2017 wikitext editor/Feedback/2017/03

Post your feedback about using the first iteration of the 2017 wikitext editor as a Beta Feature.

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).

The Editing 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.

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

Borks certain templates

Copy-pasting the code from WP:RM to make a requested move renders as:

{{[[:en:Substitution|subst]]:[[Template:Requested move|Requested move]]|NewFoo|reason=Place here your rationale for the proposed page name change....}}

Correctly, you should see:

{{subst:Requested move|NewFoo|reason=Place here your rationale for the proposed page name change...}}

This only happens when the Wikitext editor is enabled. 97.88.210.66 (talk) 23:15, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

I just tested this. It appears to be the general copy-paste issue. (i.e. The editor pasting nowikis and various markup, when we want/need to just copy plaintext from a page.) Alsee (talk) 04:09, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

I just tried it again and had no issues. Was someone able to fix it? Schierbecker (talk) 07:49, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

If you force your web browser to paste plain text (e.g., Edit > Paste and Match Style or ⌥⇧⌘–v on a Mac), then you will get the plain text. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:49, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

I think I wasn't able to Ctrl+Shift+V in plaintext before the other day. Now I can. Schierbecker (talk) 05:07, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

"Switch to VisualEditor" is still available even though this Page cannot edit in VisualEditor

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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You may want to try in Template:Sandbox , Click "Edit source" button and click "Visual editing is not available here" button ...... Ken Ookami Horo (talk) 07:23, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

/me using Chromium 56 on Arch Linux . Ken Ookami Horo (talk) 07:31, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, I reported this as https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T159834 . I don't get to decide the priorities, but since there is potential for bad edits, I tried to flag this "leaking" as something they should look into ASAP. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:48, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

This fix is being deployed this week; it will reach the Wikipedias on Thursday. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:40, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Although allegedly that didn't fix the problem, they're working on this. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:15, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Copy/Paste problem with Edge

If I copy/paste some text into 2017 wikitext editor using Edge, lines that start with CR+LF (i.e. empty lines) are deleted.

This does not happen with Chrome.

Environment: Windows 10 64bit, Microsoft Edge 38.14393.0.0, Vector skin Mina Utotuki (talk) 04:52, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

Thank you, Mina Utotuki, and welcome to mediawiki.org. I have copied your report to phab:T160202 and tagged it for attention by the devs. I appreciate your complete report. Thank you. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:50, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

Switch between both wikitext editors

I really like this new feature but can you please implement a function to switch elite between this wikitext modus and the old one? Or is it already possible and I am just not seeing it? Thx Crown-job (talk) 08:21, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

The team just changed the way that you switch between modes. Look on the toolbar near the Save button for a pencil icon. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:45, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

User is asking about switching between wikitext editors, there isn't a shortcut for that. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:14, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

User experience

The following is a recent example of the user experience with the 2017 source editor that just happened to me when following normal Wikipedia administration procedures:

1. Open Wikipedia:Requested moves#Requesting technical moves to list a new request.
2. Following the process instructions, copy the template code listed in that section.
3. Move to the Uncontroversial technical requests subsection and enter the Edit source mode.
4. Paste the template code and fill in the fields
5. Press the Save button. Then press the Preview button.
6. Find out that the final page shows the template code, not the evaluated template.
7. Remember that you are supposed to press Ctrl+Shift+V every time you're working with anything other than plain text, or it will do random things.
8. Close the Preview view.
9. Delete the <nowiki> tags.
10. Preview again. Find out that the template now evaluates, but produces an error.
11. Scratch my head wondering what the hell may have happened this time.
12. Copy the template code again below the previous one, this time without any formatting magic, to compare the expected result with what the previous paste created.
13. Realize that the previous paste also had inserted italics code ('') around the identifiers for page names in the template. (Surely editors will expect format to be kept from the original page, right?)
14. Remove the italics code, and the second copy of the template.
15. Preview the page and find out that it finally does what it should have done three minutes earlier.
16. Save the page.
17. Uninstall the source editor in disgust.

I posted it at the previous bug report, but I'm not sure that those are being taken seriously. The comments there by prominent developers give the appearance that they're disregarding real users feedback on lieu of some mythical Visual Editor user who may or may not want to paste text with format in the source editor. Diego Moya (talk) 09:11, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

I replied in greater detail at the bug report, but it's important to remember that we're primarily hearing from just one kind of "real user" (i.e., my kind of editor :-) right now. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:47, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

S-L-O-O-O-O-O-O-W

As fast as a racehorse. if the horse were running through molasses. And dead.

Seriously, I know that paid workers need to justify their pay, and volunteers wanna feel they have made a valuable input, but why oh why has anyone given you the authority to foist this crap on us?

Kill the project. It is a waste of time and money. It is SLOW. Look yourselves in the mirror and face up to the truth.~ Lingzhi (talk) 00:02, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Can you tell me more about your experience? What kind of computer and web browser are you using? Can you give me a link to the page were you trying to edit? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:44, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

If you look at my contribs, some of them are marked "(Tag: 2017 source edit)". Using the editor involves waiting for it to load (with progress bar), pressing save, pressing... a couple other buttons/hoops I don't recall/ waiting for it to save (progress bar again). Seriously multiplies wait time... At home I use Google Chrome Version 56.0.2924.87; I'm pretty sure I was at home. Lenovo IdeaPad. Lingzhi (talk) 00:56, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Would you mind opening your sandbox and timing it? I can open https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Lingzhi/sandbox2 in the VisualEditor's wikitext mode in less than three seconds on my Mac. How long does it take you? (At the moment, my leading theory is that it's just slower on Windows. I think that almost everyone who complains about speed is running Windows.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:40, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

I made one edit to a section in my sandbox. Loading your editor took three seconds, as you mentioned. Saving took twelve. Then I undid my edits, exited wikitext editor, and duplicated the edit my usual way. Getting the source took two seconds; saving took four or five. So 15 or so for the editor, roughly half that for editing source. But I sometimes make lots and lots of edits. Those seconds are not at all annoying when you make only one edit, but they become so when... mmm this morning I made about 25 edits while ce "William T. Stearn" and that's not a particularly heavy editing session load. Last night roughly the same. It all adds up. Working late at night, after 20 edits, the 21st etc. that takes so long becomes more and more grrrrrr. Lingzhi (talk) 02:25, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Huh. Saving's usually been pretty quick, because of some magic the devs did a while ago. (I just checked in my own sandbox; it was faster than opening the page was.) But then I copied the old contents of your sandbox, made an identical edit, and it took about 12 seconds to save (including time to type a very quick edit summary). Removing half the content resulted in it taking about half as long, which makes me think that the speed depends upon the size of the page. Would you mind doing me a favor and comparing that experience against my sandbox? Just edit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Whatamidoing_(WMF)/sandbox (however you want) and let me know if it saves noticeably faster. My sandbox has a wide variety of formatting (almost "one of everything"), but the overall length is only medium. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:34, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Loading 3, saving 4. But bear in mind I need to click "Save" TWICE, so you can add 1 or 2 seconds plus more annoyance for that. ...that's four seconds after the SECOND time I clicked save (and so was the 12 I mentioned earlier). Lingzhi (talk) 07:05, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. It actually starts transmitting your changes when you first open the "Save" dialog, so I think that 5 or 6 seconds is the more accurate number here (obviously, that will depend on how long you spend typing the edit summary, but one or two seconds seems very reasonable there). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:54, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Lingzhi (talk) 07:09, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Lingzhi, there have been ongoing objections to the New Editor speed, as well as inaccurate previews, for months. (It takes 30 seconds for me to load en:United States in the new editor, and people are reporting over two minutes load time, and browser time-out errors, on the largest of pages.) The community is about to submit consensus that these issues are blockers against deployment.

There's a Phabriator task for the load time issue, and here's the Phabriator task for the previews issue. Alsee (talk) 05:32, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Lingzhi is talking about how long it takes to save a page, not the three seconds that it takes to open it. It takes twice as long (or more) for Lingzhi to save a page than to open it (and is getting similar ratios in the old wikitext editor: two seconds to open, four or five seconds to save). I'd be curious to know whether saving a page takes you twice as long as opening it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:55, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Correction: Emphatically *Not* the same ratios in the old wikitext editor. The old wikitext editor *tops out* at four or five to save; the new one has no upper limit. Lingzhi (talk) 03:45, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

I think that the upper bound depends on page size. I edited https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/DynamicGraph3/us-10m-json (which is huge) in both; the 2006 wikitext editor took 16 seconds to save, and VisualEditor's built-in wikitext mode took 19 seconds to save.

Given the volume involved on a page like that, the upstream speed of your internet connection probably matters. Asking Google "how fast is my internet" gave me a test; at the moment, I'm averaging about 6.0 Mbps download and 0.90 Mbps upload (slower than usual for me). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:46, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Dialogue box thinks I haven't saved

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Maybe 1/4 of the time when I successfully save, the text next to the favicon still says "Editing [foo]." This sometimes triggers the familiar "Changes you made may not be saved" prompt, which is hella confusing.

Using Google Chrome/Windows 10. Schierbecker (talk) 15:23, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

Thank you. The title update issue is T126077; the "Changes you have made" prompt should be fixed as of a week ago, but if you can reproduce please shout so we can fix it! Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:04, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

No preview?

Hello, I just turned off this beta feature again. When writing, it is for me very important to see a Table of Content from time to time. The lack of seeing a ToC is for me a minus with regard to the VE, and also for this feature.

Also, I could not create a block quote. See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichskanzler_(Weimarer_Republik) Ziko (talk) 16:50, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

Hello, Ziko. Blockquote is in the "Paragraph" menu. It's almost the last item, after all of the ==Section heading== options.

The devs worked on a table of contents, but have stopped that project for now. I don't know when they will start working on it again. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:03, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for the reply. I actually did find the blockquote in the VE, but what the VE did to the text in question looked nothing like a normal blockquote. Ziko (talk) 11:11, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

The normal blockquote is <blockquote>(example)</blockquote> (per the master documentation at Help:Formatting). I don't know whether or not your home wiki happens to use the normal code very much. Several large wikis (e.g., the English Wikipedia and the English Wikisource) tend to use local templates instead of normal, native wikitext that will work at every single MediaWiki installation (including private wikis for businesses, etc.). Also, in the particular case of blockquotes, some editors mis-use the definition-list formatting (the ; and : pairs) to produce a visual indentation (or other character styling, such as bold-face text on a line), but this does not properly mark the HTML as a blockquote. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:41, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

Suggestions about the finalizing functions

Noticing (like many other editors) the fact that the Preview button is only available in the ‘Save changes’ popup, I’ve got a wish for this popup which already annoyed me a lot with the Visual Editor: I’d like it to appear at the top of the editor, toggling quickly, just like the Search & replace and the Special chars toolbars, and with a more general text such as ‘Finalize’. The current system, while being very counter-intuitive, makes the popup long to appear (one second, which is very long when you just want to change some typo or links), and it implies summarizing the changes without being able to check them in the editor because it is disabled (so it needs a big intellectual effort if we just made an action which is not common for us). Having the ‘Preview’ and ‘Review changes’ buttons in this toolbar would then be quite acceptable.

Another suggestion: on my desktop computer, I’ve got two monitors each using a resolution of 1920×1080. Seeing the preview in the full viewport without even having the contents on the borders that reminds what the readers will see (the project interface) is just waste. For my case, it would be really helpful to have the preview just next to the editor, I mean: the editor on the left, the preview (or the reviewing of the changes) on the right. The ‘Preview’ and ‘Review changes’ buttons could then be at the top of this panel on the right. We could have a button on the right of the main toolbar that would toggle this panel: a first click would show the panel on the right (taking half of the editor’s area), a second click would show the panel on the whole editor area, a third click would close the panel. Also, I’d love to have two buttons between the editor and the preview when they’re both shown, to get the scrolling of one panel into the other (this would need some algorithm to really have in one panel what you have in the other). Such an interface would be a strong improvement compared to the old editor (I could extend my browser window on my two screens to have the editor on one screen, the preview on the other), while currently it can still help to have a text editor next to MediaWiki’s editor just to be able to get this layout.

A third unrelated remark: I see, at the bottom of the editor, the article’s categories, which are semi-translucent/disabled; and they’re not displayed in the preview (just like the table of contents) while, to me, they should be.

Besides, I really like the look & feel of the editor; I’m keeping it and hoping it’ll improve quickly (because Wikimedia projects really deserve much better editors). Frigory (talk) 19:59, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

The devs are talking about a change to the Save button. Have you tried the new switch-to-visual-mode button (near the blue Save button)? It might be something like that, except you could choose to skip straight to Preview or Review Changes if you wanted. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:07, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

Yes, a drop-down. I had the idea too, but to me my idea is more interesting — I did not suggest a unique coherent interface though, to keep the suggestion open, but I can be more precise or realize a mockup if you’re interested. Frigory (talk) 22:59, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

Sorry about not getting back to you sooner. I think that you might be interested in exploring phab:T44138 and related tasks to see what they're working on. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:59, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Problem saving here, possibly because of tags?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T164031

I tried to reply to the user who posted this question, but could not save the page when using the 2017 wikitext editor - I had to switch back. I kept getting the following error:

Something went wrong

[WNqzgwpAEDMAAUdWgD0AAACX] Exception caught: Call to a member function getPrefixedText() on a non-object (null)

You can reproduce this error by trying to edit the mentioned section.

I tried escaping everything in the user's example as well (nowiki, HTML entities, the works), but that didn't help.

The specific error is common to Extension:Labeled Section Transclusion itself, might it be trying to parse code that's inside a <nowiki> block?

My latest hypothesis is that editor parses the entire page even when I'm only editing a section, and the problem is elsewhere on the page - to test that, I tried saving just this section ( See User:FreedomFighterSparrow/Sandbox), and it worked just fine; then I copied and tried to save the entire talkpage, and that failed with the same error, so it bears out.

Then I switched back to the old editor, and at first couldn't save the entire page - I got the following fine error:

[WNq2LgpAAD0AAMkwlioAAACC] 2017-03-28 19:14:55: Fatal exception of type "BadMethodCallException"

. This might be a fluke; a second attempt succeded.

So, all in all, it seems like a bug in the new editor... or more probably, some problem in the page that the old editor was more lenient about. FFS ^Talk 19:19, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

I could edit the bit in your first sandbox; I could edit the second sandbox in VisualEditor's visual mode, but not in its wikitext mode. This edit (assuming that there's a single problem on a page, blanking most and restoring until you get a problem is a quick way to find the broken syntax) produced rather unexpected results. However, the problem is a single bit of code, which you can see by going to https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=User:FreedomFighterSparrow/Sandbox2&oldid=2436110 and editing the page (nothing will be displayed): #lsth: in double curly braces. I don't know what this code is or does (beyond "probably some kind of parser function") or why it prevents you from saving the page, but that seems to be the problem. Converting one curly brace to the ASCII code ({) made it possible to edit the full page again. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 06:51, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Oh, when you test something like this, remember that adding a blank space or line at the end of the page doesn't actually create a new revision, so it looks like it worked, but nothing actually happens. So if you might have done that on the interim step, then that would explain it apparently working once. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 06:53, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for looking at this!

Just to confirm:

1. is the new wikitext editor indeed parsing the entire page, even when I'm just editing a section?
2. I do admit I had no idea wikitext inside <code> tags is expanded (and apparently whoever posted that bit of code didn't either), but it seems it is. Is that correct?

At any rate, so the problem is in the extension itself - it looks like LST doesn't handle gracefully being called without any parameters. I'm having a hard time deciding whether to fix the extension or just assume this is an edge case and fix the specific talk page :-) FFS ^Talk 07:28, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

On question #2 (aka "the easy one" ;-), the <code> tag is just HTML character styling (like using <b> for bold-faced text). It's true HTML, so it doesn't have any effect on the wikitext processing. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:54, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

The answer to question #1 is now phab:T164031. I think that the conversation could be fairly summarized as, "It doesn't... Huh, that's odd." Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:40, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

:-)

Thanks for looking at this and creating the task. FFS ^Talk 17:08, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

ETA on redlinks in previews?

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Greetings MW-devs. I'm currently using the 2017 WT editor on da-wikipedia. I really like using it, but I have one slight annoyance. Whenever I preview my edits, all links are blue despite the fact that some of them link to nonexistent articles. It's not a huge problem, but its a nice feature to have since you can spot incorrect wikilinks and also see what the page will -really- look like, which is what the preview is supposed to do. Is there an estimate on when this will be available in the 2017 editor?

Thank you very much :) InsaneHacker (talk) 14:45, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

No estimate, normal priority: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T153535 . Thanks for your message, and do subscribe there for updates :) Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:42, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

(In particular, we'd certainly appreciate details about your favorite features in this editor!) Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:43, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

Hey there. That's https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T153535 which I've written a quick patch for just now. Hopefully my code is good enough that we'll be able to merge it and provide it to you soon! Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:40, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

The patch is now in 1.29wmf19 which will deploy to most Wikipedias on Thursday. ESanders (WMF) (talk) 21:57, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Great, thanks for the notification @ESanders (WMF) InsaneHacker (talk) 05:44, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Blue "Save Changes" Button is overused with different functions

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T44138

The blue "Save Changes" button occurs in two places and does slightly different things. This will likely become moot with additional changes suggested already. Maybe the first button could be "Save Changes..." or "Save Form" but that might sound a little confusing. Maybe the Save Form could just have a "Save" Button. Better might be four edit/view modes: Source, Visual, Preview, Changes.

Thanks for working on improving the editor! StrayBolt (talk) 17:29, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

You're welcome.

This idea has been suggested in different forms a few times over the last four years. It does seem to bother a small number of people (some of whom I suspect of having a professional background in UI design  :-), but it doesn't seem to stop people from figuring out how to use the button. As you note, there are some changes coming relatively soon, but I don't think that they will address this point directly. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 07:01, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

The issue was just mentioned again above. :-)

I like the title "Don't Make Me Think", so "doesn't seem to stop people from figuring out how to use the button" sounds like there is a little room for improvement.

As much as it is nice to jump around between editing/viewing modes, would best practices recommend showing changes to fill in the save comment and show preview to double-check your results before saving (or something like that)? Would some sort of visible checklist (button highlights?) encourage that? IMDB (not that I recommend their method) does checks on the input and can require checking a box when you are doing something slightly odd. Does WP flag some errors, other than looking at the preview to discourage saving with errors? StrayBolt (talk) 19:47, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

> some of whom I suspect of having a professional background in UI design

Somewhat, but yet it remains uneffective when you’re an experienced wikimedian user who wants to work quickly.

My main contributions on the projects are about typo and formatting, and for it I need to preview very often (i.e. a change, a look, a change, a look). With the current system, the best solution is to have a second tab in my browser with the initial page while I would prefer to see my changes in a well-thought editor.

Thanks for the work anyway — :-). Frigory (talk) 00:08, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Previewing in advance slows down the save process (sometimes substantially, if you're working on a large or complicated page on a slow or busy computer), so I'm not sure that we want to do that. We forced 'Show changes' when VisualEditor was first released, and it got mixed reviews.

I think that phab:T44138 is the central task for the Save button. (You can add suggestions/mockups/comments, etc. there, if you have any technical/substantive suggestions or questions. Login by clicking the MediaWiki logo underneath the username box. Phab's a pretty friendly place overall.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:03, 14 April 2017 (UTC)