Topic on 2017 wikitext editor/Feedback

Copy and paste does not work

5
Aschmidt (talkcontribs)

There are serious issues with copy and paste, both from editors on my machine and from other wiki pages. I just tried to copy and paste the title of a page on enwiki to a talk page on dewiki in order to create a wikilink back to enwiki, and it did not work. The text was correctly pasted as a heading, but it was not possible to re-format it as a simple paragraph. When I tried preview, no text was shown at all. The same in version comparison view. In fact my text was lost I could not save it and quit the editor.

When I tried to copy and paste from TextEdit two paragraphs got lost and were not included in the browser editor window.

Also, the signature on talk pages is not correct. We sign with two -- characters before the four tildes.

I'll switch the new editor off now, said enough. I'll take another look at it in a year or so.

Thanks for looking into this.

Tested with Firefox ESR 45.7 on Mac OS X 10.11.6.

Aschmidt (talkcontribs)

BTW, I don't like the discussion system you are using here. I prefer wikitext in a simple editor window with discussions in a thread from the top to the bottom, as we have been discussing on Wikipedia since I joined in 2005.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Thanks for taking the time to share your experience. I really appreciate it.

  1. The copy-paste bug is phab:T155836, and the fix should reach the Wikipedias later today. This bug is on my list as perhaps the most disruptive problem we've seen so far.
  2. Some things aren't pastable. If it was basically text, then those missing paragraphs may have been 155836 again. But if it had complicated formatting ("complicated" from the machine POV, which is not always very obvious), then it may be a case of the software deciding that this material wasn't wanted (e.g., links to external images) or translatable into wikitext.
  3. Signatures are a matter of local convention. Most wikis use plain signatures. A few use other conventions. If your wiki insists upon including two hyphens (presumably, it's meant to be a proper dash instead of two hyphens?), then that should be set as the local default for all signatures (see MediaWiki:Signature), and then all of the software will then use that. In the meantime, you can get those hyphens by typing -- before the signature, exactly like everyone who dislikes taking their hands off the keyboard has been doing for years. (You can even type --~~~~ in visual mode, and it will auto-convert it for you on the spot, so you can see your signature before you save.)

The local community at this wiki has chosen to use Flow. It has some problems (e.g., it's not integrated into Special:Search). One of its advantages, however, is that you will get an Echo notification about this reply, as soon as I click the Reply button. This is particularly helpful for a wiki that has a lot of people who normally contribute to other projects.

Aschmidt (talkcontribs)

Thanks for elaborating, @Whatamidoing (WMF). I'm glad to see you are after those bugs already. As to no. 2, I suggest to introduce "paste as plain text", as we know it from, say, the text editor in LibreOffice. As to Flow, the use case you mention may indeed be helpful to some users, but I am used to keeping a to-do list in my local bookmarks for the talks engaged in on all platforms, and I have switched off most notifications because I don't like them. But that's only my POV. :)

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)

"Paste as plain text" already exists ( Command+ Shift+V in Safari on a Mac, but it varies per browser/OS). However, most people don't think to use it, and I'm not 100% certain it solves all of these cases.

(There are permalinks for each Flow thread, which you can bookmark. I think that might work better for you than bookmarking the whole page.)

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