2017 wikitext editor/Feedback

Post your feedback about using the first iteration of the 2017 wikitext editor as a Beta Feature. While you can disable it by unchecking the New wikitext mode checkbox in your Preferences (Beta tab), the Contributors team welcomes your feedback and ideas, especially on user interface decisions and the priorities for adding new features. All comments are read, in any language, but personal replies are not guaranteed: the team will try and go through reports here at least once a week. Need more attention? Report directly in Phabricator. You can learn how to structure well your submission.

If you are reporting a problem directly on this page, please include your web browser, computer operating system, and wiki skin (usually Vector, sometimes Monobook). Also, while editing to reproduce a problem, please try to append &safemode=1 at the end of the URL; if the problem disappears, you are using a gadget or script that interferes with the editor.

We are trying to keep the page tidy by providing links to relevant tasks while closing threads. You can help by adding {{tracked|T######}}. By all means, feel free to re-open a thread if you need to!

See also:

View open developer tasks – Complete workboard – Report a new bug in Phabricator – Join the IRC channel

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T209262

I had the opportunity to use the table generator.and was surprised at seeing that it was less functional than the one in current use on en Wiki. I wish it would continue i allowing you to designate n rows and n columns instead of the one size fits all, 1 row 2 column table generated in TE17. I would add, if the build options return, it would be nice to be able to preview the table before inserting it. In my opinion, previewing prior to inserting is always the best method, Thank you.

This was deliberate see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T113224. It is a tradeoff between speed vs convenience. Some or many people may not appreciate extra dialogs for no good reason. For instance some complain that the link buttons are not that good because they open up a dialog, while others may appreciate the "page finder" functionality.

I am accustomed to using the OpenDyslexic font when editing and see that it is not available in preferences as an "Edit area font style" for use with the 2017 text editor. It is an accessibility issue for me and I'm sure that it is for some others as well. It would be greatly appreciated if this font could be include as a preference option. Thank you.

See long discussions in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T44138, https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T153306.

Hello,

I think the organization of placing buttons "Review your changes" and "Show preview" and the summary edition within the "Save your changes" overlay is very disconcerting.

I take the following series of action as an example :

• I make some changes to a page and want to review the page before publishing,
• So I click the "Publish changes..." button (which is a first problem : publishing is not reviewing),
• The "Save your changes" overlay appears, I click on "Show preview",
• The pages looks good to me, so I want to see the "Save your changes" overlay again in order to add a summary to my edit,
• As previously, I click the "Publish changes" button again... Fail! The page is published, I didn't had a chance to edit the summary.

Indeed, the "Publish changes" button changes its role depending on the window I'm on. I actually had to hit the "Return to save form" button, and then only the "Publish changes" button. This is the exact same button (apart from the "..." which is not very noticeable), at the exact same position in the window. The "Publish changes" button on the "Save your changes" overlay is different, because is not in the upper-right of the window, but this one is at the exact same position as the "Publish changes..." button.

This is very disconcerting. The same button has various roles.

I think the "preview" button should be actually separated from the "publish changes" button. There should be a "Review you changes" button next to the "Publish changes" button, giving access to both page preview and diff. Then the "Publish changes" button should always give access to the summary editing, no matter the window we are on (except, of course, on the "Save you changes" overlay).

This is my two cents. I think there is still work to do for this new interface to be as efficient as the previous one.

Other concerns for the record :

• We no longer have access to the tags (noinclude, nowiki, etc.), the wikicode (category, etc.) which was very useful for advanced users (I use the editor in "source editing" mode). There should be an option to add them to the interface (if there is one, I never found it).
• The summary editor is now a text box instead of a text line. In browsers, this means we no longer have access to the drop-down history list. This is an issue when we do repetitive work with the same summary: I used to type two characters, then select the message from the list. Usually, my clipboard is used by a text or a template to paste on the code, so I can't use it on the summary.
• Not to mention the fact that, to switch between page editing and page previewing, it takes now two clicks instead of only one before to launch the preview, then one click instead of none to edit again. This seems nothing, but for people like me who generally preview the page lots of times before publishing, this is very heavy in the process of editing.

Thanks for reading this long message. The new editor is good work, but it still need a few refinements to be as efficient as the previous one, this is why I don't use it for now. I tried it a long time, but the issues mentioned above made me disable it as I loose half my productivity. There should be an "advanced" mode I think.

I began testing the 2017 Text Editor yesterday and thought I'd share some highlights from my first experience.

Initially, I was very confused because I could not find the preview link, I agree with Epok that it is inconsistent with how we've been molded as editors for years up to now. For me, it wasn't until I had uploaded a screenshot and reported what appeared to be an anomaly at en-VPT,[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)&oldid=869255939] where I was prepared to publish my posting without previewing it, when I learned that another screen appeared after you pressed "publish changes". I believe that needs to be improved.

It does not intuitive follow that you should press "publish changes" to expose the publishing links one would expect to exist. Considering that one of the buttons in the newly exposed view is another "publish changes" link, the first one encountered could be relabeled to make things more obvious. For example, I suggest that "'''Open publisher'''" would be, and would have been much less confusing,

Thank you for considering this, and for all that you do in support of our needs.

Hey, just thought I'd let you know that the new editor breaks wikipedia:WP:WikEd, a wikitext editor many find very helpful. It has a ton of editing tools, including a RegEx search that makes cleanup of articles go a lot faster. If this editor is made the default, can you guys do something to make sure it is either still able to be disabled, or make sure it doesn't suppress WikEd from appearing in the edit pane? Thank you!

• I think that I can safely promise that there will always be a way to switch editing environments. Otherwise, some people wouldn't be able to edit (e.g., if you use a screen reader, or you're working on a very old computer).
• The 2017 wikitext editor also supports RegEx search, plus things like syntax highlighting. What tools do you find that you're using in WikEd that don't seem to be generally available?

@Whatamidoing (WMF) See my previous comments

- A simple way to increase font size and, if possible, the font itself (via user preferences? and if possible with dedicated CSS to avoid interactions with users' site-wide custom CSS preferences)

- Allow a "ctrl+click" on a template while editing to open its template page in an other tab

- an advanced toolbar (2 rows with direct access to search and replace, browse menu per section, expanded "style text" menu...)

- Direct toolbar access to show preview (without having to go through "publish changes" and then "show preview")

- Better syntax highlighting

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2019/Editing#Syntax_highlighting_of_special_characters

- Collapsible code templates to improve readability ("code folding")

https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Community_Wishlist_Survey_2019/Editing/Minimize_references

Bringing eventually wikitext to feature parity with WikEd would be nice. But first graduate it :-)

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2019/Editing#Graduate_2017_wikitext_editor_and_make_it_a_full_value_editor

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T50274

When entering an edit summary a preview of summary predictions, based on summaries previously entered, should be offered. This is useful when performing a recurring edit like adding a Project banner for a WikiProjet. Right now you must manually enter each edit summary which is considerably more time consuming. Thank you.

This editor does not support the wizards for filling out the cite book, cite news, etc., templates that I rely on heavily. So it's unusable to me, sadly.

Sandstein, which wizards are you using? Is the (built-in) citoid service (toolbar > Cite > Automatic) not working for you?

Thanks - I didn't find that function. But it doesn't work how I want it to either. It only allows fully automatic or fully manual filling out of citations. It does not support filling out what it can automatically, and letting me fill out the remaining fields, which is how I've worked so far.

You can do that. Start with the automatic form, click "Insert" to add it to the page.

In the visual mode, you can then click "Edit" to fill in the remaining fields (or to fix the ones that were wrong) in a dialog box. In the 2017 wikitext mode, you can manually edit the wikitext.

This 2017 wikitext editor has its good points, but speed is not one of them. A solution is a quick-launch editing toolbar, similar in principle to the quick-launch taskbar in Windows. People choose a few single-click commands. 5 or 6, for example.

The 5 main things I do all the time take 2 clicks or more in the 2017 wikitext editor.

Whereas in the old 2006 wikitext toolbar, etc. they are all one-click tasks (not buried in menus, and no popup intermediaries):

• Bold
• Italics
• Internal link (adds double brackets)
• External link (adds single brackets)
• Signature

A customizable wikitext editing toolbar section would allow people to choose. No one would be imposing their choices.

Agent utilisateur : Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/11.1.2 Safari/605.1.15

URL : https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discussion:Histoire_des_Juifs_au_Maroc&action=edit&section=new

Bjr. Cela fait plusieurs jours que mon écran n'affiche plus de touche où cliquer pour signer/dater les messages. Je signale que je travaille toujours sous éditeur visuel mais lors de l'écriture de messages, le basculement en code était automatique. Maintenant, il ne l'est plus (tant mieux pour moi) mais impossible de signer. Même si je bascule en code, toujours pas de touche pour signer. Cdmt'

The citation function, type "automatic" of the "beta" function of the "beta wikitext editor" is to mixing/switching the texts. For example, for the IBM about FIPS 140–2 function adds publisher (IBM Knowledge Center) in the title, and add url (www.ibm.com) to work/author...

"<ref>{{Citar web|url=https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/pt-br/SSSHTQ_8.1.0/com.ibm.netcool_OMNIbus.doc_8.1.0/omnibus/wip/install/concept/omn_con_fipssupport.html%7C|title=IBM Knowledge Center|work=www.ibm.com}}</ref>". Elilopes (talk) 18:21, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for your note. It looks like someone pasted in an invalid URL. It should not end with "concept/omn_con_fipssupport.html%7C".

However, even with the correct URL, the results aren't much different. The HTML in IBM's webpage doesn't specify a name for the website, using any of the standard formats. Therefore, the automatic tool guesses that it's probably "www.ibm.com". The alternative is to leave it blank.

Using the correct url "omn_con_fipssupport.html", the name for the website or author name appears in the title (titulo=IBM Knowledge Center), reference used in the ptwiki article FIPS.

Similar to website techtarget whatis title is "... Definition from WhatIs.com". ~~~~

IBM has decided to make that page on their website be called "IBM Knowledge Center". This is line 233 in the HTML from the page you are looking at:

<title>IBM Knowledge Center</title>

When the citoid service looks at their HTML, it finds the part that IBM has declared to be the page's <title>, and it copies IBM's choice of title into the |title= field for the citation template.

There is no way for the citoid service to guess that IBM has put the "wrong" thing in their page title tag. The only way to "fix" that is to contact IBM and convince them to change the HTML on their page to suit you.

In the meantime, you can fix the citation by editing the template to display the information that you think is proper.

Ok, i found the problem: IBM website uses a internal frame with title <title>Federal Information Processing Standard 140–2 (FIPS 140–2) suporte</title> at url https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/pt-br/SSSHTQ_8.1.0/com.ibm.netcool_OMNIbus.doc_8.1.0/omnibus/wip/install/concept/omn_con_fipssupport.html?view=embed. ~~~~

I am a sysop on fr.WP and found out that when deleting revision, the wikitexteditor automatically launches itself (after submitting the revision deletion), rather than showing the confirmation message. Tried with &safemode=1, same thing.

I wonder whether this might be the same (underlying) problem as phab:T176022. If so, then it might be fixed soon. I've pinged you in that task.