Thread:VisualEditor/Feedback/using styles in text/reply (4)

Whether it is "right" to revert an entire edit due to formatting problems is determined by local policies. At most Wikipedias, Nnemo is correct: fixing the formatting errors, rather than throwing out the baby with the bathwater, would be considered the best response by their communities.

Wikitext has the functionality to change the font; it just isn't used very often in English Wikipedia articles, and when it is, the English Wikipedia prefers to hide it in a template so that people don't see that it's being changed. However, it is used regularly, such as whenever someone at the English Wikipedia uses w:en:Template:Xt to highlight a sentence or uses a language template in an article to set a font for non-English material, such as w:en:Template:Jav to provide Javanese text. Most people don't like to type out long span or div tags by hand, but the fonts do get changed. I suspect that this is more common at some non-English Wikipedias.

I'm not certain that blindly dumping the font is a good idea. This might cause problems when you are working in multiple languages. If you were deliberately trying to copy, say, an original Javanese book title into an article's references, then you might be dismayed to find that the font had been stripped away and the resulting (presumably) nonsense substituted. It's possible that this is also necessary for using English words at some non-English Wikipedias (especially right-to-left ones). At the same time, if it's going to rich-paste the font, then there needs to be be a way to remove the font from within VisualEditor (ideally, without killing all the other formatting and links at the same time).