Topic on VisualEditor/Feedback

https://phabriitcator.wikimedia.org/T103635

When attempting to insert an inline interwiki link, even if you try to put a colon at the front of the link, VE strips the colon away and turns it into a sidebar interwiki link.

With sidebar interwiki links handled by Wikidata by default now, we should treat attempts to enter inline interwiki links as inline links by default. If somebody wants to add a sidebar interwiki link, they'd do it on the sidebar...

(Offending page: w:yue:哈利寶)

That's doable by prefixing the link with a colon, see www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project%3ASandbox&type=revision&diff=3311547&oldid=3311546 .

No, my bug report is precisely about the fact that this cannot be fixed by prefixing the link with a colon inside VisualEditor. VE strips the colon even if I attempt to insert one at the start of the link. I had to get out of VisualEditor and edit source to get the correct link in.

Your bug report is incomplete. It is a bit like saying you're sick because you can't see, which is true if you're in a dark room, but isn't indicative of sickness. The link above shows an edit made with visual editor clearly(www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project%3ASandbox&type=revision&diff=3311547&oldid=3311546) adding a inline interwiki link. It could be improved to not require colons and there's already a phab task for that.

Please follow these exact steps to reproduce this bug.

1. Open a page in VisualEditor
2. Type some text
3. Highlight the text
4. Click on the link icon to turn the highlighted text into a link
5. Type a page name with an interwiki prefix into the link destination box, e.g. :de:Haribo
6. Click "done"
7. (Optional: Click on the link text and then click "edit" again to see that VE has already stripped the leading colon. You can add the leading colon back at this stage and VE will strip it again.)
8. Save page
9. Upon saving page, the new link becomes a sidebar interwiki link, not an inline interwiki link.

I am unable to reproduce the behaviour in your diff () inside VisualEditor myself.

The instructions now make sense. I can still link like that the trick is to create the link directly using the link dialog instead of linking existing text.

Anyway there is already an existing bug report for that.

It's a slightly different issue: phab:T103635 wants VE to guess that the user wants an interwiki link rather than a sidebar link when there is no prefix. This bug report is about making VE not strip the colon when the user has deliberately added a colon to signify that they want an interwiki link.

I have created phab:T228977 for this issue.

It actually does work. If you paste full link without the link dialog inspector to the page and then change the label, see www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Sandbox&oldid=3329373 . The tasks are essentially the same. In principle nobody should ever need to enter a colon to create an interwiki link nor should it even be allowed by the interface because that's wikitext that newbies should not need to know.

That's also not a valid character in a link anyway.