Topic on VisualEditor/Feedback

VE was recently deployed on the Portuguese Wikipedia, and introduces its usual bunch of errors and problems.

• This edit totally ruins the page.
• This edit makes the usual ref inside a header error, but also has some strange "span class" additions
• This has a strange ref addition as well
• here and then here, and here, it looks as if that ref under "Faixas" gets duplicated automatically, and testing it myself in VE, it turns out to be true...

In the first few hundred most recent VE edits on the Portuguese Wikipedia, I think I have seen one instance where the addition of a reference didn't cause or contain any problems. For simple edits, plain text, VE is somewhat usable, but as soon as you try anything different, you are likely to run into problems. That's rather depressing for something that has been tested and discussed for months and months now in live environments. Is it really wise to continue to bring this to more and more wikis? What benefit does that actually bring?

You have the right premises, but the wrong conclusion.

We have two facts :

1. Editing smoothly with a visual editor is indispensable to the future of Wikipedia.
2. The visual editor in its current state is absolutely lamentable.

What solution do I see ?

Hire 1000 (good) developers.

Seriously. Wikimedia asks for dollars for various purposes, useful and useless. But Wikimedia never focus a campaign on hiring people. And Wikimedia employs, I think, very few people. So guess why MediaWiki has so many unfixed bugs and limitations. Wikimedia could highlight the fact of creating many jobs.

MediaWiki needs workers. A lot of workers.

I don't agree with your #1, but that's an opinion, not a right-or-wrong position. I obviously agree with your #2. As for the solution, I don't believe it needs more people, it just needs better people.

FYI: I added a link to your topic on our local feedback page:

• w:pt:WP:Editor Visual/Comentários#Introdução de problemas nos artigos

Thanks. I don't speak Portuguese, so I haven't tried this, nor will I be able to help much there...

I thought this was solved, but I have found a very recent edit introducing a "☁" sign:

More, from the 50 most recent:

• goes all wrong
• Here; at the very bottom, the "Portal" code goes wrong. Looks like something VE does, not something the human editor does, but I haven't tried to reproduce it.
• Of course we still have unwanted "nowiki"s

And this is all from a cursory glance of some of these edits... It's a bit sad that VE still creates so many errors and problems when it has been in production on all the largest wikis and many smaller ones for over half a year now.

In #1, it appears that the person pasted an image into a reference. I've been unable to save a page that has a pasted image in a ref, but I have been able to paste the image into the ref box in Firefox (Safari refused to even paste it). I believe that you aren't supposed to be able to paste images from external websites (how would you get the source and license information recorded at Commons?), so I'll file a bug report on this. (Update: it's bugzilla:60780.

In #2, the portal code isn't going wrong. The actual problem appears to be that the wikitext opens six tables but closes only five of them, causing a good deal of the article to read as a "table". This is probably very irritating to readers that depend on proper HTML for page navigation. VisualEditor (well, probably Parsoid) is trying to close the table, only it doesn't know where the table actually stops. I suspect that the problematic bit is this:

=== Comissão técnica ===
{|
|valign="top"|
{| class="toccolours" border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" align="left" style="margin:0.5em;"
!colspan="2" align=center bgcolor="#00458A" | <span style="color:#FFFF00;">Comissão Técnica</span>
|-
| {{BRAb}} '''[[Paulo Porto]]''' || '''Treinador'''

As for #3, it appears that these nowikis will be there for as long as users type wikitext manually in a non-wikitext editor. Requests to change this behavior have been refused in the past.

And as long as these requests are refused (for ideological reasons only, no technical reason to do so exists), these errors will be made with VE and people will turn back to the wikitext editor. Which is good!