VisualEditor/Feedback/LQT Archive 1

__NEWSECTIONLINK__

 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

Latest status update



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):

Test feedback
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2

First post! NeilK 20:01, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

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)

Link editing should work when cursor is on the link
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:8.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0.1

When on top of an existing link using the link interface should be able to manipulate the link. Currently you get a visible but not really working interface until you manually select the entire link. Daniel Friesen (Dantman) 20:38, 13 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Yes, the little down-arrow with B/F/Link should be visible if the cursor is at a link and no text is selected. You should also be able to format the whole link with the menu if the cursor is on a link. -- JakobVoss 22:16, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Incorrect behavior when typing 's into the editor
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:8.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0.1

When typing asdf into the visual editor the editor leaves it as " asdf " the WikiText mode lists " asdf ", and the preview displays a literal " asdf ". Naturally this is not correct since either the preview is wrong and it will end up as a link, or the WikiText is wrong and needs nowiki tags. Daniel Friesen (Dantman) 20:41, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Collapse same text links
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:8.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0.1

When selecting the text "asdf" and linking it to "asdf" or "Asdf" the visual editor should collapse this to asdf instead of outputting asdf as the wikitext. Daniel Friesen (Dantman) 20:43, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
 * But foo should always collapse to foo for every "foo". If you link "Asdf" to "asdf", the editor does not collapse, so everything is right. -- JakobVoss 22:19, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
 * This can be done intelligently; if the markup is foo2 and foo2 would resolve to the same page as foo1 (typically foo1=foo2 if 1st characters uppercased), then replace foo2 by foo2.

Wow.
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:8.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0.1

This is great, just as it is now it would make a big difference to users.

Minor issues: I'm using Firefox 8.01 on a Mac with OSX 10.6.8 I scrolled down the page then tried to use the scroll bar to get back to the top but it kept jumping back to where the cursor was.

I notice you can only edit in the wysiwig window. For more complicated formatting it could be useful to be able to edit in the wikiformat window and see the results in the wysywig window.

Having HTML and JSON windows may seem like a waste or a confusion but I think it is cool - there could be a settings option to hide show these if editors react badly to these.

Editing tables and templates will be the big deal - these are a bastard to edit now - code soup. Don't feel that every single thing has to be supported - some stuff can be deprecated if there is another way of doing it which works better or even left to be editted in wikicode until the next version.

MediaWiki version 2.0; bring it on, the sooner the better. Filceolaire 21:09, 13 December 2011 (UTC)


 * There are a lot of preview modes right now, and even a peek at the transaction history. But that's mostly for us developers. NeilK 21:37, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Keyboard shortcut to clear formatting
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Ubuntu; X11; Linux i686; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0

Please add a keyboard shortcut to clear formatting, that would be very handy. Jean-Fred 21:11, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Feedback
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0

Interesting start! Finally something to show for all that WYSIWG talk...

1) When highlighting text & choosing to insert a link, the link text should default to the highlighted text. I.e. if I select "Gene Mosher" and want to insert a link to "Gene Mosher", I should not be required to re-type "Gene Mosher".

2) In toggle wiki-markup, I see that some links are formatted with _ instead of spaces (like [Gene_Mosher]), which would make a bunch of AWB users very unhappy...

3) It's my understanding this does not yet work for templates, right?

4) How do I save? Or see what changes I made? Confused. Renata3 21:22, 13 December 2011 (UTC)


 * (1-2) thanks for the feedback. (3) we are still working on a template interface. (4) right now, you can't save. NeilK 21:38, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Link editing
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2

By default, editing a link should probably edit the *whole* link. Currently you only get the little arrow when you select some text in the link - should probably show anytime cursoring over a link. Currently allows trailing spaces in links (which aren't shown normally, iirc)

Toolbar icons are excellent. Everything else feels pretty good (especially compared to wysiftw). Not sure how much is happening behind the scenes though.

-- Steve Bennett (stevage) Stevage 21:45, 13 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Also it is easy to select part of a link and edit it, while not editing the whole thing, resulting in two adjacent links (which aren't discernibly separate until one mouses over them). 75.101.56.74 23:25, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Fantastic! A few points.
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2

1. Un-toggling the views (via the buttons on the right) is confusingly slow (i.e., multiple key presses) on Google Chrome 15.0.874.121-r109964. 2. There's a citation needed tag, but it's not clear how one would edit that...? 98.216.238.148 21:50, 13 December 2011 (UTC)


 * That un-toggling slowness is puzzling us right now too. Trevor was trying to fix that until like, seconds before I deployed. NeilK 21:51, 13 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Oddly, I don't see this with Firefox, and it comes down to Webkit taking a ridiculous (like 10x) amount of time to give a result for domElement.clientWidth (which measures the size of an element on screen). But yes, we are looking into it for sure. --Trevor Parscal 22:08, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Link button
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:8.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0.1

Would be nice if you could position the cursor anywhere on an existing link and hit the link button to edit the destination: it seems that you have to drag and select at least one character within the link for the link button to do anything?

Similarly, when adding a new link, it would be nice if after selecting a span of text and hitting the link button, the edit link popup came up with the destination defaulting to the text you have selected, so if you need to change it, you can, but in many cases you won't. 134.159.142.130 22:12, 13 December 2011 (UTC)


 * See bugs https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33049 and https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33053

Excellent starting point!
A few feedbacks:

FT2 (Talk 22:18, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
 * 1) Dropdown/popup dialogs for formating are not clear enough - they don't stand out enough against the text. Dimming the rest seems to be a common way to do it.
 * 2) The "toggle XYZ view" icons look good, and having them separate makes them more accessible. I like this. However:
 * "Toggle preview" is redundant, as the left pane is preview anyway
 * When a view is shown, its icon should change, to make it clearer. (And clicking the icon again should remove the split view)
 * 1) Selecting text then clicking escape to de-select whatever options pop up, causes the text to change format
 * 2) Cut/paste/drag/drop obviously aren't there right now, though partly shown in help. I assume they will be at some point.
 * 3) Adding wikilinks will be a major activity and one of the most used functions. But finding the correct link isn't easy. An "Advanced>" or "Search>" option would be important.
 * Bonus points if it can also explain "this isn't usually the best link" and show a list of possible links, if someone selects a disambiguation or redirect page (identified via template or page title).
 * 1) In some rich text processing software, clicking in the margin next to a paragraph, selects the entire paragraph. An easy way to select a paragraph, section, or entire containing section might be worth considering.
 * 2) When multiple editors work on a page, how will we avoid mayhem, or have meaningful attribution of edits? Or will it be local editing only, up to the point where the user presses "save"?
 * 3) If typing automatically edits the text, Readers could fear unintentionally changing or editing articles. For reassurance, users should choose "editing mode/reading mode" or have an "enable editing" button or icon, perhaps with editing tools and a subtle background color change (very pale cream?). If the user starts to do editing actions when it isn't enabled they should get a popup "You have started editing this page" or something. If this isn't considered then many editors not au fait with technology may panic the first time they get something unexpected when reading, and some may not access pages in future for fear of accidentally "doing something wrong" or typing into them.

Templates cannot be accessed or edited
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_2) AppleWebKit/535.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.970.0 Safari/535.13

They can, however, be deleted. Magnus Manske 22:22, 13 December 2011 (UTC)


 * There's a couple of examples of a template being rendered (and being treated as a single character) in the demo. We do not have a template editor yet, and the user interface for editing templates, images and hooks is going to be different than editing text. This isn't included in the demo because it's not done yet. --Trevor Parscal 22:43, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

A step in the right direction
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:8.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0.1

First off, great work team. This is one of the best WYSYWIG editors I have seen on the web. Visually, I have very few gripes with it. The layout is clean, minimal and works very well with the existing mediaWiki look. The icon set works well and most things are where you expect them to be.

There does seem to be some functionality lacking, but I'm sure this will be coming in the future (this is just a first pass, afterall).

One thing of note, though. It would be super awesome if you could directly edit the source pane and see this changes in the preview. That way you could do simple editing tasks quickly on the preview (left) pane, and then switch over to the source (right) pane to do tasks that require more complexity than the GUI allows while still having the benefit of seeing exactly what changes you are making. 38.127.199.123 22:25, 13 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Agree with the last point, that was something I thought too. FT2 (Talk 22:30, 13 December 2011 (UTC)


 * The editor uses a data structure called Wikidom, which is based on Wikitext. We are working on a parser which can convert between Wikitext to Wikidom, but the parser isn't ready yet, so we can't convert from Wikitext to Wikidom - which means we can't make the right-pane editable. --Trevor Parscal 22:46, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
 * "Yet" was the key word there. Thanks Trevor! FT2 (Talk 22:56, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

List un-/remarking
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_2) AppleWebKit/535.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.970.0 Safari/535.13

Turning a bullet point or numbered list item into a normal paragraph inserts an additional blank line before the paragraph. Re-applying a list style will break the list order due to that blank line, resetting numbering to start at 1 again. Magnus Manske 22:27, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Cannot insert new link
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_2) AppleWebKit/535.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.970.0 Safari/535.13

Clicking on the link icon or pressing Command-K while in normal text should open the link dialog, either blank or pre-selecting the word the cursor is currently in. Magnus Manske 22:29, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Closing preview is strangely slow
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_2) AppleWebKit/535.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.970.0 Safari/535.13

Opening it is fast, though. Affects all types of preview. Magnus Manske 22:31, 13 December 2011 (UTC)


 * See bug https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33051

Inserting HTML tags will keep them "as is"
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_2) AppleWebKit/535.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.970.0 Safari/535.13

Typing "dd" will add the exact same text to the wiki markup preview. However, if saved that way, they would render as italics, which is different from the Visual Editor display while editing. Magnus Manske 22:36, 13 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Both the Wikitext and HTML serializers could use a lot of attention, this is known and should be improving soon. --Trevor Parscal 22:49, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Pre-formatting text breaks in lists
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_2) AppleWebKit/535.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.970.0 Safari/535.13

In new document, write some characters, click on list, then change to "Preformatted". The wiki markup preview will show the leading "pre"-space after the list star, which will obviously not work in later rendering. Magnus Manske 22:39, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

A space typed at the beginning of a paragraph...
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_2) AppleWebKit/535.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.970.0 Safari/535.13

...will be rendered into a normal wikitext space, which would create a "pre"-line in the next rendering. Magnus Manske 22:42, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

"Double linking"
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0

Pages such as computer science are being linked as computer science, required. Current best practice is to only link that sort of thing once. Is that a necessary technical change? Izno 22:43, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Looks like Dantman commented on this at . On a side note, there might be more than a few duplicate posts with the way this is currently set up... :3 --Izno 22:45, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Link removal cannot be undone
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_2) AppleWebKit/535.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.970.0 Safari/535.13

Also, removing part of a linked text works, but can leave trailing spaces within the link. Magnus Manske 22:47, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Pages accessible under multiple names
Although early stages, if we are redesigning the editor I would like to suggest an area of improvement to include within it.

A lot of pages can (and should) be accessible under multiple names. For example, project and community pages accessed under WP:SHORTCUT redirects, and articles with common alternate names that users might look for them under.

Redirect management (managing alternate names and ensuring likely alternate names are created) is hard. It's hard to ensure consistent coverage, especially for topics with multiple or non-English alternate names, and often significant alternate names aren't found when one searches. For example the article on the Chairman of the Libyan Transitional Council commences:

"Mustafa Abdul Jalil or Abdul-Jalil (Arabic:مصطفى عبد الجليل, also transcribed Abdul-Jelil, Abd-al-Jalil, Abdel-Jalil, Abdeljalil or Abdu Al Jeleil)..."

All 8 of these names including the Arabic, and possibly uncased or major familial-name variants, are possible valid redirects or expected page titles. There is no easy way for a non-expert editor to check that common "lookup terms" or alternate names are accounted for, or indeed to identify and remove "crufty" alternate names.

I would like to suggest a changed approach for alternate names, that would fit in well with the visual editor. What I'd like to see is that in the same way you will be able to visually add and edit a list of interwiki language links, or a list of categories, you can also add and edit a list of alternate page titles. That would replace (or act as a visual editing approach for) redirects.

The idea is that when you edit a page, you can simply edit a list of all other names that should redirect to this page, and mark one of them as the default page name. Conflicts where the same name appears on 2+ articles then naturally lead to a "this name is already used for XYZ article" and a request to disambiguate, or refusal to accept until it's resolved (ie the proposed name is unused elsewhere). I think this would help newcomers to enter and manage alternate page names and redirects in an easy visual manner. FT2 (Talk 22:54, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

New document: List breaks editing completely
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_2) AppleWebKit/535.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.970.0 Safari/535.13

If, in the new document, the first action is "bullet list", the cursor is "trapped" before the bullet and cannot be moved anymore. Magnus Manske 22:53, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I can't reproduce this one, can you try to describe it more specific? --Inez 01:01, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

No button for definition list
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_2) AppleWebKit/535.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.970.0 Safari/535.13

Also, opening this feedback form adds a "#" to the URL. Missing "return false", anyone? ;-) Magnus Manske 22:54, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Tables are missing!
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:8.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0.1

I don't see how to enter a table or a mathematical formula! WiseWoman 23:25, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Broken links still show up blue
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2

Yair rand 23:28, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Linking tool allows broken page names
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2

...resulting in things like  foo . Yair rand 23:30, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Linking tool
Small comment on current linking implementation: when clicking hyperlink button, the selected text should be provided as the default hyperlink, similar to current editing practice (many many links are simple the display text itself). Furthermore, the editor should not create wikitext like "computer science, ... is a human-computer interaction" - I believe this will provoke bad reactions from the current Wikipedia editors. It should be trivial to simplify links where possible to: "computer science, ... is a human-computer interaction".

PS: Very nice editor. Almost irritating whether the text is editable - some hint like a border -- G.Hagedorn 23:32, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank for your hard work on the new veditor!
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; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; OfficeLiveConnector.1.5; OfficeLivePatch.1.3; .NET4.0C; Zune 4.7; Creative AutoUpdate v1.40.01)

I'm impressed by how far you have gotten. Hopefully we will soon be able to opt-in on using the new editor in wikipedia and perhaps even install the extension on our own wikis? I love what I see and can't wait to use it in action. I especially like how you don't have to enter a new edit-mode where you have to find the part your interested in to edit it. Can't wait to see how saving and transactions will work. John Ericson 23:38, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Love it
User agent: Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; U; en) Presto/2.10.229 Version/11.60

Can we have it yesterday? Also, if you could come up with something clever to support tables that would ne nice Milliped 00:02, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

H1
does not exist on normal Wikipedia (and in fact most mediawiki) pages, since h1 is always the page title on mediawiki. Although it is possible to markup H1, it needs to be communicated to newby users that this is not desirable. I would be happy enough to have the option entirely removed from the editing toolbar, so that the h1 headings can be exclusively created in wiki text mode. G.Hagedorn 00:14, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Amazing work
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2

This is definitely something we've needed for a long long time. My finest compliments, if only in "beta beta" form, WMF team. Blurpeace 00:25, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Internal links and when pipes aren't needed
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; CPDTDF; .NET4.0C)

Currently, it looks as if links are being piped when they don't need to be. Computer science can be reduced to computer science, but I can't see a way to do this in the visual editor as it doesn't convert the square brackets into a link (typing "computer science" does nothing, but I don't know if that's intentional or will change when the page is saved.)

Other than that, no complaints from me. A visual editor is something that newcomers and veterans alike could be very thankful for. 188.29.53.2 00:27, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Great work
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0

Looks great! Good luck, not an easy task, but should be worthwhile in the long run. 65.110.28.92 01:11, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Lovely clean interface
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:8.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0.1

I like it! The undo/redo was a nice touch. Curious as to how references and images will work with it. I'd certainly use this, if only for tables (if it works for these how I assume it should.) Great work.

(The article: The citation needed didn't appear in the wikitext at all? Wasn't manipulable.) Sonia 01:55, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Editing existing links
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Ubuntu; X11; Linux x86_64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0

We shouldn't need to select the whole link to be able to edit its target. Only having the cursor on it and clicking the link icon should bring up the edit dialog. Waldir 02:38, 14 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Fixed in trunk. --Eloquence 03:34, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Some weirdness in the view modes
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Ubuntu; X11; Linux x86_64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0

The wiki mode should allow editing as well.

And the toggle preview button seems useless, since we already have the preview on the left. Besides, it behaves in a strange way: try toggling the wikicode view (or anything that makes the second pane show up) and then toggle preview several times. Result: the right pane becomes a preview (identical to the left one) then subsequent clicks only display or hide this second preview. It seems like as it's currently implemented, it's serving no useful purpose. Waldir 02:43, 14 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Note that this is a developer prototype, and the primary purpose of the toggles is debugging (with the exception of the wikitext one). As a tester, you may find the preview panel useful to test link behavior.--Eloquence 03:10, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

link to feedback page
This feedback page should be linked from the testing page. Waldir 02:47, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Brilliant work (Also: entering citations)
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2

Probably the best WSIWYG editor I've ever seen. What'd I really like to see, though, is a simple system for adding citations. Often, I'm more than willing to add text, but adding citations is such rigmarole that I leave it to more experienced editors. 24.126.201.119 03:04, 14 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Agree, even as an experienced editor filling in sources is a real pain. A lot of the time it could be automated.


 * What I would ideally like is to note that Firefox "citation" extensions exist for online sources, where much of the cite template (especially for common sites) is auto-filled once a citation page URL is known. I'd like this taken further, where a citation popup requires entering a URL and clicking a "next" button, and the software itself autofills as much as possible of the template, then presents it to the user for final editing before acceptance. Presumably this would require some kind of rules-base identifying data extractable from popular website pages given a URL, and a template defined in Special:Allmessages for each language:


 * User enters a URL (eg http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/16157835 or http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21978001) and clicks "next"
 * Mediawiki via its database of known sources "knows" it can identify the source name ("BBC News" or "Pubmed"), publication date, date accessed, page/paper title, journal title and volume if applicable, authors, and the correct template to use for this citation on the current wiki
 * Mediawiki checks the cite template with the user, then presents the user with a panel showing the source page in-frame and next to it the list of template fields and their estimated contents, for the user to fine tune.
 * User can easily compare source to template, edit the fields, and click OK.


 * Technically this should be possible. The URL gives the domain, the domain and a single regex check on URL confirms the page interpretation rules are correct and allows lookup of the correct template and the rules used to pull data from that page, there are perhaps no more than 10 - 15 standard fields which we need to extract and the lookup rules assign these to standard placeholders ready to check contents with the user, and to substitute the final values into the template.


 * FT2 (Talk 10:32, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Opinion
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0

Good work so far! Perhaps some tutorials should be run so that the community becomes comfortable with this new way of editing. Only thing I noticed which could be better is when I wikilinked a word (eg metaphor) instead of metaphor the wikitext format showed it as metaphor which is a little redundant. DaGizza 03:22, 14 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Also as an aside, I suggest you make the Wikipedia article on a more interesting topic. Something perhaps easier to read or more basic. Maybe an animal? You don't want people falling asleep while experimenting with the modern way of Wiki-editing! :P DaGizza 03:25, 14 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Good point. Nominations welcome in this thread. We'll have to simplify it a bit while we can't do the fancy stuff (images etc.) yet.--Eloquence 03:35, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Link activation
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2

I vote for: 1) one click = manipulation of link's text. 2) double click = link activation Synagonism 04:32, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Select and overwrite
Impressive work, everybody. I think I spotted a bug that occurs when selecting a word via the keyboard and overwriting it: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33078 --DarTar 04:56, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Looking good. :D Tracking bug for i18n issues coming...
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:8.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0.1

I've started a tracking bug for internationalization & multilingual issues: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=33077&hide_resolved=1

With more people involved in testing, we should have more opportunities to get these worked out... IME support may be tricky but is really required for some languages; bidi will be ... interesting but should be doable. :) brion 04:57, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Toggle vs Tab
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2

Using "toggles" leaves few space for editing AND there is no one to one correspondence between markup and visual-text. In my HtmlMgr [1] try, I used 3 tabs. A "browser-tab" for the readers where with one click follow the links. A "wysiwyg(visual)-tab" for editors where with double-clicks follow the links. A "source-tab" for authors who prefer markup. Also with a splitter on the left with the table-of-contents the readers and the editors where able to go to the same position of the text following any of the above tabs. My synagonism-mediawiki-skin [2] has a similar splitter as the above. [1] http://htmlmgr.sourceforge.net/ [2] http://synagonism-mw.sourceforge.net/ Synagonism 05:03, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

How to make reference and citations?
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/17.0.942.0 Safari/535.8

It would be much helpful if the edit tool bar have reference, citations and all available wiki operation tools to enhance the editing experience by the user rather than make him/her memorize the syntax for everything. Bala8vijay 05:17, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Kudoz
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0

Way to goo.. But great work. Kudoz to all behind this. This will defenitely improve the wiki editing.. Anoopan 05:42, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Scrolling weirdness
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:8.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0.1

After loading the page, if I try to scroll down, it jumps back to the first header on the page where the cursor is rather than leaving me wherever I scrolled to. Kaldari 06:13, 14 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I can confirm this, very weird. (Firefox 8.0) --92.225.25.202 10:31, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Handling of elements out of context
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Ubuntu; X11; Linux x86_64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0

In wikicode there can be templates that opens boxes somewhere else on the page. This isn't easy to grasp in a WYSIWYG environment. How will you handle this? Through some small marker in the editable text? Jeblad 06:42, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Handling of selections crossing element boundaries
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Ubuntu; X11; Linux x86_64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0

A selection can start in ordinary text and extend into another element, for example into a link. (example) A simplistic handling of this will leave the generated code in an erroneous state. How do you plan to handle this, an easy approach is either to extend the selection to include the whole element or to not select inside additional elements. The fist is probably a valid approach for inline elements, while the latter is probably a valid approach for block elements that is removed from the ordinary document flow. And then there is all the other cases with inline-block and run-ins and &hellip; all sorts of problems creep out! Jeblad 06:49, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Input Method
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0.1

In Firefox 7.0.1 @ Mac OS X, input methods don't work. Hat600 08:45, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Brion rules
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0

Congratulations Brion! You showed before year end a prototype of a visual editor. Awesome!

Ad Huikeshoven Dedalus 08:45, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Real good
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.24) Gecko/20111103 Firefox/3.6.24

It looks nice, it is fast, it has parallel views, it is good. I really like it, can't wait for new features. I expirience some "view glich" when I was typing in parrallel view and both views where visual editor (not JSON, HTML). I was typing some order list and a paragraph after that (maybe it can help). 213.137.114.142 08:51, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Keyboard shortcuts for Paragraph / Heading 1...
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/9.0.598.0 Safari/534.13

Very nice editor ! I wonder if it would be possible to add shortcuts for the formatting. Like ctrl+P (Paragraph), ctrl+H (toggle Heading 1, Heading 2...), ctrl+* (List item)

This would be really cool, as it would allow to type all on the keyboard, and not needing the mouse to adjust titles. 148.177.129.211 08:55, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Bold and Italics
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8) AppleWebKit/534.50.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.6 Safari/533.22.3

they don't work for me. Xaura 09:06, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Lack of "advanced" tools
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/11.10 Chromium/15.0.874.106 Chrome/15.0.874.106 Safari/535.2

Hello, I really like this new interface, but I think it lacks an "advanced" button, or a panel like the one on the right side of this page http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/index.php?title=Ysgramor&action=edit : Here I cannot see a way to add a category, a table or an image, I can not see the list of the templates... Ash Crow 09:25, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Heading 1, keyboard shortcuts
Some Linux, Firefox 8

Hi,

That's really awesome!

I suggest hiding the “Heading 1” from the dropdown menu, as it will most likely confuse new users because it shouldn't be used. Having “standard” keyboard shortcuts for bold ( ctrl+b in English, ctrl+g in French…), italic ( ctrl+i ), headings ( ctrl+1/2/3/4/5/6 ) would be cool too.

Can't wait to see how it'll look with templates, math formulas and images ;)

Best regards — Arkanosis ✉ 09:47, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Cool stuff
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.120 Safari/535.2

That might lower the entry threshold. 193.108.184.61 09:57, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Incompatible with Opera 10.60
User agent: Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; U; en) Presto/2.10.229 Version/11.60

Edition is broken as the cursor position is off, no headlines can be created, bulleting things does work but the text is not associated with the bullet, etc pp. I stopped testing as the first 10 seconds were ugly 217.86.203.29 09:58, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

cool but links editing isnt great
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.63 Safari/535.7

Hey,

very cool feature!

But you can improve linking: Add a little searchfield for other wikipedia artikel and make it possible to click on a link for test purposes.

Tx. 194.76.29.2 10:05, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

test
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0

test 89.204.130.16 10:05, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Opera - No input possible
User agent: Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux x86_64; U; nb) Presto/2.10.229 Version/11.60

With Opera on Version 11.60 (1185 ). Platform Linux, System x86_64, 2.6.32-30-generic I can't input or delete text. Line breaks and changing layout via the menu or the context-menu is possible though. Works in Firefox on the same machine. 80.65.54.242 10:16, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Great work, some hints (that probably have been mentioned)
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0

Dear Wiki Devs,

first of all, great work! That will make it a whole lot easier for new users to edit articles. While testing the editor I noticted some things:


 * 1) While inserting a link, propose articles to the user (Google style) as he/she types.
 * 2) When you activate preview mode, the space between p's is smaller than the one between the div's in the editor. I would like the space to be equal, so the editor mode looks even more like the preview.
 * 3) When changing the format (Heading 1 / Heading 2 / Paragraph) give the user a chance to get outta there with ESC.

Thanks for your great work. David 194.114.62.72 10:24, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Nice
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0

Missing table editing

194.127.8.27 10:24, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Bullet lists - no feedback possibilty
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0

It is not possibel for me to give you feedback, until there is only this small rubbish window.

I found a problem, made a screenshot and you wil see the problem with one look on it.

I'm not willing to write a description about a few pages and afterwards the problem isn't clear.

Just a hint to solve the communication problem. Use a Wiki.

Best Robert Robert Radke 10:34, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Context menus
Some discussion needed later, on what context-menu options should be shown to the user, when they right click a link or other specialized formatting, some selected text, a section header, etc (or equivalent on a mac or handheld device). FT2 (Talk 10:36, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Tables
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0

Hello great Wikipedia-Team. I think the visual-editor is a nice feature. Whats about tables? I think this will be a great feature (like tables in other inline editors).

Kind Regards

62.152.161.149 10:37, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

How do you add citation references?
User agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; OfficeLiveConnector.1.5; OfficeLivePatch.1.3; .NET4.0C)

Its not clear if there is any help for editors who wish to cite their sources. How do you insert references and refrerence lists? Do you still have to write HTML code (" ") in order to cite your sources? Hopefully this process can be made easier for editors using some sort of drop down template. Gavin.collins 10:39, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

oh wow!
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:8.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0.1

guys I must say I love this. It is sleek, stylish and smooth, reminds me of the iphone UI... the only thing is when can we have the product. I have lots of clients for whom this is *THE* topmost concern and I know they will love this UI to death.

I specifically like that you can type directly on the screen and not in an editor box, which is much more compelling to users.

Absolutely fantastic. Testing this on FF/Win XP btw... 77.10.73.34 10:42, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

CJK characters
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2

CJK characters are not able to display under Windows XP with Google Chrome Tomchiukc 10:48, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

really cool
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0

at first it is a little bit irritating to write to the plain page (without 'editing-box'), but after some try's it is really good. One problem occured: the undo/redo of increasing/reducing the indentation of a normal list does nothing (in the editor), and after that the list-item can't made bold,italic, inc/decr intendation. Too, the wiki-code-preview displays only the first two lines, and no lists. it would be good to grey out the 2 buttons, if there is nothing to undo/redo. And maybe there could be a bit more color (i.e. the link-dialog: green/red accept/cancel pic) 88.74.251.29 10:50, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

math formula
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/10.04 Chromium/15.0.874.106 Chrome/15.0.874.106 Safari/535.2

it would be nice to have a math-environement. it would suffice to have a small textfield inside the text where one could write latex code. best would be if it would be rendered while typing (see LyX-Editor) 129.70.15.60 10:54, 14 December 2011 (UTC)