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):

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.

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.

Enhancements
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0

What about adding LaTeX to the selection of markup formats? Or DocBook XML? Or TEI XML? Is the underlying data model capable of supporting hierarchical structured markup? 109.255.79.69 19:55, 8 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Ah, TEI is something I would like to see featured as well! I don't know what else that entails though apart from adding XML-like tags. Currently the only way to use that, as far as I'm aware, is Extension:TEITags, but it was specifically created for a transcription project at UCL, and so is not guaranteed to work on any MW site. Cavila MW 1.17, MySQL 5.5.23, Php 5.3.10, SMW 1.7.1 20:23, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

Great Idea, but formating not working using Opera 11.64 Win
User agent: Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; U; de) Presto/2.10.229 Version/11.64

I can enter Text, but not a single formatting option works using Opera 11.64 on Windows. Please keep on developing this editor. It will be a great help for us in our internal wiki. It will allow even the secretary to edit additional text without training. Especially a help for Tables will be highly appreciated. 62.225.0.136 05:56, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

table
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0

When I copy the table into the table in the visual one....The normal noe breaks and never wake upagain. Justincheng12345 (talk) 13:09, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

Why not use a typical editor style?
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.168 Safari/535.19

It seems that an editor such as TinyMCE, or the editor that Yahoo uses would be adaptable (or limited) to specific wiki functions.

This would eliminate the pain of designing and coding a new one, and learning the new design by editors, especially "domain experts" who don't even like computers.

HTH

69.168.144.143 22:17, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

Great
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0

Good editor. Good Luck and good joob 187.54.35.43 20:42, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

Errors
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_4) AppleWebKit/534.57.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1.7 Safari/534.57.2

I have some errors in the current deploy: TypeError: 'null' is not an object (evaluating 'nodes[0].getElement.attributes') 3load.php:20TypeError: 'null' is not an object (evaluating 'node.children') TheDJ (talk) 19:41, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Bold, italics and headings don't always work.
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/536.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/19.0.1084.56 Safari/536.5

The headings never work. The formatting sometimes breaks. I hope to use this extension as it is released as a usable product with MediaWiki Muqman 52 (talk) 00:26, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Change button text for unsaved 'are you sure' dialog?
If you try and leave a page that you've edited before saving, you get a nice dialog box confirming you want to leave. The text is Are you sure you want to go back to view mode without saving first? Cancel   OK What would you think of changing the button text from 'Cancel', 'OK' to 'No, take me back' and 'Yes, I'm sure'? It always feels weird to me to answer a yes/no question with ok/cancel rather than yes or no. Bhartshorne (talk) 20:25, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Control plus arrows doesn't move cursor among words
I'm used to being able to use Control+LeftArrow or Control+RightArrow to move the cursor one word's length leftward or rightward. Doesn't work yet in the Visual Editor. Is that in the plan already? Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manager (talk) 21:22, 21 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Could be related to 34095.

Auto-hide of formatting arrow
Once clicked, the formatting arrow's "Bold – Italic – Underline" menu remains expanded when the cursor is moved to another section. Having this intelligently disappear would be more intuitive. Otherwise, this is fantastic! AGK [•] 21:39, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Linking unsatisfactory
Linking is too simple. You have to word the sentence to incorporate the name of the article. Also, one would expect to be able to link web sites as well as Wikipedia articles. Finally, there is no preview to see if the links are correct. Jc3s5h (talk) 21:49, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Toolbar
Hey, the new prototype (ala VisualEditor:Welcome) looks great. I tested a few edits, and I wanted to say both congrats and point out what is not really a bug but a UX choice that I think needs discussion:

Currently users expect "save" "preview" and other such functions to be at the bottom of the page. While I really really really appreciate that the toolbar follows me when I scroll up and down (I can't emphasize this enough), I think it's kind of a broken choice to put the save button in the upper right. It breaks what users expect currently, and feels a little a slow to have to mouse up there.

Are there are any plans to have a bottom toolbar with such functions to complement the current top toolbar? Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   21:51, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Visual Editor Bugzilla bugs
New visual editor bugs in Bugzilla only get sent to Trevor and Neil(!). This needs to be updated. Kaldari (talk) 21:59, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Unparsed interface
When I clicked on Save, there was an item with the (wiki)text " This is a minor edit " but I think it should be parsed, as in "This is a minor edit". Helder 22:01, 21 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Argh, thanks - we caught one of those, but clearly missed this one.
 * Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 22:12, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Undefined link target
When I clicked on the "our feedback page" link which was in the text of the page VisualEditor:Welcome (before it was moved to Visual editor/Welcome), it loaded the page

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Undefined

I'm using Firefox 9.0.1 on Windos XP. Helder 22:07, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Navigation in the summary field
If I type "something" in the summary and then try to use SHIFT+Home, or SHIFT+Left arrow, or triple click to select the text, nothing happens. I'm using Firefox 9.0.1. Helder 22:17, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Are there edit conflicts?
I've [//www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?diff=next&oldid=552684 removed content] from previous edits but got no warning about that. Helder 22:17, 21 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Yes, we discovered this during deployment. A priority right away, certainly!
 * Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 22:20, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Missing tooltips
It shows the name of the MediaWiki message (i.e. "&amp;lt;visualeditor-formatdropdown-tooltip&amp;gt;") instead of the appropriated tooltip in the "Paragraph" menu (it is not listed on Special:AllMessages either). The same happens for other entris of that menu (the headers). Helder 22:22, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Editing talk pages
Contributing effectively usually requires interaction on talk pages. If the visual editor only supports articles and not talk pages, and as a result they only work on articles and don't pay any attention to talk pages, they will not be welcomed into the community and will be turned against Wikipedia. Jc3s5h (talk) 22:26, 21 June 2012 (UTC)
 * This is temporary. Right now we're only testing the editor itself.--Jasper Deng (talk) 22:26, 21 June 2012 (UTC)