Topic on VisualEditor/Feedback

Text editor is really a bot - editors being credited for edits they did not make, nor were they aware of

4
Chaosdruid (talkcontribs)

Hi

I made an edit earlier, simply moving a 3 or 4 words around, and as it is a live edit (and no markup involved) I clicked save and added a summary. Later, when checking the history, I noticed that my "simple" change had added 1435 characters to the article.

When I checked the edit summary, the editor had added 1450+ spaces into the articles refs. Now, I did not ask it to do this, I did not know it had done this, and it has dramatically changed the article and credited it to me, without me even knowing. I have raised this elsewhere, and so will post it here rather than just type it all out again:

"Is there some facet of the "Beta editor" that has made it into a semi-autonomous editor? I made a little change, trying to place a date in a sentence, and simply moved "in 19XX" to an earlier place in the sentence, and changed "he joined" to "joining".

When I looked at the edit history, I was amazed that it was telling me I had added 1,459 characters!! It seems that while I was moving the text around, something or someone added lots of spaces to the punctuation of the refs ... has it always done this? Should it be doing this? I am reluctant to ever use this beta feature again if it really is doing things and making changes I have no idea about, and then telling the world that I did it - not good! Chaosdruid (talk) 21:04, 18 April 2014 (UTC)"

Either make the editor aware that additional changes have been made, or better still, stop it from being in any way autonomous - put buttons for us to click to let it do things like this, DO NOT make it automatically do things without the permission of the editor making the changes.

Why did it add the spaces? Why was I not informed of the additions? Why would you let a bot out that makes changes and credits them to an editor that does not even know the text editor is autonomous and has "acted on their behalf"?

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)

It shouldn't be doing this. It shouldn't be adding spaces to templates, and it also shouldn't be changing things on lines that you didn't edit. So that's two bits of breakage. I suspect that the problem is that VisualEditor and/or Parsoid does;t know what to do with w:en:Template:Sfnm.

Chaosdruid (talkcontribs)

DOH - I should have looked more closely ... call myself a system analyst sheesh

Looks that way, indeed there is at least one {{sfn| in there also. So is it looking at the whole page, or between certain parts? e.g. from the first lvl2 header down to when it meets ==References==

I'll leave it with you for now, if someone could drop me a line when this is fixed, that would be great ... that article is a copyedit for FA, so I'll have to stop using the VisEd until it's fixed unfortunately, a fair number of articles I worked on recently seem to have gone towards sfn refs - and it is such a great tool!

Thanks for looking in to it :¬)

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)

It's now bugzilla:64197bugzilla:55461.

I didn't see any changes to templates except for {{sfn}} and {{sfnm}}, and they were only changed if they contained an equals sign. VisualEditor does not play well with sfn templates at the moment, so presumably that's the problem.

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