Topic on Help talk:VisualEditor/User guide

Hi,

In 2015 or so, @Vikassy implemented auto-updated and auto-translated screenshots for this user guide as a GSoC project. @ZFilipin (WMF) and I mentored him. It worked well and was very useful because it kept the guide up to date with VE's current look and strings. However, the Ruby code was difficult to maintain, so if I recall correctly, @ZFilipin (WMF) and @ESanders (WMF) rewrote it in JavaScript in 2016. The screenshot auto-updating software kept working at least for some time after that.

Is this still maintained?

I see, for example, that File:VisualEditor Media Insert Menu-en.png still says "Media", even though the button label was changed to "Images and media" a few months ago.

Pinging also @PPelberg (WMF) and @Whatamidoing (WMF).

It looks like its last run was in June 2018.

OK, thanks. Maybe @ESanders (WMF) or @ZFilipin (WMF) know more about it? I remember @ESanders (WMF) investing quite a lot of effort in it in 2016.

We still have the code maintained in the VE repo, and it is ready to be run again, but I don't think I have the access to trigger it.

The job is here and I've triggered it to run again, let's see what happens. The last run took about ~9 hours...

Thanks!

The screenshots have been updated with about a 3% failure rate. I would also note that fewer than half of the screenshots in the user guide are using auto-screenshots, could be a good project for someone to improve that.

Thanks! The one I referred to in my opening question, File:VisualEditor Media Insert Menu-en.png, is updated.

I wonder why do they look a bit fuzzy, but I guess that's a separate issue.

They look fairly sharp to me..

Hello! :) I have found that File:VisualEditor_edit_tab-ru.png is outdated and File:VisualEditor - Section edit links-ru.png not exist. Is it possible to recreate this two screenshots or recreate all screens on that page?

Those images are no longer generated by the bot, probably because it requires the per-wiki configuration to know if we should show one edit tab or two, and all the screenshots currently run on a test page on en.wiki. I would recommend you just generate them by hand.

Are there any other screenshots that need to be manually corrected? To me, in any case, the scheme seems to be quite inconvenient. Better to take all screenshots, and then replace if necessary. Otherwise, it appears completely outdated.

The design team is working on updating so much of the interface right now, that I wonder whether it'd be better to do that in a few months. I understand that OOUI is going to be replaced, (so the 'blue button' will look a little different), and there's the Desktop improvements project, which will make several changes to the appearance. Wtih all that coming up, any screenshots we make now will be outdated by New Year's.

The "replacement" of OOUI will likely not affect the design of the major components, it's more a technology change.

In my opinion, this should be done with every design update. The bot does not ask for food :) And while we wait, many users will receive outdated documentation.

I was thinking of the human effort needed to make manual ones. The bot used to run automagically, on a set schedule (just checking to see whether any update needed to be made), and that's fine with me.

Creating new screenshot tasks is unlikely to be on any team's priority list any time soon, but volunteer patches are always welcome.