Topic on Talk:VisualEditor/Diffs/Flow

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T200476

I hate these alternative talk page formats. Guaranteed to gum up everything. Try to get feedback, and then send people to a non-standard format. Brilliant. Bad enough to send people from English Wikipedia to a wiki where all the links back will need interwiki links. Most of your useful comments will be coming from English Wikipedia. So if you really want lots of useful feedback set up the feedback page on English Wikipedia using standard wikitext formatting.

List of countries by infant and under-five mortality rates. You figure out the link. I do not have time. After hitting the review link before publishing I see that the row number column for the CIA table is out of whack. Line heights are exaggerated. I will press publish anyway and see what happens. See diff:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_countries_by_infant_and_under-five_mortality_rates&type=revision&diff=851538407&oldid=851533298

Row number column is fine. But VisualEditor fucked everything else up. It so frequently changes formats and other things without it being directed to do so. It changed table away from horizontal wikitext for rows. Now it is a mixture of horizontal and vertical. Idiocy after all these years. I had used VE to add a column. One great thing that VE does. Should be some mechanism to tell VE to maintain horizontal format for rows in tables.

It looked like you made things align properly in this edit, by removing the extra paragraph breaks that you'd added to the header cells. The English Wikipedia adds vertical space between "paragraphs", so that explains why the line height was larger in those cells than in the other table. There is, unfortunately, no way to insert <br /> in the visual editor right now, so you have to switch to a wikitext editor to do that.

List of countries by infant and under-five mortality rates. This crap talk page editor does not even have a way to make this link work as an interwiki link. I bothered to look.

I did not fix the rest of the table. See the wikitext for the CIA table:

*https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_countries_by_infant_and_under-five_mortality_rates&action=edit&section=2

Note that the visual editor put every row on 2 lines of wikitext. It was on 1 line before VE:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_countries_by_infant_and_under-five_mortality_rates&action=edit&oldid=844664241

I added some more numbers to the 2017 column in the CIA table. When I go straight to publish (no review) it looks fine throughout the whole process. But when I click the review button the static row number column on the left has varying line heights for the rows. As do the table rows. So they do not align. I am not sure what review is supposed to do. I thought one of the main points of VE was to eliminate much of these intermediate previews and reviews. WYSIWYG and all that.

> But when I click the review button the static row number column on the left has varying line heights for the rows. As do the table rows. So they do not align.

When I click the "Show preview" button, the number column on the left has the same (matching) line heights that I see after the page has been saved. The rows labeled 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc., all have the same height. (The header cell, with no label, has the same two-line height as "Country or territory" in the next table.) Are you seeing different row heights? What is the content in the rows that have the wrong height?

(About this editor: if you want to write in wikitext, then click the pencil icon and switch to wikitext "source editing". It will remember your preference for the future.)

• en:List of countries by infant and under-five mortality rates

OK. I think I nailed it down. Enter a few numbers in the 2017 column. Then click "review your changes". I see now that the varying line height is not in the left column of fixed row numbers. The varying line height starts exactly where I entered the first number. Enter a few numbers from this source so you can feel free to publish too to see what happens every step of the process.

• https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2091.html

Thanks for the wikitext entry point, but this editor has some many quirks, idiosyncrasies, bugs, and differences. What the hell are the developers thinking? Explains so much about the cluelessness about what gets done and not done on the Wikimedia software. Wasting time on this piece of crap talk page software, instead of doing one of the top ten requests: fully-integrated, bug-free, interwiki, global, fine-tunable, customizable cross-watchlists. What are we paying them for? Why is the Wikimedia Foundation so out of touch?

Well, it's possible that they aren't so much "out of touch" as "in touch with more people than just highly experienced editors like me". What works for me doesn't work for new folks. And, to be fair, part of the vision is to build a modular, locally controllable system that could replace the duct tape and bublegum that is AFD at enwiki, which would mostly benefit power users like us. They just aren't finished. In the meantime, having replies from "off wiki" automatically ping anyone who's watching this discussion (without having to watch the whole page) on the other wikis is pretty nice.

When you talk about varying row height, are you talking about the wikitext or about something that's visible to the reader? VisualEditor (well, I think it's actually Parsoid) is expected to change the wikitext from a single row:

| | |[[#UN_Bulgaria|->]]

into one line per cell:

| new numbers
| |[[#UN_Bulgaria|->]]

when you edit that part of the table.

VE is weird. When it added a whole new blank column (the 2017 column) it went from one row to 2 rows. But in one of the rows (of each pair of wikitext rows) it created space for the new column. It could have gone from one row to 3 rows right away. So VE has the capability of being programmed to add a cell to an existing wikitext row, or to start a new wikitext row. I just wish it would have a setting or option to keep a table row in one row of wikitext. And I wish it had another option to convert a table into one wikitext row per table row. It is much more intuitive. And there will always be a need to edit in the wikitext. Tables are too complex to probably ever be completely editable in VE for all options.

To see the increase in row/line height in review mode you have to actually enter some numbers using VE into the 2017 column to see what I am talking about. Did you do that? If not, try it. Then click "review your changes" (which shows up after clicking "Publish" the first time). The cells with the new numbers have greater line height in their cells and rows. Maybe that is being done on purpose in order to emphasize the changes. If so, it is confusing in a WYSIWYG editor.

I just looked at AFD (has been a long time). I see obvious areas for improvement. Most obvious being that it took me a long time to find the link to the transcluded page of an AFD discussion. Most developers are clueless without this kind of fresh examination and feedback. So it is difficult to put the individual AFD on a watchlist. This is basic and obvious to me. But I will be ignored as usual. I bother less and less. Anyway, there should a transcluded watchlist link too. Probably in noinclude tags.

My suggestion is to follow the principal of least surprise when trying to add on to Wikimedia software functionality. I have seen other systems of transcluded wiki talk page threads that looked better than the one at AFD. They allowed the same ability to watchlist individual threads. And they used standard wikipedia editing. Nothing changed in the editing toolbar, etc.. No attempt at VE on talk pages.

Here's what I have been seeing (I added the same number as the previous year):

Is this what you're seeing?

I'm really struggling to understand what you mean by "row/line height". To me, that means the number of vertical pixels taken up by a row. I suppose that the blue box might be one pixel taller than the gray ones, but it actually all looks the same to me. Does it look the same to you?

Here is a screenshot of the "review your changes" screen after I added 3 more numbers (the last 3 consecutive ones in this image) to the 2017 column. Note that the rows are taller for those 3 countries: Benin, Bermuda, Bhutan. It is confusing since I was expecting to see a review of what the end result would be. It is more like a wikitext "show changes" screen in a way. It seems to be emphasizing the changes by increasing the line height of those changed rows.

Sorry, I was completely missing the idea that you were looking at the visual diff, because you started in the visual editor. I couldn't find any previous reports about this, so I filed phab:T200476 for you. Thank you for sticking with this until I understood the problem correctly. :-)

You are welcome. I was completely baffled by so much in this thread. Learning how to use this talk page editor, learning more about using the visual editor (which I rarely use), learning about the AFD method of putting individual threads on a watchlist, row/line height (I just happened to be studying the CSS line-height:1.6em for wiki tables pasted in email), etc..

This kind of experience makes me wonder how anyone actually gets started as a new (regular) editor any more. It wasn't so complex when we started.

I've heard from other folks that this talk-page system, although incomplete, has been adopted for user talk pages on a few Wikipedias, where it generally does good things for newbies. They can figure out how to click a "reply" button, and it automatically signs and dates their replies. Also, you don't have to watchlist someone's whole talk page when you only care about one thread. But it's different, and we old-timers already know how the old system works, so it's a bit awkward for us at first. I wasn't thrilled about converting this page to this system, but I've pretty much gotten used to it, and it's okay now. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

Wikia has tried various methods in its central forums. I have seen various versions on Shoutwiki. After looking at various talk systems I conclude that the bottom line for the greatest success, simplicity, and utility is to use the exact same editing toolbar as on the current Wikipedia talk pages.

The wrappings don't matter much. All the addons such as auto-signing, auto-dating, etc.. The wikitext editor is a fallback that has yet to be bettered by any VE type talk. It is OK to integrate VE and wikitext editor. But there must be a way for users to choose a standard wikitext editor on talk pages, threads, and forums. Then there is almost no learning curve. Then the options are appreciated, and not considered an imposition by the evil WMF, etc., etc.... :)

Individual topics that can be watchlisted are great. But inside them there must be the option for a standard wikitext editor and toolbar. The exact same one as on Wikipedia talk pages.

> But there must be a way for users to choose a standard wikitext editor on talk pages, threads, and forums. Then there is almost no learning curve.

If that were true, then things like this would not happen on free-form wikitext-based talk pages.

Now, if you meant "almost no learning curve for the tiny fraction of people who have already mastered the existing system", I cheerfully grant that you are correct. But there are not so many people in the world who can claim our skills.

Most people coming to the hallowed halls of MediaWiki.org are adept at talk page wikitext since VE is not used on talk pages of Wikipedia (at least on English Wikipedia). So a standard wikitext editing toolbar is actually the easiest thing for them. And all types of questions, answers, tables, etc. can be discussed and shown. The limited-function editing toolbar here is exasperating.

I have no problem with VE as an option on talk pages. Best of both worlds. But it should be as close as possible to the VE on Wikipedia. See my point? Otherwise we are introducing a 3rd and 4th way of editing. As is done here.

This can be done. And still have separate topics.

Crippling the wikitext editor, or crippling the VE editor, in order to make it "simpler" for use here is a failure here in my opinion.

Well, I think it'd be the 15th way of editing, counting only those in current production, but I think that two of those editors don't work on talk pages, and I'm not sure about another two.

The full toolbar for the visual editor doesn't fit on smartphones, which is a problem that the Editing team is looking at during the next year. I think this system is using the limited version from one of the mobile editors (or something like it).