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.
 * People interested in VisualEditor, the new WYSIWYG editor for Wikipedia

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, the following pages are sources of usable non-Latin text that may be copy-pasted around for test purposes:


 * 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
 * A fun experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Hieroglyphs

Another source of useful non-Latin text for test purposes are the language wikis themselves:


 * http://he.wikipedia.org/
 * http://zh.wikipedia.org/
 * etc.

Most testers will want to edit their own or others' User pages and Talk pages for this exercise. 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.

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


 * Use VisualEditor to edit pages that contain non-Latin characters; edit and save a page, adding more non-Latin characters with each edit.
 * Insert non-Latin characters into pages that do not otherwise contain non-Latin characters.
 * 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.
 * Find non-language Unicode icons and such and edit pages using those also.


 * Investigate the behavior of VisualEditor under different preferences available in English Wikipedia. (See the Setup section below.)
 * Investigate the behavior of VisualEditor in the presence of gadgets.
 * Investigate the behavior of VisualEditor in the presence of custom user Javascript and CSS.


 * Look for inconsistencies when editing logged in versus editing while not logged in.

Where

 * Kickoff on IRC #wikimedia-dev Jan 28 2013 OR blog post with details of the test exercise. Blog post is preferred.
 * What about a blog post agreed with Guillaume to be published on Jan 28?--Qgil (talk) 21:50, 22 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Test plan is this page.
 * Test environment is users' own User and Talk pages.


 * Questions, discussion, support will be available in IRC channel. We will do our best covering different timezones. Look for users ,  ,.

Setup

 * You need a browser like Firefox or Chrome. Internet Explorer is not supported yet.
 * 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,  ,   (add yourself).