syntax highlighting (I have the gadget enabled on the old wikitext editor, and even if it's not perfect it's very useful)
  • The editing tools seem to be available only to insert a new template/ref/link/... but not to edit an existing one

Other than that, the concept seems ok. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 05:42, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

Whatamidoing (WMF) I confirm the blank page on an old Firefox (ESR 31.2)... I know it's old but out of my hands to be able to update. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 08:33, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the note. I wouldn't get your hopes up about syntax highlighting; as is the case with the current scripts, it is only sufficiently performant on higher-powered computers. (Or, if you thought that was slow, then let me show you what slow really looks like.  ;-) This is on the list for "some day, we hope, if we can make this work for everyone" list.

I'm not sure what you mean about editing an existing template, etc. If you're in wikitext mode, then you just edit the wikitext.

I mentioned you in the two Phab tasks. Please feel free to expand or comment there. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:29, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

Whatamidoing (WMF) Thanks for phabricator, I dropped a comment for phab:T147585, and phab:T147584 seems to be solved. By editing an existing template, I mean the ability of editing it with an inspector (like the "Insert template" in the toolbar that works only for inserting a new template), rather than just directly in wikitext: it would bring powerful tools to wikitext editor (taking advantage of TemplateData...). And it's the same for other structures (links, images, tables...). --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 09:21, 7 October 2016 (UTC)

I'll ask what their plans are, but I don't think they're planning to make that possible. (It'll probably take a while to get a solid answer.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:56, 7 October 2016 (UTC)

My advice to students has been: Don't touch VE, as all your potential mentors will not be using it. It is still in alpha. But each year I revisit VE to see how it has improved. I found one activity where it is the best tool and that is in adding wikilinks in existing text.

However here are my list of no-nos

1. It is so slow to load

2. When you save your work- you have to load VE again from scratch- it is so slow. You advise your students to 'save little and often' and with a room of students on a single IP it dies. When saving there should be a save and continue option

3. When you leave a page without saving- there is no warning and nothing is in a buffer that can be recovered. (This was after doing a page of 20 wikilinks).

4. When adding a citation to a page that uses {-{sfn}-}, {-{sfnref}-} it can't find the existing references. It needs to do that and not to screw up the formatting

5. VE editor doesn't have a indent/unident icon- I am not sure if it can even do it.

6. I looked at the Help- this is not suitable for an end-user: being ordered for a software developer- it is really only a 'look what I have completed list'

More comments will follow as I probe deeper. Nevertheless greetings to all ClemRutter (talk) 10:31, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

1. 'too slow' I personally don't experience that, but I do know that for 5 percent of the requests it can be rather slow. That is mostly due to first time loading, being on a slow connection, using old computers and when loading very large articles. The same for the old editor of course, but while for 95% the VE editor is at most 4 seconds instead of 2 seconds for WikiEditor, the performance penalty for those last 5% is much worse with VE (unto 20 and more seconds). Time will mostly solve this. (if you are using a 56k modem, i'm sure you wouldn't want to use the Wikitext editor or Wikipedia at all).
2. 'save and continue'. This has been considered I seem to remember, but I think it requires first completing the move away from Tidy, so that wikitext and Parsoid serializer generate the same visual output when invalid HTML is at play..
3. 'there is no warning'. That should not be true. It uses the exact same system to guard against this as the wikitext editor, and I just used it, it works. What browser and setup are you using, maybe it's specific to one of those. Related to auto-save and recovery are phab:T132570, phab:T57370.
4. 'sfn' I don't know enough about this part.
5. 'VE editor doesn't have a indent/unident icon'. It does for lists... If you mean indentation when there is no list, then I'd note that wikitext doesn't feature such indentation. The only indentation allowed by the manual of style of en.wp is block quotes (and these are available in text style menu). We only have multiple levels of indentation in talk pages, which actually is a fake list. That latter feature will likely not be supported by VE, because it is... terrible, and since VE doesn't support talk pages to begin with, it has little use in VE.
6. 'this is not suitable for an end-user'. I guess it's meant to be a reference work, not a "Your first steps into VE". I would like to note that such manuals are usually not written by developers, but by the community however. Often because the rules of wiki's also differ per community. There is Help:Introduction_to_editing_with_VisualEditor, maybe we should link it into Wikipedia:VisualEditor/User_guide ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:43, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick response. I am looking at it from the point of view of a tutor, and my own personal choices are minor when confronted with 25 academics who have all brought their own laptops (Androids, Apple, Linux flavours and Microsoft),to the large room in the university that has got the worst internet signal. Don't take offence.

I am giving a snapshot of the system I see today. I am talking about features that users use- we can use bots to convert their faltering first steps to MOS. Use any of my comments to raise tickets or whatever.

sfns are a serious concern- and demand a little study. They are useful because academics are used to the markup- Name, year, page- linking to a full reference below that can be easily typed up using one of our 4 templates which will contain the field (ref= sfn-ref{-{Name, year}-} it also encourages users to leave anecdotes in {-{efn}-} which appear in the notelist, rather than stilting the text to fit them in in-line. Above all they are easy to explain, and correct when they go wrong (important to the tutor).

Our students are usual brilliant in their own field but use computers without any formal training- so it is the KISS principle to the power of the number of people in the room. --ClemRutter (talk) 13:36, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Why not encourage them to use both? Isn't the main advantage of VE, is its user-friendliness and WYSIWYG-part? I would imagine that most new editors with no prior knowledge to source editing would prefer it. Now doing more intermediate tasks, like sfn etc which aren't implemented yet or are buggy, tell them to go to source editing where their tutors can help them. I personally use VE almost 90 percent of the time now. When I come across such situations like sfn, I just make the same citation again with the relevant page no and when done, switch to source and convert them to sfn. Even the {{rp}} template is can be used temporarily: See Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive_2016_1#Citing_using_Visual_Editor_.28same_book_but_different_page_numbers.29. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 14:11, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Mainly we are talking to people who would rather be somewhere else- but as someone in the department had to go they volunteered. We have a very disappointing conversion rate where few actually continue to edit- they are not the sort of people that can be persuaded- they are too busy. Can I give you a link to a beginners training booklet- each course will be tailored a different way this one had referencing on a separate sheet Nottingham Correcting or improving an article for the first time. It is far from perfect- but shows you how we encourage them to use the talk space (no VE) before they hit mainspace. These notes are designed to be read at home as reminders of what was covered. We have no idea what our users backgrounds will be- but all will be familiar with the departmental email text editor, and most will have prepared manuscripts using various WP packages. Very few will be familiar with many mobile phone apps. I have other booklets that demonstrate things like tables, pie-charts etc. and would personally love to have a VE version- so I can switch. I am not in a position to tell, only to suggest. The software must be in a position where it decides when to switch- the switch must be seemless or you frighten the horses. The software must help the user- not the otherway round. If I say the average age of my students is 50+, and they have a lot to contribute if we can persuade them to stay. (sorry real life has intervened- back later) --ClemRutter (talk) 19:42, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

@ClemRutter: and I think it's really useful that you give this feedback, it's really important that we all collect feedback from parties on what works and what doesn't work. Please try collecting as much as possible. I'm not working on this system, and as a volunteer I can only tell you what I know. Some of these points are definitely already on the radar, but tackling them can sometimes take really long, because they will also touch or interact with many systems.

BTW, it would be really cool if once in a while, you could ask a participant if you can video part of their first-steps. That's really valuable information for the developers and UX people. Might give some interesting results. Elitre should know the WMF team that could interface with you on that. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:23, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

That would be mw:Wikimedia Research/Design Research. Daisy in particular works closely with the visual editor team. HTH, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:31, 21 September 2016 (UTC)

To chime in on three points:

• Indentation: if this is being taught to people who are editing articles, that is a mistake. WP:MOS in no way supports this. Indentation is used on talk pages (for which VE is unavailable), but - again - is not used in articles. Any indentation in articles is a result of lists, or block quotes, or other functionality; it's not done directly. [I'm open to counter-examples, but in the thousands of articles that I've edited, I've never seen an appropriate use of the colon for indentation, and I've probably encountered such usage in less than a dozen cases.]
• In-line help: No, VE doesn't have this (except for some programmer-written, less-than-helpful help in the Options dialog), though VE should. Or, to be explicit, what VE should have is built-in variables that allow each language community to write their own in-line help information, and such information should be able to include links, so that an editor who doesn't get enough help from the pop-up help item can then drill deeper into the Wikipedia documentation. (Communities could start by using chunks of their VE user manual, where the translation has been done.)
• VE doesn't handle unusual locations of footnotes very well, if at all. {{Sfn}} is one example; footnotes inside of templates (typically infoboxes) is another; footnotes inside of {{reflist}} is a third (and, in my opinion, the most serious). I sympathize with the VE team, given that taking the position that "it's a user problem" isn't very popular, while solving this purely technically is somewhere between difficult and impossible. What this points out is that the "footnotes are just text that is numbered and displayed in a group, somewhere on the page" approach is fundamentally flawed: references/footnotes/citations should be a completely different layer (namespace). If that were done, then all the non-standard footnote formatting (and there are more than the two I mentioned, above) wouldn't be an issue, because it wouldn't be necessary - it could be handled with user preferences. [End soapbox.] -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:34, 21 September 2016 (UTC)

In that sheet: typos at "Independant" and "yout". This makes a good short helpful guide, maybe could serve as an example boilerplate for other future editathons; is it at wp-namespace? but I'm sure there must be many other help guides anyway. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 16:55, 21 September 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the typo spotting.ClemRutter (talk) 10:44, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

Indentation: @John Broughton:The beginner is encouraged to use talk pages, and really we don't want to teach them two editors- hopefully VE will be enabled for Talk very soon, so they can stick with the same editor when they switch. But, within English WP we deprecate indentation in our final articles, but that doesn't mean that the users won't initially attempt to use it. It is part of the learning process to wean them off and introduce them to MOS. Our users may have used it for many years in professional articles they have published elsewhere (or just minuting faculty meetings) and not providing the facility while they are drafting text is an unnecessary hurdle. We can CE later.

Also just because they edit this way- doesn't mean that we have to display it with colons when the text is previewed- we may choose by default to display it as a bulletted list, or as a block quote. ClemRutter (talk) 10:44, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

Clem - I still don't get it. You list, as a no-no (by which I assume that you would have VE behave otherwise) "VE editor doesn't have a indent/unident icon- I am not sure if it can even do it." By contrast, I believe thatthis is a plus - VE doesn't allow editors to do something wrong. It's a much better teaching point, I think, that when a student says "I want to indent a paragraph - I can't figure out how", you say "That's because Wikipedia articles don't use indentation except as part of another technique, such as a block quotation." And sure, indentation is needed on Talk pages, but since VE can't edit such pages, yet, that's besides the point.

And certainly it's a problem that students need to learn two different editing interfaces, one for articles, one for talk pages, but that overstates the problem - talk pages basically involve (a) clicking to add a section, (b) for an existing section, typing colons to add indentation; (c) typing text, (d) pasting URLs, and (e) signing one's posting. If someone does those five things, they're already better than the majority of people who post to talk pages, and their posts have at least 75% of the functionality of what expert Wikipedia editors can do.] -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:09, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

ClemRutter, could you please provide links to the "Help" that you looked at (item 6 in the original list)? Sorry just forgotten it --ClemRutter (talk) 21:51, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

Also, an autosave feature (useful if you accidentally close the wrong tab) may be released soon. (Warnings about closing tabs without saving content are provided by your web browser, not by web pages themselves.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:39, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

I have put the pdfs of the training booklets on commons commons:Category:Wikimedia UK training booklets. Do any of you folk know where I can upload the source .odts?--ClemRutter (talk) 21:51, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

At the session which involved adding sound files uploaded by the British Library into Infobox on as many Wikipediae as had articles on each of the target birds, we came across an interesting problem with Farsi which at the time of editing exclusively used VE. I tried to replicate it later- but ran out of time. Yesterday I attempted to use VE to add the .ogg into the image_caption field of the Arabic Infobox- having taken the precaution of having an Egyptian Post Grad sitting next to me.

The Wikipedia:GLAM/British Library/British wildlife edit-a-thon 2016 held on 8 October 2016 at the British Library. During this edit-a-thon wildlife lovers and Wikipedians selected sound files from the list in the link, and placed them firstly in (en) file of that particular bird- I was working with green wood hoopoes and black cuckoos. That done they entered a wikidata statement https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q998279 "audio is" and could see a complete list of Black Cuckoos in every language. It is here I found a x-wikilink to https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%88%D9%82%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%82_%D8%A3%D8%B3%D9%88%D8%AF and here is the sound file.File:Black Cuckoo (Cuculus clamosus) (022A-WA03044X0014-0013M0).ogg

The problem is using the Visual Editor to enter mixed r-l and l-r text in parameter fields. I was using Firefox 48.0 for Linux but I suspect it is a universal. ClemRutter (talk) 21:51, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

I suspect that it's "universal" in the sense that this formatting, although it looks completely broken to us native English speakers, is actually the proper wikitext syntax for a link like that. There are a couple of RTL native speakers in the WMF; I'll ask one of them to double-check – but the short answer is, if that worked when you clicked the "Insert" button, then that was the proper wikitext. ("Rich editing" of template parameters, which would let you bypass this whole mess by using Insert > Media instead, is planned.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:27, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:49.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/49.0

I cannot upload the new logo of our federation, Febelgra. Message is We could not determine whether this file is suitable for Wikimedia Commons. Please only upload photos that you took yourself with your camera, or see what else is acceptable. See the guide to make sure the file is acceptable and learn how to upload it on Wikimedia Commons.

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

Febelgra (talk) 07:42, 14 October 2016 (UTC)

Hello, Febelgra. You will have to talk to your own lawyers about whether that image qualifies for copyright protection. If it doesn't (including if it is trademarked but not copyrightable), then you can upload it to Commons. c:Category:Logos of organizations of the Netherlands may give you some ideas about how other people have tagged theirs. Because of a configuration setting created by the volunteers who run Wikimedia Commons, you may need to use c:Special:UploadWizard rather than the in-editor upload system.

If it does qualify for copyright protection, then it could probably be uploaded here as WP:Fair use for the article about your organization. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:36, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

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

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=St._Francis_Preparatory_School&section=1&veaction=edit&oldid=742797808&wteswitched=1: I am in fact a member of the "historic" first co-ed graduating class of St. Francis Prep, and cannot figure out how to edit the article's reference to Prep's predecessor school (Bishop Reilly). I'm hoping a member of the Wikipedia team can edit the article as follows:

Section on History references Bishop Reilly High School as having been co-educational, when the school was actually what is known as co-INSTITUTIONAL. There was a girls school on one wing, and boys side on the other (girls on the West, boys on the East), and we ONLY comingled at lunch in the co-ed cafeteria. There were NO co-ed classes. Clubs and certain other extracurricular activities were quite co-ed.

Therefore, please edit the reference to Bishop Reilly to describe it as "co-institutional".

Finally, the title of the article should reference Prep as "St. Francis Preparatory HIGH SCHOOL". It is NOT "St. Francis Preparatory School".

My thanks for whatever attention you'll pay to this edit request!!

Robin R. Hicks (nee Rollins) SFP, '75!!

173.56.243.111 (talk) 04:49, 20 October 2016 (UTC)

I've copied your request to the article's talk page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:13, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

The Phase Master (talk) 18:39, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your note. It's on the list of known problems. Most templates work fine if they're put on the same line (and some need to be on the same line), but there are a handful, such as this one, that don't work unless they are in the right location. (That template is just the wikitext for closing a table.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:04, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

Okay, thank you, Whatamidoing (WMF). --The Phase Master (talk) 13:37, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.143 Safari/537.36

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

The logo does not show up accurately. It should say Child Soldiers International, however, for some reason it only shows 'Child'. Once you click on it, it shows the accurate logo. I have tried to upload the logo three times already and each time it did not show up correctly.

Thank you

YTalas (talk) 15:33, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Hello, YTalas. It looks like there is a bad "thumbnail" for that image. (This isn't your fault.) I'll ask one of the volunteers who know about images if they can fix it for you. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:45, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

I know that this has been mentioned before, but would it be possible to implement a method of caching active edits? In the wikitext editor, if I've been working on an edit, I can leave the window open for hours. If my browser crashes, I typically can start it up again an the wikitext editor will reload, with the edits I was working on still in place. However, this does not happen in VE. If my browser crashes, as happened an hour ago, and I haven't saved my work, it will not re-load.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 20:01, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Yes. They're working on it now. I'm not sure whether it will become available before the end of 2016, but it is definitely on the list.

(AIUI, your web browser saves [or doesn't, usually just when I most need it] changes in the old wikitext editors, which are just HTML <textarea>s with toolbars, but browsers don't save Content.Editable areas. So the devs are arranging for that.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:58, 25 October 2016 (UTC)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/54.0.2840.71 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=S%C3%A3o_Paulo&action=edit

I spend over than one hour gathering data about Sao Paulo City population because the current document is completely wrong, and after fill the data i didnt save it.

It was my first and unfoturnatelly last time that I tried to update anything else in this website.

I am very disapointed because I think that you have good informations but it boring to update them and when there is something wrong the editor just tell us "there are something wrong. try to discovery sukcer"

Ubirajarasegura (talk) 12:43, 30 October 2016 (UTC)

Hello Ubirajarasegura,

I'm really sorry that you lost your work. I agree that the "something went wrong" error is frustrating. Would you mind trying again, just to make one small change on that page, and let me know if it worked this time? Knowing whether it's always broken for you, or only sometimes or for certain types of changes, would help us figure out where the problem lies. Thank you, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:41, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

Used to work, now it's broken! Kerry (talk) 03:42, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

Kerry, it's working for me (Safari 10.0.1/Mac OS 10.12.1 now). Can you try again, and let me know either that it was a transient glitch or what your current browser/OS versions are? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:44, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

Still broken for me. Chrome Version 54.0.2840.71 m (no updates pending). Windows 8.1 (which seems unwilling to tell me what version number it is) but again there are no pending updates. Kerry (talk) 23:58, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

And I have just cleared my browser cache and rebooted. Still no joy. It's been broken since I returned from holidays (last Friday). It was working fine before I left (23 September) so something changed between now and then. Kerry (talk) 00:10, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

Doesn't work for me as well (Chrome 53.0.2785.143/Mac OS 10.10.5). Ugog Nizdast (talk) 14:46, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

Ah, I have discovered something interesting. If I copy from the start of the file name "Bishop Nathaniel Dawes, Anglican Bishop of Rockhampton", the paste fails. If I copy from within the file name e.g. "Nathaniel Dawes, Anglican Bishop of Rockhampton", then the paste works as expected. So I am guessing that there's something happening at the start of the file name that's causing the grief. Kerry (talk) 22:25, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

Ah yes, CNTRL SHIFT V works, suggesting there's something invisible being hoovered up by the copy that is not palatable to the normal paste. Kerry (talk) 22:30, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

I couldn't be sure how widespread this is, but it seems when editors use the visual editor for Template:Infobox officeholder and their child templates (I wouldn't know much about others, such as even Infobox person), the data fields get scrambled. The office sections get switched around, particularly term_start and term_end fields getting lumped together and moved to somewhere near the bottom, or sandwiched among later office fields. While this doesn't seem to do much for a casual reader, it does cause confusion when trying to edit/update information in wikitext. These are some examples of those re-orderings (where I've also made my intended edits). [1] [2] [3] [4] I can't remember when I began encountering this issue, but it has definitely been several months now (at least by this summer), but only recently understood the issue to originate with the visual editor. Therequiembellishere (talk) 11:41, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your note. All templates get "properly" (←note the use of scare quotes here  ;-) ordered when edited. The "proper" order is determined by the TemplateData on the template's documentation (and alphabetical for un-documented parameters). You can rearrange the TemplateData to give the order that you think best by editing that template's documentation page, clicking the "Manage TemplateData" button, and dragging the items up and down until you get the order that you want. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:27, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Icebob99 (talk) 20:52, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

Does this happen every time you edit this page? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:30, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Whatamidoing (WMF) it is inconsistent. The majority of edits do end up with this grayed-out screen, however. Icebob99 (talk) 02:36, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

We had a group of students working on transferring data from a collection of essays in a book- the course leader had introduced ve- could I just explain how to insert the reference.

This seems to be the relevant cite:

{{cite book |last=Bloggs |first=Fred |editor-first=John |editor-last=Doe |title=Big Compilation Book with Many Chapters and Distinct Chapter Authors |publisher=Book Publishers |date=January 1, 2001 |pages=100–110 |chapter=Chapter 2: The History of the Bloggs Family |isbn=978-1-234-56789-7}}

They are not aware that 'add further information' will give them more fields- icon not clear.

The UI of cite book fails them. Lets be more surgical. Alphabetic grouping of some of the fields is a programmer solution- users need logical grouping. first1,last1,authorlink1 all together, then first2 ... In their thinking they want to reference the book- then move on and credit the author of the chapter.

At this point, as tutor I want to fallback to plain wikitext-- there is no [[]] icon to fallback to raw wikitext or the normal wikitext template- so we have to lose the data they have already entered by returning to edit source.

From a tutor point of view- one says- any reference ids better than no reference. If you are not sure copy in what you have got and put <ref></ref> around it. Again that is detected by ve- and throws the student into the cite dialogue! The final tip is to say <!-- --> is a comment that no-one will see until they start editing. Put what you have got in comment brackets and let the course leader sort it out. That does work.

So there are a few issues there. ClemRutter (talk) 10:34, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Clem, I think I need more information here, beginning with what wiki is this happening on?

• {{Cite book}} – here at the English Wikipedia – already has "logicial" grouping for the parameters. The order is defined by TemplateData, and falls back to alphabetical grouping iff no TemplateData exists.
• I can't imaging why you need to cancel the data they've already entered. Just insert what you've got and click the [[ ]] button.
• If you want to give them a pre-formed ideal citation (and they're using the same source), then you can give them the raw wikitext (including the citation template) and tell them to paste it into the "Basic form" instead. Parsoid will convert it all for you on the spot. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:45, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Whatamidoing (WMF) I was going to say good morning but it seems inappropriate today, Hola! My function here is as a reporter- I try very hard not to get involved any more in the more fascinating world of coding -all I can do is describe how our wonderful product works when you let real editors to use it. I am not looking for immediate answers, I am asking that this is put in the feedback sack to inform future design decisions.

Here in Hoxton using (en), VE had been adopted by a group of organisers of a small charity. We (WPUK) have done a stage 1- introductory editation where we had control of the group and could direct them towards best practice and get them enthused, this was a stage 2 follow up editathon. They were organising it- they did the morning session alone triaging which of the personalities were actually notable and what they needed to say. They started writing - had lunch- and continued with enthusiasm. I was invited in for the afternoon to give advice on how to solve the problems they were encountering. We had succeeded to persuade them to fly solo and they had taken-off. Here is one of the pieces Kaite O'Reilly.

They had structure, understood the need of good referencing, and had typed in some prose. One guy was a professional TV Soap Opera writer so they could write. There were two problems - what is an infobox and how do I do it- and how do I write this reference? I was in a position to get them to dropdown to wikitext to do the infobox and cut and paste a sample infobox from my training page and change the facts. I wasn't in a position to tell them to start over as they already had typed in so much text. (In retrospect- I should have said that is great- just save it, and the we will go over it again in wikitext) So, this is where I discovered that Add more information was not the way to do it- and ::# the users were unwilling even to try it- it was not intuitive

1. when pressed it gave too many fields in alpha order - when they were problem focused and just wanted to know how to markup the article author, article title, page numbers- and secondarily the books compiler/ editor, book title, edition etc. (the field names in wikitext are as perplexing too!)

It is a philosophical difference- all inclusive, or topic-focus. Newbies need the latter.

In my dreams I see two solutions

1. Reworking the Citation manual dialogbox. To the top four options- add Article in book- this would lead the template I have shown above. If four items in important, then adding web and news could be merged. If you wish to take it up to six- cite signs could be added- as it would be useful in GLAM backstage passes. To the bottom two options- rename Basic form to Basic Text- form is ambiguous (eg Data entry form- which is what we are using)- or simply rename it [[]] because that is what it does. In the empty space use the insert comment icon- because it allows the trainer to say when all else fails- put what you know in a comment box and the course leader will sort it out later

1. Reworking the Cite book- Add more information- flash panel. This is a biggy as it involve redesigning cite book with context-sensitive intelligence. Take the example of 0-486-41146-X Sundials: Mayall and Mayall. If the user types the ISBN it should autofill.(But it doesn't on Automatic either). The user wants to add a second author- they select last2, and two boxes should open up last2 and first2. Also an author link box should be offered here. If the user selects editor-last1, then the displayed fields should reconfigure to offer editor-first1, editor-last2, editor-first2. I can't see a simple way to tell the context sensitive form that this is a compilation, without a direct question- no doubt someone else has that answer.

As I said, I am not looking for immediate changes just adding comments based on watching a small sample of fledgling editors- and reporting back.ClemRutter (talk) 10:46, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi, I've already reported it several times ago, but it doesn't seem to be fixed : sometimes VE adds images with the link= attribute filled with a link to the image. Example: Jean Gilles (général) (lien= is the equivalent of link= on frwiki). --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 11:05, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi, VE is still adding span tags to articles with purely internal attributes, like here. Please fix. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 11:07, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

And forgot to mention that those tags are also invalid HTML5... (span tags can't be self closed in HTML5). --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 11:08, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:02, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

@Mike Christie: So you copy pasted a fragment of rendered wikipage into the editor ? It's a bit difficult for the editor to detect this as an error situation I think, because there is no semantic information that distinguishes a blob of html that looks like a reference from a blob of html that IS a reference. Maybe the developers could add a warning as they do when you copy wikicode, when they detect a sup element with "cite" ids in it. "It looks like you might have pasted a piece of wiki content. It is advisable to copy elements from the editor, and not from the resulting HTML, as you will loose important information." ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:24, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

Here is an example of a student doing this sort of thing[5] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 16:28, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

@TheDJ:I agree that the editor can't easily detect this; and of course now I know about it I'm unlikely to do it again. That doesn't mean it's the right behaviour, though -- Doc James' example shows that this is going to happen to new editors, and although AWB can probably find and clean these up fairly easily it would be better to try to find a solution that doesn't require post-editing cleanup. I think your suggestion is a reasonable one; perhaps just Wikipedia links inside sup elements would be enough? It would be nice if the user could be asked if they want to convert them back to the original citation: there's enough data in the html for a human to figure out what to do, so perhaps VE (or a post-edit cleanup script) could do so. I suspect that's a pipe dream for now. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 17:32, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

That'd create problems for some content.^{[dubious – discuss?]} Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:39, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I could imagine that, though I can't think of a particular issue off hand. For now is there a reason not to detect and avoid pasting this sort of thing? I can't see a situation where you'd ever want it to happen. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 09:55, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

I wonder if there's some sort of CSS class or something that could be detected (and then perhaps an error message produced). I'll ask one of the devs. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:49, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

I was trying to make a simple edit on the Viking metal article - I needed to add an archived url to fix a dead link. In the source editor, all I needed to do was scroll down and add the link. Now, the reference section in that article uses Template:Refbegin and Template:Refend, so in Visual Editor, you get this big mess of columns. It's still fairly easy to amend existing parameters, though it might take longer to find the reference in question. But I could not find how to add new parameters (in this case, Archive-url and Archive-date) to the existing reference template.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 15:51, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

It's not exactly easy. First you scroll down through the mile-long complex transclusion until you find the correct Cite web section. Then you click this icon (lower left) that looks sort of like an old television screen (the icons across the bottom left run puzzle to add a "new template", square brackets to add "new content" (aka non-template wikitext), and the box-shaped one to "add more information", which is what you want; after that, there are arrows to re-arrange the items and a trash can icon to remove the selected item). After you click "add more information", I think it'll look familiar enough for you to figure it out. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:36, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

My goodness that's complicated. That's my point. I'm sure I could have found it eventually. But sifting through over fifty-five templates to find the right one, when they all look the same unless you take the time to click on and expand each one, is not user-friendly, and the whole point of Visual Editor is that it is supposed to be more user friendly, not less. Also, I found out why I couldn't do it before: I was getting an error with an unresponsive script, and I opted to kill that script. I could use parts of the dialog, but not others. This time, the error message came up about four or five times, and I just kept clicking through it. So, at least with large amount of references, which a well-written, FA-candidate like this article would be, the VE scripts are buggy, too.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 03:51, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

I understand that "unresponsive script" is something that your browser does, not the visual editor (nor any other website). As I understand it, your browser gives you that message when it is taking more than a certain (defined by your browser) number of seconds to process a script, even if the script itself is fine.

I'm hoping that {{refbegin}} and other cosmetic templates will be much easier to edit when rich template editing becomes available. But for now, it's complicated. (Can you believe that this tool is what we started with back in 2013, for every template?) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:41, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, I remember how it was.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 16:03, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi

I'm unsure wether this is an issue with the automatic citation function or the source but when I try to create a reference automatically for http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002439/243938e.pdf the tool says We couldn't make a citation for you. You can create one manually using the "Manual" tab above. Please can someone explain why this is happening and what could be done for this source to correct this issue?

Thanks

--John Cummings (talk) 11:29, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

I believe that citoid only works on HTML pages. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:25, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/54.0.2840.99 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Amazing_Race_4&action=edit my edit comment box is not appearing when I carry out the edit. I can save but not comment out what changes I made and why. The changes I made were some text change to make it more readable and take out a link selling the promotional dvd.

Neil Kindness (talk) 06:01, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Hello, Neil Kindness, and thanks for this report. Can you tell me how you started to save your change? Were you using a keyboard shortcut (such as alt-shift-s) or clicking the blue button? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:36, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

I never tried this feature out before. Doesn't seem to work for me at all.

• Try a random page and add a category to it, either got to page settings or just click on the categories at the bottom to open the menu.
• Trying adding a cat. The menu shows that its added; however, the page doesn't update--saving results in no change or edit. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 12:16, 21 November 2016 (UTC)
  • Confirmed and reported —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:03, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

Here's a sample article: Bharatiya Janata Party.

I recall that edit notices used to display before. Considering that my example has an Arb notice, things can get pretty serious if this doesn't happen. Acknowledged or is it just me? Ugog Nizdast (talk) 13:24, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

I agree; I see the edit notice in the wikitext editor but not in VE. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:26, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

I tested this - edit notice doesn't show in VE [so, confirmed]; switched to wikitext editor, edit notice does show; switched back to VE - and the software got about 3/4 of the way to opening the article in VE, then stopped. That was on Firefox (on a Mac); same behavior using the Chrome browser. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:00, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

Confirmed and reported —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:12, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

VeniVidiVicipedia (talk) 16:03, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

The display that I see doesn't match any of the other modes. I think this may be a deliberate choice (to make it obvious that there are multiple images present), but I'll ask the dev who knows the most about it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:31, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

Displaying it different when editing or reading is not what you would expect for a WYSIWYG-editor.--VeniVidiVicipedia (talk) 12:00, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

No, it is not. But I think that most of our interactive content is currently not-fully interactive while in the edit mode. Should still be filed as a ticket though. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:28, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_1) AppleWebKit/602.2.14 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0.1 Safari/602.2.14

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estates_of_Cura%C3%A7ao?action=edit&veswitched=1&oldid=751133083

The page title is wrong. The correct word for this is Parliament and not Estates. I changed it in the text but the title is not editable. Thanks.

AnthonyHollander (talk) 16:13, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

@AnthonyHollander: That concerns "moving" a page and is not related to normal editing. For help at doing it, see WP:MOVE. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 16:33, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/54.0.2840.99 Safari/537.36

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

JumboBull415 (talk) 15:31, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

@JumboBull415: New articles automatically get noindex added directly to the html by our software until they have been reviewed by Wikipedia:New pages patrol. The oldest unreviewed articles are currently from October 23 and International Expeditions is from October 25 so it will probably be reviewed within a few days. If the reviewer accepts it then noindex is removed. __INDEX__ and __NOINDEX__ have no effect in article space. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:21, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

@JumboBull415: btw. if one of the first things you do when creating a Wikipedia page is to see if it turns up in Google, that to us is cause to question your motives, as it is an indicator of a potential conflict of interest. Abuse of Wikipedia to get your content to show up high in Google's search results is one of the reasons the community has chosen to initially keep new content out of search engines all together. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:18, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

@JumboBull415: I made a mistake earlier by using Special:NewPages but it only goes back 30 days. Special:NewPagesFeed currently has unreviewed articles going back to 23 July. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:04, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

GermanJoe (talk) 18:51, 24 November 2016 (UTC)

That's an odd one. Thank you for reporting this. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 06:41, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for reporting this on Phab, but de-Wiki beat us to it :). I have switched the above task number to the older open task, just for convenience. GermanJoe (talk) 17:29, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0

I am Unable to save my edit . PLease help

Raminder0707 (talk) 10:39, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/54.0.2840.98 Safari/537.36

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

I am not currently able to save changes. Eep! I just finished adding to a strong draft and it's complete - but I can't save!!! I keep getting an error when trying to save. What do I do??

Gargroetzi (talk) 03:08, 27 November 2016 (UTC)

I'm so sorry to hear about this, Gargroetzi. One thing you can do is to copy it and paste it some place else, in the hope of not losing everything. Did you get any particular error messages? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:08, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

For instance, if I see a linked text that says "Theobalds House" (which was recently moved to "De Vere Theobalds Estate", a more correct name), and I want to replace that text ("Theobalds House") with the newer name for the article, it's relatively difficult to do in the current form of the Visual Editor. Granted, it's far easier IMO to do said action in VE than it is with source editing. And it is very easy to change the article that a text links to, which I'm very grateful for. But if I want to simply replace a text with the name of the article I want the text to link to, it's very difficult from my experience in VE, unless there's just a better way to do that.

Also, you could also make it easier to modify links and text in templates and infoboxes and such, which it's very, very difficult to do so now, and is actually easier to do in source editing IMO.--Chicowales (talk) 21:57, 27 November 2016 (UTC)

On your first problem, I usually remove the old one completely, and then create a new one. If you type [[, it'll pop up the search list for links, so then you only have to type in a little bit of the name, select the item when it appears in the list, and Insert it.

Can you give me a diff or example of exactly what you'd like to change in the templates/infoboxes? Long-term, there are plans to make some things easy to edit (just click on it and change the text), but right now it can be a bit complicated. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:11, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, Cyphoidbomb (talk) 19:27, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

Sadly (as annoying this can be while checking diffs), that happens..it's not a bug but just doing as it has been told. See /Archive_2016_1#VisualEditor_reorders_parms_in_infobox. Though here, I can figure why |film name went right down, contradicting what's at Template:Infobox film#TemplateData. |border and |image size seem to be no longer used though, maybe they're the cause? Ugog Nizdast (talk) 19:45, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

I tried something else. Here, I moved |film_name= to the bottom of the infobox, then in the next edit, I activated the Visual Editor. |image_size= and |border= were stuffed right before |film_name=. Then I tried moving film_name somewhere toward the middle of the template. In the next edit I activated Visual Editor, and |film_name= got moved to the very bottom, along with |image_size= and |border= right above it. I don't know if that helps answer anything. Regards, Cyphoidbomb (talk) 20:12, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

I also wanted to mention that part of why this is a problem, is that editors would expect to find image controls and |film_name= at the top of the infobox formatting, because the image and names display at the top of the infobox. If these are arbitrarily moved to the bottom, we run the risk of users adding duplicate parameters, which is just going to create more work to clean up, and may result in errors. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 18:15, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for this report. I've talked to the product manager about this, but I don't know how soon it will be fixed. (My best guess: no sooner than 15 December.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:18, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

I am not a big user of galleries myself, but I had to edit an article today that had a gallery to add an image. I clicked on the gallery and it offered me the opportunity to add new image, I click on Add New Image, and then the usual search box appears which, after the usual pause, brings up a bunch of candidate photos. I clicked on my desired photo and then it offered me the opportunity to add a caption. Problem! I don't remember the details and there is no way it seems to get the filename or bring up the File page for the image. What seems to be missing here is the "Media settings" screen that comes up when adding an image (not in a gallery) which shows you the file name, and if you need to know more, offers a link to the description page, all of which is useful when writing a detailed caption. Why doesn't the gallery insertion provide the filename and the link to the description page so you can you can write your caption? Fortunately, I had the Commons page for the image sitting in the history in another browser tab, so I managed to find it again on Commons and get the information I needed.

Then, I noticed that the captions of some of the other photos in the gallery were also a bit light on captioning, so I wanted to improve their captions. That was more of a puzzle, as I have no clue what the file names (as they are not displayed), so my search on Commons using the obvious keywords failed to find the photos. Eventually the penny dropped that maybe the files weren't on Commons but were uploaded to Wikipedia and eventually I found the photo there. Again, when looking at an existing image in a gallery, you still need to be shown the file name and a link to the File page. Kerry (talk) 06:43, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

See phab:T145247, phab:T64677, and phab:T149602. You, me, and the dev who will do all the work agree about this. 😉 Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:20, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/54.0.2840.100 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

<gallery mode="packed" class="center">
File:Test.png|a
File:Test.png|b
</gallery>

1. Put a gallery like the above into a page.
2. Save the page, and edit the page with the visual editor
3. Click on the gallery you have added
4. Flick to the "Options" tab and note the contents of the "Classes" field.
5. Save the gallery and the page
6. View the source of the page, note the redundant "classes=" parameter, not in the documentation, like <gallery mode="packed" class="center" classes="center">. --BurritoBazooka ^Talk Contribs 15:11, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for this detailed report. Also, may I interest you in mw:How to become a MediaWiki hacker? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:30, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 19:29, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Is there any way we can make the experience of inserting a photo into an infobox more "visual"? And also support the relocating of another photo in an article into an infobox or vice versa. Right now, it's an absolute pain in VE. I don't know if we could make TemplateData smarter to flag that a parameter expects an image file name or image caption, or take a simpler solution that a parameter pair called image and caption (which seem to the "norm" in most infoboxes) are assumed to have those semantics. I realise that templates and infoboxes are painful/impossible in many ways for the VE-only user, but generally most infoboxes work sort-of OK if the VE uses provides no-markup values for the parameters, but the image parameter isn't one of them. Kerry (talk) 04:59, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

Quick reply: yes, but not soon. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:36, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0

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

Jzsj (talk) 22:25, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

This looks like it might be a bug related to the setting of "Preference > Editing > Edit mode". I find that it is safest to select "both editor tabs" as I too have experienced being locked out of the VE with other settings. Kerry (talk) 02:14, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

Can you please tell me as much as you remember about what was going on when you encountered this problem? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:30, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

Your advice, received also from another editor, has worked and it looks like my "preferences" changed without my knowing it. Thanks.Jzsj (talk) 09:33, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

Is there any easy way to change the way the citation function in VE picks up dates when you're automatically adding a link? I ask because it seems to import as month-day-year automatically and it means editors sometimes have to correct additions that I've made i.e. the most recent edit made to Charlotte Kerwood (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charlotte_Kerwood&action=history). Red Fiona (talk) 18:52, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

A parameter - df - exists which can be used to specify the date format - "mdy-all" is what I use, I think, to force the accessdate and (in those rare occasions when Citoid works close to fully) the source date to be in a useful format, without retyping them. Unfortunately, this parameter isn't defined in templatedata, though it works if forced into a citation template manually. (And yes, I did request a fix, which was ignored, and I've not had time to try again.)

I also note that for British articles, the parameter would be set to a different value. And I doubt the developers are interested in having VE look at a template in articlespace to automatically set the value of this parameter, so the best would be to make it easy for human editors to manually put the dates in the preferred format. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 05:20, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

For most languages there is probably a preferred date format that is fairly universal, so there might be a good enough reason to set a preference in Special:Preferences that VE could respect. That would at least allow users to set a default which might resolve a large fraction of these, particularly if the users mostly works on articles with one particular language association. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:47, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

Citoid uses the YYYY-MM-DD date format, and this is unlikely to change. If a format is preferred for a given wiki, then I suspect that they could address that by setting a default date format for users at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering.

I wonder if it would be helpful to have the date-formatting bots add the |df= to relevant templates as well. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:05, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

I appreciate that Citoid shouldn't have to guess what is the right format but if the article contains {{Use DMY dates}}, then I think it is pretty obvious. Otherwise, I end up wasting a lot of time reformatting them - not just my own but other people's too. This is an example of the VE making unnecessary work for the community. Kerry (talk) 13:51, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

After a VE edit, I sometimes see Yobot come by and make edits like this, which include in the edit summary the phrase "Removed invisible unicode characters". Is this some debris that VE is leaving behind? That perhaps it should not? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:38, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

I have no idea. Do you think that bit of text was added via copy-and-paste from another website? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:34, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

No, I was just adding wikilinks. The only thing I can think of is a non-breaking space -- I'm a two-spaces-after-a-full-stop typist, and if I see a single space at the end of a sentence in wikitext I might reflexively add another space. But in this case the link locations seem to make that unlikely. Is it possible to look at the Yobot edit with a tool that will show the Unicode for the text it changed? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:39, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

The reliable method is "ask User:Magioladitis, who can do magic", but I think that these are merely non-breaking spaces. It looks like you added that sentence in this edit, and as it's part of a direct quotation, you probably copied and pasted from the original source. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:24, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

@Mike Christie and Whatamidoing (WMF): VE has the bad habit to allow editors to paste of any character. Pasting from other sites, Microsoft Word, etc. results in various invisible unicode characters inside the text. I use this site to check for invisible characters. It's not a big deal in most cases since the bot fixes them daily. -- Magioladitis (talk) 15:50, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trans_(album)&section=5&veaction=edit&oldid=747935146&wteswitched=1&redirect=no

Andrewjtalcott (talk) 03:09, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

@Andrewjtalcott: Could you be more specific? Do you mean WP:WIKILINK or references? I see that you've added this comment in the article so I'm not sure what you mean--the ref looks fine to me. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 13:53, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

I took a look at the article. The problem being reported (see this diff which makes it clearer) is that the URL in the citation had ceased to point a relevant web page (cyber-squatted by the look of it). It doesn't look like a VE issue as such, but is more a case of a new user asking the question "what can I do about this?". Thanks to the Internet Archive, I had been able to add an archive url to fix the citation, so the specific problem is fixed. In terms of what might be useful within the VE is that after the user has done "select citation > Edit" (which can bring up a number of different screens depending on whether it is web/book/.../manual) is to put on those screens in some appropriate place a button which insert ^{[dead link]} into the source in the appropriate place. While I don't expect we can provide a built-in solution to all problems within the VE, nonetheless deadlinks in citations/external links is a pretty common problem, so maybe we can do something about these. I guess the external link dialogue would also need a deadlink button. While a deadlink template doesn't solve the problem, at least it warns the reader and flags to any more experienced contributors that there is something broken that might be fixable. Kerry (talk) 06:11, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Thinking about this a bit more, a simpler solution might be to add a new Problem menu which offers a selection of the most popular "problem" templates, like deadlink, citation needed, dubious, etc. If we wanted to be really sexy, we could have a final "Any other problem" with a text box, which just puts it in as a comment. Before anyone says they should use the Talk page, my experience in training is that new users are oblivious to the Talk page. Or the comment could just be "Problem report, See Talk" and dump the full text of the problem onto the Talk page. Kerry (talk) 06:43, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Oh a dead link, judging by my response it sounds like I checked it but can't remember. Yes, I've experienced this too. Dead link is supposed to be added at the end of the ref within its tags, which I couldn't find a way to do when we use any of those cite templates since we can only add valid fields to it. External links aren't tagged btw WP:ELDEAD. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 06:56, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't think you can add a {{deadlink}} within the <ref>...</ref> tags using the VE, but you can always add after the citation in the text. It still flags a deadlink even if it does in a different place. As for External links, it is true there is no point in keeping a truly dead external link, but it is still OK to recover dead external links using archive links, so I think it's OK for people who don't know how to fix deadlinks just to flag them and leave it for those more able to determine if the link is recoverable or whether it is time to delete. Better to let a deadlink sit for a while than delete it in an over-hasty way. Kerry (talk) 02:06, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

Looks like this is tracked already: here. Hey Whatamidoing (WMF), does that phab bug cover what we've both discussed above? Ugog Nizdast (talk) 15:42, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

Yes, except for Kerry's idea of a "Problem" menu. I'm not sure that a "Problem" menu has been considered. It feels like it could be the sort of thing that only works at the English Wikipedia.

Note that the combination of 40 story points (="easily more than a week's dedicated work") and the need for design work on that bug means that it's probably not going to be solved in the coming weeks. So we're probably stuck with this problem for a while. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:04, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

I notice that some of the wikilinks produced by the VE are annoying the community (well, they are coming along after me and fixing things). An example from Edward Barton Southerden, an article I recently created mostly using the VE, contains:

[[Immigrant|immigrants]]

which has now been changed by another editor to

[[immigrant]]s

which is the preferred form according to WP:NOPIPE. I can't say that it bothers me, as I subscribe to the principle of "never send a human to do a machine's job", but it appears to irritate others, so maybe we should fix the machine. Kerry (talk) 03:41, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

I wouldn't recommend anyone going out of their way to fix that, I've seen bots handle that. Couldn't find anything in Phab. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 04:21, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

This is a fairly minor problem here at the English Wikipedia, but it's a more significant irritation at languages whose endings vary. OTOH, it's only visible when you are reading the wikitext itself. The result is the same for the reader. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:11, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

True, it's not directly visible to the VE user, but what will be visible to them is the increasingly sarcastic comments by the MoS-loving source-editor user who "fixes yet-another of your errors" across a number of articles. The problem is not the source code produced, but the behavioural response it can provoke. Kerry (talk) 03:51, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

Maybe this should be a VE 'post edit cleanup' step, where "if you are an experienced user, we will ask you what to prefer for each link, and we will ask if you we should remember your preference, or keep asking you for every edit that has such issues". —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:45, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

Kerry, are people really leaving nasty comments for you about this? The clean-up here at enwiki is most commonly done by a bot. NOPIPE isn't a guideline and it only states a preference, not a requirement, anyway. In fact, I'm wondering whether that type of change would technically be a COSMETICBOT violation, if it weren't done in conjunction with other changes. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:17, 19 December 2016 (UTC)