Topic on 2017 wikitext editor/Feedback

Answered inside.

I've just started trying this. First the question: is there any way to preview edits?

The issues: it is very slow to load, up to 15 seconds. Second, I needed to look at the deleted edits of a red link, but the wikitext editor opened as soon as I clicked on the red link, which meant the deleted edits were no longer a clickable link.

Update: I've just found how to preview. There's no indication that first you have to click on save.

An external link in the post didn't show up properly in preview.

When previewing a new short ref, one using sfn, it wouldn't let me click through to the long ref, so I couldn't check that the templates had worked. When I clicked on any short ref in preview, it opened the current version of the article in another window, which doesn't help if the reference hasn't been saved.

Hi there. Thank you very much for stopping by! About the deletion log, your thoughts would be very welcome at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T176070.

Would like to take a look at that malfunctioning link if possible.

I left a note on phabricator, but I see that someone else had already raised it. It means that admins working on certain issues would have to keep disabling the new wikitext editor.

SV, the "New editor" was actually build as a wikitext-mode inside of Visual Editor. Performance is atrocious on larger articles. (The last time I tried to preview the United States article, it took over 60 seconds.) It also works kinda like Flow, using VisualEditor as a fake-preview mode. That results in a large variety of rendering errors in the preview. Audio and video files didn't display at all last time I checked, and various types of wikitext get mangled in odd ways.

See March 2017 Village Pump RFC with 90+% consensus to file these issues as deployment blockers.

Thus far there is no indication that they can fix the performance issue at all. They also refuse to provide genuine previews. Instead they say they eventually want to switch over article-read-views to VE's rendering engine. In theory that would (mostly?) "fix" the rendering problems, but it would "break" the current wikitext editor's previews.

As for the location of the preview button... I think they plan on some sort of change. However The Powers That Be somehow consider the preview button less important than the various Visual-Editor-type buttons. Last I saw they were undecided-but-resistant about giving the preview button equal placement next to the save button.

Performance is literally the key goal for this quarter for the team...

Not being able to check that citation templates work before saving is a major issue. I had to stop using it for that reason alone.