VisualEditor/Testing Non-Latin Characters Input and Behavior



There will be a testing event for VisualEditor starting on January 28 focusing on non-Latin characters input and behavior. Wikimedia Foundation will offer special orientation and support to testers through the week.

The VisualEditor project aims to create a reliable rich-text editor for MediaWiki. It is a top priority for the Wikimedia Foundation and it is available for testing today on the English Wikipedia: see Wikipedia:VisualEditor.

You can learn more about exploratory testing at the Features testing pages. Join the MediaWiki Group Features Testing to hear more about test events like this.

Who

 * People using non-Latin character sets routinely e.g. العربية, Ελληνικά, 한국어, हिन्दी, עברית, 日本語, Русский, 中文 and more.
 * People interested in accessibility.
 * People interested in localization.

What
We are interested in two areas primarily:


 * How the editor behaves upon inserting, deleting, changing, and otherwise manipulating all sorts of text within the pages being edited.
 * How non-Latin characters and strings may or may not affect the behavior of the VisualEditor.

For example, there is an unsubstantiated report that strings from different non-Latin languages inserted into a page and saved with VisualEditor may cause loss of data in text elsewhere in the page. Finding and verifying such issues is important.

In detail
For the examples below, various sorts of usable non-Latin text may be found in various sources:


 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmic_scripts
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew
 * A comprehensive list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters

The following areas are suggestions, or "charters", for testers to investigate:

While article pages may be edited with VisualEditor, User pages and Talk pages may be also, so it is not necessary to deface actual Wikipedia articles with unwanted additions for testing purposes. If in doubt, edit User Pages and Talk pages with non-Latin characters rather than actual Wikipedia articles.


 * Use VisualEditor to edit pages that contain non-Latin characters; edit and save a page, adding more non-Latin characters with each edit.
 * It would be better if we could provide some examples of actual pages.--Qgil (talk) 22:42, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Insert non-Latin characters into pages that do not otherwise contain non-Latin characters.
 * It would be better if we could provide some examples of actual pages.--Qgil (talk) 22:42, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
 * If you can, use non-Latin strings from multiple languages when editing, for example both Hebrew and Indic characters. There is no need to be a speaker of any particular language, we are interested only in the effect of non-Latin text on the page.
 * Not a trivial request! How many people you know fluent in 2 non-Latin languages?--Qgil (talk) 22:42, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Find non-language Unicode icons and such and edit pages using those also.
 * It would be better if we could provide some examples of actual pages.--Qgil (talk) 22:42, 22 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Investigate the behavior of VisualEditor under different preferences available in English Wikipedia. (See the Setup section below.)
 * Should we be more precise? And provide examples?--Qgil (talk) 22:42, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Investigate the behavior of VisualEditor in the presence of gadgets.
 * Should we be more precise? And provide examples?--Qgil (talk) 22:42, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Investigate the behavior of VisualEditor in the presence of custom user Javascript and CSS.
 * Should we be more precise? And provide examples?--Qgil (talk) 22:42, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Where

 * Kickoff on IRC #wikimedia-dev Jan 28 2013.
 * Do we need this? What about a blog post agreed with Guillaume to be published on Jan 28?--Qgil (talk) 21:50, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Test documentation and discussion on mediawiki.org pages.
 * What links exactly?--Qgil (talk) 21:50, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Test environment on English Wikipedia
 * What test environment exactly?--Qgil (talk) 21:50, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Setup

 * How to enable VisualEditor in English Wikipedia.
 * To change language preferences: go to Preferences > User profile tab > Language.
 * To enable and disable gadgets: go to Preferences > Gadgets.

Reporting bugs

 * Check existing bugs for VisualEditor internationalization issues.
 * If you find new problems the best you can do is to report them as bugs - see how to report a bug.

Receiving help
You can get support and comment on problems at the mediawiki-i18n mailing list and the IRC channel. Look for users,   (more? (I'd be disappointed if   were not on that list -CM)).