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

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"?