Topic on VisualEditor/Feedback

VisualEditor still messing up citation templates

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JPxG (talkcontribs)

Check out this diff. It is still doing it: for no apparent reason, Visual Editor destroys citation templates. In this case, {{Citation needed}} was replaced with <sup>[''[[Wikipedia:Citation needed|citation needed]]'']</sup>. I don't know why it is doing this, but it creates massive amounts of work. Can it please be fixed? JPxG (talk) 20:22, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

JPxG (talkcontribs)

oh, cool, the feedback form for when VE is broken forces you to write your comments using VE.

JPxG (talkcontribs)

I have a massive regex in my AWB settings that can pretty easily detect when VE vandalizes a page -- another red flag is when it peppers nowiki tags throughout a paragraph, seemingly at random. Is there a way that we can get VE to pop up a warning or a confirmation box when someone attempts to save an edit that's adding a bunch of nowiki tags all over the page's source? It seems like there are very few situations in which this is what the editor actually intends to happen.

JPxG (talkcontribs)

Some other examples of this happening: here, here, here. This edit is an example of the "nowiki blizzard" where the tag is added at random points throughout an entire paragraph, in addition to the broken CN templates. This has been going on for months, and necessitates large AWB runs on a regular basis. Is there any way to fix it?

JPxG (talkcontribs)
JPxG (talkcontribs)

I asked one editor about this, Sakrb3791zi, who said: "I think I edited this article by going back and forth between mobile and visual editing. It most likely happened in the process of changing text editing to visual variants or vice versa. It was behaving a bit strangely, if I recall correctly. The device used is a Google Pixel 5."

JPxG (talkcontribs)

Here is a pretty egregious example, where it made an article basically unreadable by random addition of nowiki tags (in addition to messing up citation needed templates).

JPxG (talkcontribs)
TheDJ (talkcontribs)

Based on the pattern, the most likely reason is copying something from a preview or the original article, or even another article in another tab, and pasting it into the editor, preserving HTML. How is a person to know, that copying [citation needed] from somewhere is not going to insert the citation needed template? And how can the visual editor know that a piece of html is supposed to be generated as a template?

The problem here is that it looks about the same to the end user. They don't realize something is going wrong. If they did it with a big template like an infobox, it's much easier to spot that the paste result is problematic.

Here you have some more examples of a similar problem with inline reference numbers like [1] being copy pasted by users (not a VE problem anymore). When copied into VE, these no longer cause nowiki, as those copy pastes don't have wiki'able syntax. They also don't cause link syntax, as the VE likely can recognize them as ref links, due to the anchor. But do the same using a notepad app or whatever and you get this bare [1]. But VE can't really distinguish one wiki link in text from another (which citation needed actually is, just a link to a wiki page), so it's just gonna add it as what it is. A valid link, with potentially unbalanced link bracket syntax around it, which it then escapes. You could argue it could test if they are balanced or not, and don't contain an external link, but that seems like a pretty hard test....

But this isn't really new. From that list, I took this case, where an editor was doing the same in 2005, but its less noticeable. I repaired it today. Editors just aren't as aware of these as they don't contain the most evil 'nowiki' keyword.

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