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

Agent utilisateur : Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/71.0.3578.98 Chrome/71.0.3578.98 Safari/537.36

URL : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippolyte-Jules_Pilet_de_La_Mesnardi%C3%A8re

Dans la section "Jugements", il y a un cas "̇Jean Chapelain", je veux ajouter un autre cas. Impossible d'ajouter une étoile. Si j'appuie sur le caractère "étoile", ça m'affiche un truc bizarre. Moi qui suis habitué à l'éditeur emacs, je ne comprends pas pourquoi on ne peut pas ajouter du texte "tel quel".

Disadvantages of this editor compared to text editor:

*(in preview) citations preview (by hovering mouse pointer on citation number [1]) doesn't work,

*needs one click extra to see a preview,

*no simultaneous preview and edit (maybe option to open preview in new tab/window?),

*no preview with another page (useful for template editing or doc pages for templates using PAGENAME),

*when progress of loading visual editor stucks, this editor doesn't load either.

On the initial, main editing page of this editor, there is no option to preview one's work. There is only a big button which says ''Publish''.

This leads one to think that one's only option, after having composed one's edit, is to publish it directly, without having an opportunity to first preview one's proposed changes. This is confusing, disorienting, and in every way bad and undesirable.

I've been editing since 2006, and it threw me off severely. I can only imagine how new and novice editors must feel.

Please add my voice to the many who have already pointed out this terrible flaw in the interface of the editor, and who request an immediate change. ~~~~

VisualEditor/Gadgets#Checking whether VisualEditor is currently open

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T167880

When actively using the "2017 wikitext editor" to edit a page, the interface is still in "wgAction":"view" mode. Is this intentional?

With Javascript, how to I realize that the interface is in "edit" mode while using the "2017 wikitext editor" to edit a page? For the old editors, I was able to use if(mw.config.get('wgAction') === 'edit'){ /* do something */ }, but that does not work any longer.

User:Whatamidoing (WMF), you seem to be moderating these discussions. Can you please help me with my question here? Thanks a lot!

I think that the links in the summary by 197.218 will be more useful to you than anything I could tell you.

Yes this is more or less what I am looking for. It does not really work for me yet, but I think I know meanwhile how to go about it…

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'

Below are some remarks I post on behalf of a friend who asked me for help because he prefers not to post his comments in English. He uses the latest Firefox on Windows 10.

• First, he suggests the edit summary in wikitext 2017 editor should provide an interface that can be easily filled in with the usual tool provided by Firefox. As it is now, summary text has to be put in anew with every edit you make, even it you have put it in earlier. There should be a way to make it easier for you to complete summary texts you had used before.
• Then, there should be a flag in your settings to make it mandatory to put in a summary text in the publishing dialogue if a user prefers to. The flag there is for the traditional wikitext editor seems not to work with the wikitext 2017 editor.
• Also, there is no button in the publish dialogue to abort publishing. You can abort by pressing the ESC key, but there is no message which tells you so.
• Lastly, he misses the table of contents and the sidebar in preview for checking if all images, tables, etc. are in place before saving. He would prefer to have a complete page preview available before publishing his edit.

Perhaps some of these feature requests are already being discussed or even worked on. – Thanks in advance.

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.

John, I believe that specific fonts are something that you have to set up in your own web browser.

Thank you Whatamidoing (WMF) for your reply. On en Wikipedia I modified my Common/CSS page with a verbatim script that was given to me by volunteers at the village pump/technical page in response to a question I'd posted there to these regards. If there is such a thing as a Global/CSS page I would need to create that page and probably modify it with similar changes. My request here was prompted upon noticing the preferences option on the editing tab under "editor" where it says "Edit area font style" and therein the choices of Monospaced font, Sans-serif font, and Serif font are offered. It seems that if OpenDyslexic font was offered there, I could select it and preclude any need for creating or modifying this or that /CSS page which I would not know what to do or where to do it unless I was specifically shown by a tech-savant that clearly has enough on his or her plate already in serving the collective needs of the community such that I relish the thought of increasing their workload by asking that they also find time to serve my individual needs. It would be much better to my manner and belief if it simply was added among the existing choices where I could service my own needs without feeling that I've had to misappropriate our limited technical resources in achieving my desired end. Thank you again.

You can copy the contents of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:John_Cline/common.css into https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:John_Cline/global.css to get the effect you want at all the wikis.

Wikipedia doesn't know what fonts your computer has installed. Your web browser does, and most of them allow users to specify what fonts they prefer. For example, in Chrome, you go to the settings page and scroll down to the spot that says "Customize fonts" (or paste this into the bar, apparently: chrome://settings/fonts ). Then you can pick whatever font you want, and Wikipedia (and most other websites) should respect that.

Thank you Whatamidoing (WMF) for following up on this with me. I understand your reply and will adopt its counsel moving forward. In itself, that resolves my individual needs and concern. As it appears, there are no collective concerns to address; leaving this a mooted matter. That so, I am not averse to an archiving of this section if it ought be. I yield this to another's discretion; and remain.

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.

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