VisualEditor/Feedback/LQT Archive 1

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 Your feedback about the visual editor developer prototype

This page is a place for you to tell the Wikimedia developers what issues you encounter when using the visual editor sandbox. Please note that this is still an early prototype which cannot yet edit or save existing pages and has many known issues. We do welcome your feedback and ideas, especially on some of the early user interface decisions we're making!

[//www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Visual_editor/Feedback&action=edit&section=new Add a new comment] – View known bugs – Report a new bug in Bugzilla

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Archives (older archive dates indicate date of initial comments and may span several months; newer archives span one month per archive and are generated by MiszaBot):

This is the greatest editor ever made!
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_2) AppleWebKit/535.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.969.0 Safari/535.13

Trevor should get a raise. Trevor Parscal 20:02, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
 * +1 :) --Samer.hc 18:12, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Feedback by users that see no feedback link
Some feedback by German users here: de:Wikipedia Diskussion:Kurier

Usability
It's great that you're working on a visual editor.

I've trained non-technical people on wikis and I know there is a strong reluctance for people to do any editing once they see the wiki-markup.

In this spirit, I might suggest putting the 'advanced editor' tools like Wikitext View, JSON View, etc under a single drop-down. My sense is people will see those options, not understand what they mean and decide not to touch anything for fear they'll break it.

I look forward to showing people how easy it is to use the simplified editor.

Lessons from Wikia source editor and visual editor
There are some important lessons to learn from Wikia concerning their visual editor and the source editor. I am an admin on Wikia with tens of thousands of edits. The main thing to me is that people are allowed to edit with either editor. And that they can instantly go from one editor to the other. Wikia uses tabs. So Wikia succeeds in that.

Wikia fails though in that it does not allow editors to default to the source editor. So most experienced editors turn off visual editing altogether in their preferences. It is the only way to avoid constantly having to spend time changing from the visual tab to the source editing tab. The visual tab is always on top when beginning to edit a page. Many people have asked Wikia about this, but Wikia has a habit of ignoring experienced editors for over a year now ever since the debacle of their imposition of a much disliked skin.

Like the narrow-format skin Wikia seems to think that people will just magically like the visual editor if it is forced on them. This cluelessness concerning the skin and the editor has lost participation in many wikis, and many editors have left, or moved/forked their wikis. Wikia and Wikipedia are both volunteer projects. Ignoring editors is why both are becoming unpopular, and many experienced editors are leaving. I edit less on Wikipedia lately due to the rampant vandalism by registered users, rude and speedy deletions by newbs with power, non-admin closures by newbs, and the severe lack of conflict resolution in editor disputes. Wikipedia seems to be empowering inexperienced editors with the visual editor, but hopefully you will not further dis-empower experienced editors by making us use the visual editor by default. LET US CHOOSE THE DEFAULT EDITOR. There are times I want to use a visual editor, and so I don't want to have to turn it on and off in preferences. --Timeshifter 22:34, 29 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Dear Timeshifter,


 * thanks for your thoughts. I agree that this should be an optional, gradual process. The goal here isn't progress for the sake of progress -- it's to make everyone's life easier. Once the feature set is there to support comprehensive editing well, we may want to make it the default for new users with supported browsers, but I don't see any reason to impose a new default on existing users anytime soon, provided we can safely manage the back-and-forth between users using markup vs. visual mode.


 * On the other hand, I think we should increasingly advertise the option of the visual editor as we begin to unlock use cases where it can be safely employed.--Eloquence 03:08, 30 December 2011 (UTC)


 * I agree with Timeshifter. I repeat here my 3 tabs proposal: a browser tab, a visual editor, and a source editor. --Synagonism 09:04, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

User Interface
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I like how the user interface is simplified. It makes editing much easier. Users can spend less time thinking about code and more time on the content. This is a work in progress. One suggestion I would make is to incorporate real-time editing, so that users can see editing happen in real time.

TJRana 12:02, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Footnotes - Where are You?
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.63 Safari/535.7
 * In the edit-box is a footnote "citation needed" which is not shown in the wikitext-view. But there are no footnotes in the end of the document and no way to insert them.

Where are the footnotes? An editor without footnotes makes articles without sources i.e. nonsense.

The Markup for bold and italics, headers and other styles is not so complicated and easy to learn. Difficult are footnotes, templates and tables. E.g for books it should be sufficient just to insert isbn and page number to get a complete footnote (with help of the appropriate template). 19.326.31.145 12:10, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

{ } - Templates
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If pressing { } I would expect to get the chance to insert templates, because in Wikimarkup is used for templates tratditionally. There should be a wizard to choose the right template dependent on the categories the article is sorted in and des section which is edited:

1. Footnotes: sources 2. Top: infoboxes 3. Text: Area: sources, pictures and tables 4. Bottom: navigation bars, biographic data 29.246.31.145 12:27, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

Toolbar
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/9.0.1

I would strongly recommend you reconsider some of the labels on the toolbar if you aim to make accessible to the general public. I love what you have done so far! 205.254.147.8 17:17, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

references / citations
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needs a button to insert references and citations 123465421jhytwretpo98721654 04:01, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

inserting images
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needs a button to insert images 123465421jhytwretpo98721654 04:01, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Wikitext view
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/9.0.1 Iceweasel/9.0.1

This news editor is great. For backward usability (keeping the ability to edit as wikitext) that would be greater if the "Toogle wikitext view" would allow directly editing wiki syntax (and see the result in the visual editor) 193.49.225.25 16:15, 4 January 2012 (UTC)


 * First, absolutely agree that this is an awesome advance. Second, now I can't help being hungry for more, and the idea by the above contributor is right on.  Not every feature will be available in the new visual editor, and we will still need wiki markup for a while; working in markup and seeing directly the change made makes it much easier to learn markup features.  The small amount of wiki markup I've taught myself is through painful back-and-forth, "let's see what happens when we do this" self-teaching.Erudy 02:27, 27 January 2012 (UTC)

Bullet and numbered list behavior
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/17.0.963.26 Safari/535.11

In most interfaces when you want to end your bullet list you hit return twice. The first return will create an empty bullet and the second return will drop you out of bullet mode. I think it would be best to mimic that behavior in this editor too. The same should be true for numbered lists as well. 107.1.76.62 15:00, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

Help expose capabilities users want but don't know how to
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Wikipedians have created an amazing array of specialized templates to help control the visual layout of a wiki article. These are in addition to the existing MAGIC WORDS built into MediaWiki. A few examples include:

,, , , , and. While I see that it is a requirement for the visual editor to be able to interpret and act on this code, I think it is also important for the visual editor to help users employ these tools even when they didn't know that it existed. There should be additional toolbars just like in Word, OO, Google Docs, etc that allow users to find more advanced functionality. Tools like Excel even help you find the functions you need via simple and advanced query techniques. 107.1.76.62 15:07, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

Linking actions
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There is currently only one link icon. Is it intended that this link icon will be used for both internal and external links? In my experience, inexperienced users have a great deal of difficulty conceptualizing the difference between and internal link and an external link. Anything the visual editor can do to help users not have to worry about that should be explored. Personally, I believe we should just integrate intelligence into the linking tool. Examples:

If an editor uses a full external URL to link to another wiki page, the tools should just automatically convert it to an appropriate internal link. Ideally, the tool would even be able to do this for interwiki links as well.

If an editor has highlight a word(s) to be linked, the editor should automatically try to find the correct page and prepopulate it.

I also think the editor should try to identify internal links automatically and just populate the those for the user. We know the core guidelines (only link once, link first use but not others). The tool would be generous with linking and a user should be able to just click on a link and easily remove it if the link is extraneous to the article.

In short, the visual linking tools should eliminate the need for most users from having to know the complexities of linking and just help them connect their article to other articles and information. Theflyer 15:26, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

Upload and Insert Images in one step
Brilliant work! It still lacks some tools, like insert images, videos, audio and documents (pdf, xls, etc) Insert an image or any file from our computer is a complicated process in mediawiki. For common people is almost impossible.

It is so different to the that people get used to in windows and mac applications. In mediawiki you have to click on a link at the sidebar (not in the Editor toolbar) to upload. After that, you have to copy the file name and close the dialog. Then you click in the button to insert. Then you substitute the "File:Example.jpg" by the name previouly copied.

Compare this to the way Wordpress 3.3.1 Editor implemented. They made it so easy to insert images in one single button, one single step! Why don't you use that code? It is well written and it is free. With a few changes you could use that stable and tested code to quickly implement a very useful feature to Visual Editor.

The step by stepUpload Wizard with image copyright may be good for Wikipedia, but is an extension of unnecessary complexity, useless in many other wikis like the one I am developing for fifty thousand users in an intranet environment.

Upload and insert images should be as simple as Wordpress implemented so well in their visual editor.

Suggestion: for newbies ON, for experienced users OFF
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; InfoPath.3; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E)


 * On cswiki Village Pump user Fagnes suggested: "Nešlo by to aspoň nastavit tak, aby to bylo u nováčků implicitně zapnuto a u ostatních explicitně vypnuto?"
 * Translated: "Is it possible to make it so that VES will be implicitly set to ON for newbie users and explicitly set to OFF for the others?
 * See: http://cs.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedie:Pod_l%C3%ADpou&diff=7890518&oldid=7890494


 * Suggested: Fagnes
 * Translated: Utar 12:28, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Hyperlinking in fusional languages
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I assume that there will be a similar version of hyperlinking help in VisualEditor as in the current version of the MediaWiki software. (i.e. the words in the selected like show up as you're typing). I speak a Slavic language, so I would welcome that the software would take into account the gramatical cases. For example, the hyperlinked phrase is "ruskou hokejovou reprezentací" and the name of the article is "Ruská hokejová reprezentace". As you see, only the suffixes change, and this is the case of most Indo-European languages. So it wouldn't be difficult to change the context help in the way that it would take into account only the beginnings of the words with the result that the wanted article would show up immediately. Thank you. 90.177.208.162 17:26, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

column and tables
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/9.0.1

The two features I mostly use are:


 * column to indent paragraphs at will

{ tables because I have many texts in French on the left column and English on the right column. }

Interested to know how you support them. Would it not be nice to have wysywyg on one side and wiktext on the other side and be able to enter text in both forms?

Best 89.227.88.111 15:14, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

wwwr.cbs.dk/content/view/full/382/(offset)/10?t=achieving
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jeg vil vidd hven han er og hvorfor.haha du er djov😊 94.144.63.215 06:16, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Please *actively recruit* testers with disabilities
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/9.0.1

Anytime there's a move to a Visual Anything on the web, I worry about accessibility, in particular for blind people and people disabled by pain like myself, those who find mousing painful.

Everything must be able to be done by keyboard or other methods described by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) or other organizations such as the American Foundation for the Blind:

http://www.afb.org/webaccess.asp

I am too sick to spend much energy here. I'm typing this up without verifying that you don't have such a team in place, which of course could be made of both disabled and currently abled (we all get disabled eventually) people.

Even if you can only recruit abled, sighted mouse-lovers, start there, as long as truly want to learn. It's a good opportunity that way, something to add to the resume about the widening of one's perception and consideration.

Lastly, Courier-type fonts worsen my migraines and occasionally can trigger them over a longer editing session. Please give us the option of editing in some other font that's distinct from that of the article, such as a serif font to contrast with the sans-serif article font.

Thanks for all your hard work. Please don't let us get lost in the scramble. And I truly wish I could be more reliable, but what lets me work on Wikipedia edits is the lack of reporting and deadlines. It's so important to me. It keeps my hand and mind just a little in the editing world I lost over 10 years ago, and with that it keeps me from feeling cut off and useless. Thanks. Geekdiva 03:34, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Toggle different views, missing features
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Toggling seems to be slow sometimes and this is puzzling. Eventually,graphical feedback about actual state would help.

What I'm missing are tables and GUI for uploading pictures 213.164.88.26 11:50, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Way to go!
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This is so important for Wikipedia. Well done. Don't let the haters and nitpickers get you down. That's all! Qwerty0 16:08, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Macros for editors after they get experienced
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The most obvious missing features are images and tables and templates but I guess you know that. Looking very good though.

If you want to keep editors after they get experienced with this the thing to do is to allow them to customize. In particular letting registered editors set up and save macros would give them a strong commitment. People always value things more when they put some effort into. Dmcq 09:55, 18 January 2012 (UTC)

source-editing
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:12.0a1) Gecko/20120119 Firefox/12.0a1

the editor needs definitely a source-editing-mode, e.g. for tables. Dänenleo 16:16, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Sketchy toolbar
Toolbar is so incomplete, there are no Insert image, make a table, refrences, templat, etc... Fabi Fuu 76 00:10, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, but there are many bugfixes needed.
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I tested today the new Visual editor, and I saw that there are many bugs. If you click to make a link, then you see that the window is hyaline. Another problem is that you cannot delete a link totally. That are two major problems that need to be solved. 194.31.121.12 11:55, 26 January 2012 (UTC)