2017 wikitext editor/Feedback/2017/09

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

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My experience

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T175634
Resolved

I have been trying the editor for few days. This is my opinion:

Good things:

1. Visually attractive
2. In categories, it's good to view the items of the category while you are editing
3. It's also good to see interwikis
4. It really pushes editors to make a short explanation of their edit
5. You don't have to go to the bottom of the page to click on the "publish" button

Things to improve:

1. Slow load of the editor
2. We lost the ability to use strange symbols (which are at the bottom at the original editor)
3. References cannot be segregated for an easier text-only-edit (I had a gadget for that)
4. It would be great to have a "Preview" button when you edit. Now, to preview, you have to click first to "publish". It is more complicated and not very logical.
5. It would be great, while editing, to be able to differentiate beetween blue links and red links (pages still missing)
6. It would be great to be able to copy (for later pasting) the title of the page
7. For templates, it also would be good to be able to preview articles using this template (as you do with the source editor)
8. Inability to make a null-edit to force page to update.
9. Inability to undo (at least with Google Chrome)

Thanks! Paucabot (talk) 11:31, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

Hello, Paucabot, and thank you for this. Here are my questions about things to improve:

1. Slow load of the editor
   • The team is talking about a performance audit.
2. We lost the ability to use strange symbols (which are at the bottom at the original editor)
   • Look for the omega character (Ω) in the toolbar. The first section is customizable at MediaWiki:Visualeditor-quick-access-characters.json.
3. References cannot be segregated for an easier text-only-edit (I had a gadget for that)
   • Can you please give me a link to the gadget? Also, you may be interested in the Beta Feature for m:Community Tech/Wikitext editor syntax highlighting.
4. It would be great to have a "Preview" button when you edit. Now, to preview, you have to click first to "publish". It is more complicated and not very logical.
   • The team agrees that this is not very logical. They have not (yet) decided exactly how to change it.
5. It would be great, while editing, to be able to differentiate beetween blue links and red links (pages still missing)
   • How would you display this to the editor?
6. It would be great to be able to copy (for later pasting) the title of the page
   • See phab:T156047.
7. For templates, it also would be good to be able to preview articles using this tmplate (as you do with the source editor)
   • I believe that this is planned, but "not soon".
8. Inability to make a null-edit to force page to update.
   • You can, but it's strange. You type a character, remove that character, and then save the page.
9. Inability to undo (at least with Google Chrome)
   • Is this when you use the keyboard command (e.g., Command-Z) or when you use the button in the toolbar? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:46, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks Whatamidoing (WMF) for your reply.

1. Ok.
2. Ok.
3. ca:MediaWiki:Gadget-SegregaRefs.js
4. Ok.
5. Maybe with the same colours than in the preview?
6. Thanks.
7. Ok.
8. Ok, but it's still more complicated then the other way. Is it made on purpose?
9. When I use right-click on the mouse. It does work with the shortcut and with the button in the toolbar. Paucabot (talk) 07:25, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Gadgets: Gadgets have to be re-written to work in VisualEditor (whether you're using the visual or the wikitext modes). See VisualEditor/Gadgets and its subpages to get started. The documentation isn't great, and I encourage you to boldly improve it as you go.

Link colors: Syntax highlighting is on the way. I don't know if it currently labels blue links and red links, though. It feels like the kind of thing that should be possible in VisualEditor's 2017 wikitext mode. @DHorn (WMF) could tell us whether that's a supported use case.

Null edits: It's not intentional, but it's not likely to be improved very soon, either.

Mouse support: I don't think that mouse-based commands are very well supported, and they depend a lot upon OS/browser interactions. You could file a Phab task with the request, if you wanted (or post your OS/browser/anything else that seems relevant, and I'll file it). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:58, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

My browser is Google Chrome 58 64-bit with Ubuntu Linux.

One last thing I have just remembered: It was very handy to get the browser to remember edit summaries: you could autocomplete them. Now, with this editor, it won't. Is it easy to get that behaviour to work with this new editor?

Thanks in advance. Paucabot (talk) 21:31, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T175634

I pinged you in this task for the "undo" problem. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:32, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

[deleted] 105.112.18.185 (talk) 23:20, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

Auto-completing edit summaries is something that I'd love to see, but which turns out to depend upon your web browser, and apparently web browsers don't want to auto-complete that form. See phab:T50274 and related tasks for some of the ideas that they're thinking about. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:27, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Nested templates and syntax highlighting: both missing

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T101246

I install Visual Editor first and then 2017 wikitext editor on a non wikipedia server. Unfortunately, this wiki uses a lot of templates and many nested templates.

And everyone knows that syntax highlighting is mandatory for editing nested braces. Thus, I looked at some extensions available and at the end choose Syntax_highlighter for the simplicity and elegant recursive program (installed as a gadget).

Unfortunately, Remember_the_dot/Syntax_highlighter gadget highlight templates in a single color (yellow), and nested templates are not highlighted in a different color.

Therefore I modified its code in order to adapt it for our very specific templates and you can get a visual example at http://en-ii.demopaedia.org/w/index.php?title=10&action=edit .

This gadget is currently helping a lot! The boring templates are nearly opaque and can be hardly read such that the text to be changed is in a light color or white. Much more easier editing!

Next step was to improve editing even more by installing Visual editor (parsoid etc). But I discovered that the syntax highlighting is not implemented.

I also read that for the standard wikitext editor they just did not choose Remember_the_dot highlighter but another one.

My current last step was to test your 2017 wikitext editor, that is having a Visual Editor within a wikitext. I installed it successfully on mw 1.28 of October 2016. But unfortunately, again a syntax hightlighter is not implemented yet.

Fortunately, you mention Remember_the_dot/Syntax_highlighter in the main page of the 2017 wikitext editor article as a potential add for syntax highlighting.

For resuming, I think that if you have nested templates, you either need a recursive visual editor (which is not) or a syntax highlighting, but if both are missing, it is very hard to work online. And thus my question is do you plan to install a syntax highlighter for your 2017 wikitext editor. Nbrouard (talk) 15:02, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

It seems to be already available using the Extension:CodeMirror. 197.218.83.101 (talk) 16:21, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, it works!

On https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T101246, it is said:

DannyH added a subscriber: DannyH.Jul 6 2017, 11:55 PM

Comment Actions

Syntax highlighting is now live on Test Wiki as a beta feature:

https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures

We're testing it this week before we deploy it to live wikis, so feel free to take a look, and leave comments here:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Tech/Wikitext_editor_syntax_highlighting

If you go to test.wikipedia.org and beta preferences and check both:

• WikiText Syntax highlighting
• new Wikitext mode

and go to

https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B2bit_de_cap_pla?action=edit

Yes, it works and it will work only on a newer mw 1.30 and not my current 1.28 version.

Thus the remaining visual deficiency is in nested templates and absence of changes in colors.

If you edit

https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nbrouard/sandbox and compare with [1] you will see in the latter the different colors in nested templates.

It may be easy to improve. I don't know yet. Nbrouard (talk) 18:07, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Well, it is possible to greatly customize colors. See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T15302. It also identifies nested templates.

However it doesn't provide different classes for specific template names. This is a reasonable feature request that users can make, see BUGREPORT if you're interested in that customization. Otherwise, since you seem to know how to use javascript you can probably tweak it do to what you want.

It is doubtful though that they will ever enable that one wikimedia wikis, because it will make the colors lose their meaning. The goal there was to differentiate between wikitext markup (templates / links, html tags) through colors, if one uses it to differentiate templates then it because more like a rainbow and less informative. 197.218.92.102 (talk) 18:41, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

OOps, see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Wikitext_editor_syntax_highlighting#Color_and_style_customizationfor classes to customize the colors. 197.218.92.102 (talk) 18:42, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Question/comment

I'm trying this out and first notice that unlike the old editor, I don't have access to previously-named references (the "Named references" button in the old editor). That was an extremely useful feature. Are there plans to reinclude it?

Also I'm wondering if anyone has been developing some sort of tool to save edits before clicking "Publish", sort-of what the extension Lazarus does (which doesn't work on my browser). This would be all sorts of useful and reduce stress so so much. Ɱ (talk) 15:38, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for trying it out and letting me know what you think. (Really.)

I don't think that there are any plans to implement the "Named references" feature from the 2010 WikiEditor or the "Re-use" button from the visual mode. In general, if it works by scanning the raw wikitext, then it's not on the team's priority list. If you haven't used the search feature in the visual mode's Cite > Re-use tool, then you might want to flip over to the visual mode sometime and have a look.

There is a plan to deal with auto-saving. You can read about it in phab:T57370 and related tasks. I don't know exactly when it will happen (probably not very soon, but maybe during the next year), but I can see all kinds of advantages, from the laptop battery dying to working offline. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:20, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Hey thanks - that Visual Editor functionality is nice! Not sure if I'd be faster with the editor in general but I should try more. And cool thanks for linking the auto-saving task page. Will respond to this feedback page as other problems arrive, though right now I'm not using it because of that ctrl-f problem with the syntax highlighting :/ Ɱ (talk) 22:58, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Edittools

The option "source editing" should propose the same taskbar / menu bar (specially with the edittools) than our current "edit source" in wikitext. Christian Ferrer (talk) 11:15, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

really, I'm lost without my edittools, I return to wikitext. Regards. Christian Ferrer (talk) 11:57, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for trying it out. I don't think that the team plans to add the MediaWiki:Edittools buttons to this wikitext mode. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:25, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Δεν έχω εντοπίσει το ερώτημα σου και αν υπάρχει ερώτημα? Louismary2014 (talk) 20:37, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

When editing user talk pages, on fi.wikipedia we have all user warning/block messages stored in the edittools (see https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A4rjestelm%C3%A4viesti:Edittools.js). In this editor they are lost and can't be added anywhere. We have no easy way to warn users. We either need to remember the name of the warning messages (and also subst them!) or take our time to find them before we can warn the user.

Before it was very easy, just a one click and the warning was substed. Stryn (talk) 17:15, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

That's a different thing – what you linked to is a gadget, written and supported by the fiwiki community. Do you know who in the community knows enough to fix their gadget for users? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:48, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Ah I realized now it's not the same thing, sorry. Yep I know who to contact, but not sure if he can fix it, I will ask. Stryn (talk) 17:53, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Unable to access preview through the keyboard

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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Currently I'm unable to access the preview of an article through the keyboard i.e., the shortcut Alt + Shift + P doesn't seem to be working anymore (at least for me)

Information

• Browser : Firefox Nightly 58.0a1 (2017-09-23) (64-bit)

• Operating System : ubuntu 16.04 Kaartic ^[talk] 11:52, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

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

Unable to stop the editor from loading while offline

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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Once when I loaded a page while I'm online an went offline to read the page, I accidentally hit the 'Edit source' button. This started the progress bar for the editor and obviously it got stuck after sometime as it was unable to connect to the network. It was frustrating for me as I couldn't cancel the page load and thus couldn't read the article that I loaded until I got the error dialog.

It would be nice if there was a way to stop the editor from loading while it's being loaded. This would help the readers to proceed with what they were reading quickly when they accidentally hit the 'Edit source' button instead of waiting for the editor to load and then cancel the edit operation. Kaartic ^[talk] 12:04, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

I can reproduce this in Safari 11. It feels like the kind of thing that is controlled by your web browser, but I'll file the bug, and perhaps we'll be pleasantly surprised. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:18, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, I forgot to mention this here. There seems to be a task for this on phab, already. T117359 Kaartic ^[talk] 18:27, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:58, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

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

appears to break Template:Meetupsig @ enwiki

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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this appears to break {{meetupsig}} @ enwiki. cc @Pharos: --~ Jeremyb (talk) 21:40, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

(You don't need to sign with tildes in Flow posts.)

What do you mean by "break"? (I was able to add the button here. The editnotice that appears after I click on the button is barely readable and likely not helpful, but I don't know that that's what you mean.) Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:09, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

(yeah, don't use flow much)

I saw the editnotice issue also. this is not about adding the button, this is about how the button works once it's already on a page.

with this feature disabled click the button and then immediately click save and you're done.

when enabled click button and then save is greyed out and nothing is prefilled (wikitext textarea is empty) Jeremyb (talk) 12:19, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T51622 ? Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:59, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

sounds about right Jeremyb (talk) 13:04, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

The template is specifically designed to give maximum ease and maximum assistance to people who have never edited before.

Expected behavior:

1. Click the blue SIGN UP button
   • Edit screen appears with * ~~~~ automatically inserted, with extremely effective and stable edit notice telling them to click SAVE.
2. Click SAVE

Actual behavior:

1. Click the blue SIGN UP button
2. Edit screen appears, but signature code is not inserted
3. Editnotice is mangled, and vanishes if you do anything
4. Save button is disabled (because the NewEditor doesn't let you save or preview a nulledit) Alsee (talk) 13:16, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

I appreciate the longer explanation: it looks like the task linked above (already patch for review) may be behind this (if I'm mistaken, we'll flag this separately). Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:19, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

It looks like the Phab T51622 addresses support for preloading text into the edit window. That's the more important thing in this particular case.

As for the edit notice issue, there are other cases where providing the editnotice in pop-up form more directly breaks functionality. On some dedicated-workflow pages we fill the page notice with a toolbar of clickable links that insert helpful text into the edit window. For example try this edit link for EnWiki's AN/RFC page and click SHOW on page notice's green box. Clicking any link in the green box inserts the item into the page. That doesn't work with the popup editnotice. Alsee (talk) 13:42, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

That's https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T154204 that you had filed, right? (I recalled that from this recent conversation with Tom.) Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:10, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Ah, yes. That's the Phab for it. I forgot where it was. Alsee (talk) 16:37, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Understandable! There are so many of them :D So the first one is solved, landing on the wikis later this week, and I asked whether that being fixed changes anything for the second one. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:55, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Today I clicked the blue button and it showed my four tildes but Save was greyed out until I added and deleted some letters. So, it's still broken. ~ Jim.henderson (talk) 20:39, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

Ah-ha! Thanks for reporting. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:02, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

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