Thread:VisualEditor/Feedback/inserts "nowiki", why?/reply (6)

It is slightly different than 66210 (which has to do about starting the line with characters that have formatting meaning in wikitext)

These however are all examples of the linktrail problem. Basically it means the user selected part of a word to make that a link, and not the other part. This is not 'normal' within the our world, but apparently something that people do. It's very difficult for Editor software to guess, if the user intended to link the entire word, or not. So it serializes it the way that the editor defined it in HTML, with part of the word outside of the link. The only way to represent a link that has an unlinked trail, is by adding a in between the two parts.

This is 37939, it's not really a bug, it's just annoying and would be good if we can find an unobtrusive way to tell VE users not to do that. But influencing people's behavior, without pissing them off can be a bit tough, so it will take a while to figure this out.