2017 wikitext editor/Feedback/2021

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

光标无法对齐文字

Translation: Cursor does not align with text

• Web browser: Microsoft Edge (Chromium) ;
• Operating system: Windows 10 版本1909 ;
• Wiki skin: Vector.

今天使用2017 wikitext editor时，光标总是无法对齐文字。 Xhs44444100 (talk) 12:51, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

原来对不齐文字是广泛发生的问题，。， Air7538 (talk) 01:45, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Do you use the colorful syntax highlighting (CodeMirror)? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:02, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

YES.I have the same problem, too. 50829! (talk) 05:58, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

Did you have this problem last year, or is it fairly new? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:27, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

Another question: Is the cursor always misaligned by the same amount (e.g., wrong by 5 mm), or does it change (e.g., wrong by 5 mm at the start of the line and wrong by 1 cm at the end of the line)? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:29, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

Some scripts don't work

Hi,

I'm not sure if this is something that is relevant, but a heads up that some scripts don't work when this is enabled. Specifically, this one. SSSB (talk) 09:24, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Hey there,

Changing user scripts and community gadgets to work with the 2017 editor is the responsibility of the owners of that code. In that particular case, have you asked Ohconfucius? It might be pretty trivial, or it might be a fair bit of work for them to fix their code to work in both editors. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:16, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

preview link may wrong in Wiki with variants

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T297976

Edit in Wiki with variants and make a link in the non-transfer mark (this one: -{}-, I don't know the official name), like -{[[link]]}-, and when the URL is like xxx/w/index.php?... the link is to /w/link, a Page-not-found page.

I don't think it matters: Windows 10, Chrome 88.0.4324.150, Timeless

Thanks LaMagiaaa (talk) 14:55, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Sorry about the late reply. Is this problem happening in Chinese? Is it still happening? (Every language that uses variant scripts has its own, separate set of problems.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:44, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

It is happening in Chinese. (And I have choiced some language uses variant wikis, it is also happening. So I think this is a common problem of variant languages)

Just like I said, edit some page URL liked "zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?..." and using -{}-, for example -{[[link]]}-, this link will go /w/Link on preview page. LaMagiaaa (talk) 06:31, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

@DChan (WMF), this is the bug report I've been trying to find for you. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:04, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

Suggestion: Additional conveniences for wikitext mode

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T166098

Long citation templates and tables can get in the way of reading the article text in source code view, so the ability to fold templates would be a useful addition to the new editor. EnronEvolved (talk) 17:17, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

Code folding would require an update to Extension:CodeMirror, which AFAICT is not likely to happen. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:22, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): Do you know why or is there a link about it?

w:en:Code folding is helpful. 1992 FARHAAD (talk) 02:20, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): I saw the topic summary right now, thanks; there is also https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T30684 1992 FARHAAD (talk) 03:43, 21 August 2021 (UTC)

I don't think that any team plans to work on CodeMirror during the next year. My impression is that it is a lot of work for a small benefit. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:59, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Citation error due to date format

Whenever I cite a Nature paper using the cite button on the 2017 wikitext editor, the date gets imported with YYYY-MM, which is not allowed via the MOS and leads to an error. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_talk:Citation_Style_1#Allow_YYYY-MM_format_for_cite_journal?. This error doesn't occur when using the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RefToolbar. Could you also display the date February 2020 or simply 2020? Femke (talk) 16:47, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

The English Wikipedia has decided to reject this class of ISO standards-compliant dates. I find it annoying, too.

Years ago, I heard editors justify this rule because of the fear was that future editors would not be able to tell whether 2001-02 meant two years (2001–2002) or a year and month (February 2001). However, there is no possibility of confusion any source after 2012, and only a tiny fraction of dates from 2000–2011 would be potentially confusing and not banned by the English Wikipedia's MOS.

In the last discussion I had on this, we couldn't even agree about whether the MOS rule applies to what's typed in the wikitext vs what's shown to readers. (For example: So long as the reader sees July 2021, does it matter if I typed |iso-date=2021-07 in wikitext?) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:21, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

Template used

The Template used shows all template in the page. But when I edit some section, I more hope it shows me only the template used in that section. Could you make the template used in a section highlightly or just only show those template? LaMagiaaa (talk) 15:28, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

Unusable on Firefox Mobile

I've enabled the New wikitext mode on Beta preferences, and it makes the "Edit source" mode unusable from Firefox on Android. The caret is shown at a different point to where the text is inserted (see images below). The same problem appears on Firefox Beta for Android.

I tried to edit article Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, section Scientific controversy, and the following happens:

1) I tap in front of "Science fact..."

2) The window scrolls automatically to the top of the text area.

3) I scroll down to the paragraph I want to edit. The caret is shown where I tapped the screen (as seen in Image 1). But when I type "Example text", the text is entered here instead:

The interface has problems also when selecting text by long-pressing and dragging the finger; the drawn selection box is not vertically aligned with the text.

It is possible that the extension is interacting with some of my scripts at commons.js or commons.css for the old editor. Diego Moya (talk) 08:17, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Sorry for missing your post earlier, Diego. Does that problem go away if you turn off syntax highlighting? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:22, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

A few suggestions

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T153306

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T286829

Hi! I really love the 2017 Wikitext editor, especially some of it's features like Citoid and iinteigration the visual editor. After using it, I have a few suggestions.

• When created a redirect, append ?redirect=no to the end of the URL so you stay on the page.
• Preview: I know this is unlikely to be implemented, but not that I have to click 4 times to see a preview and go back to editing, it has massively discouraged me from using the preview button. It would be nicer if it was just to the left of the "publish" button or similar.

That's all I can think of for now! Isochrone (talk) 11:48, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

I'm glad that you like it. I find that I'm more likely to use m:Help:Keyboard shortcuts to preview a page. The exact keys depend on the type of computer, but it's Control+⌥ Option+p on a Mac. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:41, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

Edit summary and suggestion for Syntax highlighter

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T199740

Is there an option to turn off the autosuggest in edit summary without turning off the browser option? As the current default editor doesn't have autosuggest and I didn't need to tweak my browser option.

In addition for syntax highlighter, templates, magic words and bolded words are not bold hence would like to request it to be bold like in the current editor. If this is new behavior for templates and magic words, I think I can accept it. However, for bolded words, it should function the same as italics words where there is no need to click preview to confirm if it's working because the editor (wikitext mode) would display it as italicized automatically when the sentence/word is applied with italics. Paper9oll 15:35, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

There is no way to turn off the edit summary search. (It searches your most recent 200 edit summaries at that wiki.)

Because of limitations in the original CodeMirror (syntax highlighter) software, they have to choose between not having bold (and anything else that changes the width/size of characters) in the 2017WTE, or not having it be readable in some web browsers (e.g., Firefox). Unless CodeMirror gets a substantial update – which seems doubtful – we won't get anything displayed in bold text. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:37, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

Okay I would like the option to turn off the edit summary autosuggest if it could be implemented as an option feature that could be turn on/off via the preferences.

Hopefully, CodeMirror get updated for 2017WTE, so bold text works correctly in Firefox.

Thanks you for taking the time to reply. Cheers and have a good weekend. Paper9oll 04:30, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

Class mw-parser-output

One of the editor's container elements has the mw-parser-output class. While that makes a lot of sense when editing on visual mode, applying it to source editing mode may cause leakage of styles which are meant to be applied to Wikitext output, not to source code view.

This may become especially problematic when using syntax highlighting, as styling may ruin the alignment between the invisible textarea element and the visible p elements, making it almost impossible to edit. Example: https://community.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003199281

I would suggest removing that class when the wikitext mode is active. ~ 2A01:6500:A046:58AB:A347:A748:1A3C:1C01 (talk) 21:15, 6 July 2021 (UTC)

Wikia's Fandom is a third-party website. You should contact that website's owner about problems you encounter there. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:51, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

Some problems

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T153306

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T155732

I tried the beta option on hewiki and had some problems with it:

• I could not figure out how to preview the result. With current editor I occasionally press "Preview" and see the result (above my test). Mostly useful on shorter texts. Here I have to go through Publish Changes => Preview. And I don't have my text and the preview in the same screen. Show stopper.
• considered switching to the visual editor as a sort-of preview. But when I edit one section, switch to visual editor and switch back, I'm editing the whole document.

So right now I disabled the beta option. 195.110.77.193 (talk) 05:38, 23 September 2021 (UTC)

Previewing is annoying and sometimes doesn't work properly

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T153306

In order to preview a page with the new editor, you have to first click the publish button, then wait for the summary box to appear, then click preview -- extremely annoying when I want to iterate a specific change. At least on mobile it shows the preview by default.

Additionally, templates like Wikipedia:Template:Graph:Chart just straight up don't work, and don't work on mobile either. I had to disable this just to edit pages like Wikipedia:Opinion polling for the next New Zealand general election.

What I would primarily like to see is a preview button directly next to the publish button. Figuring out a way to get the graph template appearing would be a bonus as well. Nixinova (talk) 19:52, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

I agree; preview should not be under publish (VisualEditor too). Another annoying effect of this is that one cannot preview if no changes have been made (the publish button is disabled until a change has been made). Tol (talk | contribs) @ 20:21, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

The trick I use to preview a null edit on mobile is just to add a space and remove a space, preview button appears. Nixinova (talk) 21:01, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Hello, I came on this page to report this very problem: preview is frustrating when several clicks are necessary. Rannios (talk) 03:01, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

You can use the Keyboard shortcuts to bypass this problem. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:08, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

My workflow often involves scrolling rapidly between preview and wikitext, so being unable to have both on the same page is frustrating even if I can rapidly open the preview using a shortcut. Rusalkii (talk) 15:12, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

You might be interested in m:Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Real Time Preview for Wikitext, if you are mainly using the 2010 wikitext editor. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:03, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

I agree; I disabled this beta feature because it appeared there was no way to preview changes. After reading this discussion I learned that there is, but it's counterintuitively after clicking "Publish" and there are too many steps to do so. Some other features have preview-as-you-type, which is nice, but one way or another it would be nice to sort of make the preview step unavoidable, since I've sometimes regretted not previewing, but have not really been bothered by checking my work to find no mistakes. Beland (talk) 19:15, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

the CodeMirror doesn’t fully overlap above the text-area

用户代理： Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:94.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/94.0

URL：https://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=GitLab&section=0&summary=%2F%2A+top+%2A%2F+&veaction=editsource

Wikipedia theme: Timeless

I can see the text area being semi-transparent underneath, not fully aligned with the syntax highlight in CodeMirror. It seems to only happens on Chinese Wikipedia; I don’t recall encountering the bug in English Wikipedia. My guess is that CodeMirror has different wrapping configuration from the editable plain text. Franklin Yu (talk) 07:51, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Pastakhov, Szymon, Natalia, is this one of CodeMirror's known problems in Firefox? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:47, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

I think the problem seems to also affect Chrome, in a slightly different way. To explain the technical points better, I’d refer to DOM nodes with CSS selectors.

If I understand it correctly, the node .ve-ce-surface has .ve-ce-documentNode to work as the actual content to be edited (with contenteditable property set to true), and then a read-only .CodeMirror.CodeMirror-wrap overlaying it. In Firefox the issue is more obvious, because the documentNode is visible; in Chrome, the documentNode seems transparent, so it is more difficult to find the issue. Actually I can reproduce a similar issue with Chrome, even on English Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=GitLab&summary=%2F%2A+top+%2A%2F+&action=edit&section=0

Note that for Chrome the mismatch is only found by selecting the texts. The highlight makes it more obvious. Please let me know if screenshots would help (as well as where to upload screenshots). Franklin Yu (talk) 02:10, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Oh yes, I had experienced that many times before and when I tried to replicate this bug, I experienced that, too. (Firefox, Vector & new Vector, 2017 wikitext editor.) SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 11:32, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Description typo?

In the description on the Beta page it reads,

"Enable the new wikitext mode inside the visual editor. It has many of the tools present in the visual editor, uses a similar design, and allows better switching between the two."

Shouldn't that say it has many of the tools present in the wiki editor? Pariah24 (talk) 14:42, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

No. It has many of the tools in the visual editor that people wanted in the wikitext editor, like automatic citations, template additions, etc.. It has all of the 2010 wikitext editor's tools (but that's not saying much). Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:38, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

OK, my apologies. I think I get it. It's just worded in an odd way that makes it sound like a mistake. At least to me. Pariah24 (talk) 17:29, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

That really shouldn't be in Beta Features any longer. It should just be part of the regular prefs options. It would IMO be sensible to deal with phab:T202921 first. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:40, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

I definitely agree that the Editing and Gadgets menus are a nightmare from a QoL/UX standpoint. Long ago I disabled most and relied on my user JS page. Obviously that's not a solution for most users.

Should wikEd not get a spot as an editor choice, or is that a no-no because it's third party? I think it's great. Pariah24 (talk) 19:04, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

I don't know what would be involved in putting a user script/gadget into the list. I know that WikEd has its fans. I hope that someday, edits using it will start getting tagged via Special:Tags so that people can easily discover that the edits are being made that way. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:21, 5 January 2022 (UTC)