Topic on 2017 wikitext editor/Feedback

Inconsistency of the "Publish changes", "Review changes", "Show preview" and "Resume editing" buttons

4
Summary by 197.218.90.177
Epok (talkcontribs)

Hello,

I think the organization of placing buttons "Review your changes" and "Show preview" and the summary edition within the "Save your changes" overlay is very disconcerting.

I take the following series of action as an example :

  • I make some changes to a page and want to review the page before publishing,
  • So I click the "Publish changes..." button (which is a first problem : publishing is not reviewing),
  • The "Save your changes" overlay appears, I click on "Show preview",
  • The pages looks good to me, so I want to see the "Save your changes" overlay again in order to add a summary to my edit,
  • As previously, I click the "Publish changes" button again... Fail! The page is published, I didn't had a chance to edit the summary.

Indeed, the "Publish changes" button changes its role depending on the window I'm on. I actually had to hit the "Return to save form" button, and then only the "Publish changes" button. This is the exact same button (apart from the "..." which is not very noticeable), at the exact same position in the window. The "Publish changes" button on the "Save your changes" overlay is different, because is not in the upper-right of the window, but this one is at the exact same position as the "Publish changes..." button.

This is very disconcerting. The same button has various roles.

I think the "preview" button should be actually separated from the "publish changes" button. There should be a "Review you changes" button next to the "Publish changes" button, giving access to both page preview and diff. Then the "Publish changes" button should always give access to the summary editing, no matter the window we are on (except, of course, on the "Save you changes" overlay).

This is my two cents. I think there is still work to do for this new interface to be as efficient as the previous one.

Other concerns for the record :

  • We no longer have access to the tags (noinclude, nowiki, etc.), the wikicode (category, etc.) which was very useful for advanced users (I use the editor in "source editing" mode). There should be an option to add them to the interface (if there is one, I never found it).
  • The summary editor is now a text box instead of a text line. In browsers, this means we no longer have access to the drop-down history list. This is an issue when we do repetitive work with the same summary: I used to type two characters, then select the message from the list. Usually, my clipboard is used by a text or a template to paste on the code, so I can't use it on the summary.
  • Not to mention the fact that, to switch between page editing and page previewing, it takes now two clicks instead of only one before to launch the preview, then one click instead of none to edit again. This seems nothing, but for people like me who generally preview the page lots of times before publishing, this is very heavy in the process of editing.

Thanks for reading this long message. The new editor is good work, but it still need a few refinements to be as efficient as the previous one, this is why I don't use it for now. I tried it a long time, but the issues mentioned above made me disable it as I loose half my productivity. There should be an "advanced" mode I think.

John Cline (talkcontribs)

I began testing the 2017 Text Editor yesterday and thought I'd share some highlights from my first experience.

Initially, I was very confused because I could not find the preview link, I agree with Epok that it is inconsistent with how we've been molded as editors for years up to now. For me, it wasn't until I had uploaded a screenshot and reported what appeared to be an anomaly at en-VPT,[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)&oldid=869255939] where I was prepared to publish my posting without previewing it, when I learned that another screen appeared after you pressed "publish changes". I believe that needs to be improved.

It does not intuitive follow that you should press "publish changes" to expose the publishing links one would expect to exist. Considering that one of the buttons in the newly exposed view is another "publish changes" link, the first one encountered could be relabeled to make things more obvious. For example, I suggest that "'''Open publisher'''" would be, and would have been much less confusing,

Thank you for considering this, and for all that you do in support of our needs.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)

> access to the drop-down history list

This will be improved next week (sometime on 11 April 2019 on the English Wikipedia).

Epok (talkcontribs)

Thanks for this info!

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