VisualEditor/Feedback
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Use this page to tell the Wikimedia developers your ideas and issues about using VisualEditor. The Editing team welcomes your feedback and ideas, especially on user interface decisions and the priorities for adding new features. All comments are read, but personal replies are not guaranteed. This page uses LiquidThreads, so you need to click "Start a new discussion" (not the ordinary "Edit" link) to post your message.
Test for feedback[edit | edit source]
- User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.104 Safari/537.36
I am merely testing the new feedback feature
Erik Moeller (WMF) (talk) 05:48, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
"File a technical task" button is confusing[edit | edit source]
- User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.104 Safari/537.36
The grayed out submit button in combination with the highlighted "technical task" button is confusing -- it suggests that the primary action of this form is filing a task, which actually discards the form's contents.
Alternatives: Provide an initial choice in the dialog, or demote one of the actions.
Erik Moeller (WMF) (talk) 05:52, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
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Dear friends, as the VE was made available on Czech Wikinews, I started experimenting with it as I also use it on Czech Wikipedia. However, I met two issues, that are probably rather special for WN:
- We use standard aliases
[[w:to link the Wikipedia articles. When the article is editted in VE, the links are however interpreted as external links[http://cs.wikipedia.org/... ]. If no change is made within them, they are not changed, but one cannot edit them as aliased interwiki links.
- For creating new articles or new daily survey pages, the pre-filled templates are used. When the user links the "create new article" box or a "create new daily survey" link, the classical wikitext editor window is opened pre-filled with the template. Is VE ready to use such a functionality?
Thanks for answers/improvements.
HI there, sorry for the belated answers. About n.1, regardless of what the links currently look like, they can indeed be edited (of course, you won't be able to see suggestions of possible articles you'd want to link to), you only have to change the actual page title and not worry about the rest of the URL. About n.2, not really (but could pre-filled templates be added, would TemplateData allow this? Asking @User:Jdforrester (WMF) here), but I think that when switching back and forth between VE and wikitext editor will be possible, that should be an acceptable workaround.
I'm not part of a community, I just have a wiki running at work and at home. The primary barrier to rolling out the wiki to everyone else at work is the editor. Is there a way for an individual user or customer of MediaWiki to become a beta tester of VisualEditor and provide feedback?
On your local wiki, you mean? You could set VisualEditor as a Beta Feature, I guess - there's a related extension, but I don't know what you would need to do after installing it, so I recommend asking the VE team live on IRC, #mediawiki-visualeditorconnect, usually after 5pm UTC.
The Wikimedia Foundation has named its top priorities for this quarter (January to March). The first priority is making VisualEditor ready for deployment by default to all new users and logged-out users at the remaining large Wikipedias. There will be weekly triage meetings which will be open to volunteers beginning Wednesday, 11 February 2015 at 12:00 (noon) PST (20:00 UTC). Tell Vice President of Engineering Damon Sicore, Product Manager James Forrester and other team members which bugs and features are most important to you. The decisions made at these meetings will determine what work is necessary for this quarter's goal of making VisualEditor ready for deployment to new users. You can help identify these requirements. The presence of volunteers who enjoy contributing MediaWiki code is particularly appreciated. Information about how to join the meeting will be posted at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal shortly before the meeting begins. Hope to see you there,
Could you give some more information about the triage meetings, so that we can share the news (and I think it's more than only news, it's a shift in involving people into the development road) in our projects. Is it IRC, hangout? Is there an agenda?
Hi Lyzzy! So from what I know, what happens this week is that Damon and James will elaborate a bit about the criteria for triaging bugs which are now listed among the Measures of success - Prioritised functional and technical objectives here (that is, bearing in mind this quarter's goal of making sure VE is a good experience "for anonymous users and logged in users who have never edited"). Then they'll start evaluating VE tasks on Phabricator live, according to the criteria just discussed. This live evaluation is what the meetings will be about. (That's why we're looking for volunteer devs who might want to provide their angle and, hopefully and most importantly, try their hands at fixing some bugs.) I still have no information about how this will happen, partly because it depends on the kind of support we get from the IT team in San Francisco, partly because it's quite likely that the format will change in time based on participation - one thing is interacting with 10 people, another thing is interacting with 100 or 1000, and we really can't predict right now what the turnout will look like. What I do know is that the process of announcing the series of events is a work in progress - further notices will be sent to mailing lists, technical village pumps etc. in the next hours. I can't make any promise about when more information will appear on the Portal page linked above: shortly before the meeting begins is accurate, although we're doing everything we can to get most details fleshed out ASAP. Thanks for your note,
User:Lyzzy, and others, please see Talk:VisualEditor/Portal#How_to_join_the_triage_meetings. Thank you!
The next bug triage meeting will be at midnight UTC on Thursday, which is 16:00 PST on Wednesday for West Coast folks. This one is timed to be easier for some people in Asia to attend. Information about how to join is at Talk:VisualEditor/Portal (if you've never used WebEx, then please plan some extra time to get it set up), but as of this message, the "follow this link" will take you to last week's meeting, which won't be very useful. I'm trying to track down the new link, and it will be posted there before the meeting starts.
Minutes from the last one can be read on wikitech-l here.
Howdy. This is your reminder that the upcoming VE triage meeting will be held on Wednesday, 4 March at 08:00 PST (16:00 UTC). Full information about how to join the Webex call or the IRC channel, and the links to the IRC logs and minutes for the last appointment, live as usual at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal. I'm looking forward to seeing you there!
Hello, I have been visiting Prague with my company and our professional photographer... I uploaded some 2015 photos from The John Lennon Wall... Maybe you want to use them, to show little more from the John Lennon Wall in Prague.
Thanks
Perhaps this question is too broad for this page, but I would like to know if there is plans for an interactive "onboarding" process for first-time users of the Visual Editor?
Currently, when you first hit "edit" in the visual editor, there is a popup box that says welcome, and some info about the VE. After you dismiss that, you're on your own. I recently came across this blogpost which explains the the onboarding process for Duolingo, it also reminded me of the similar, and very very good, onboarding process I experienced when using the new OpenStreetMap editor for the first time. Both seamlessly took me through a little training exercise before letting me loose on the real project.
So... I know it's not in the scope of the VE team's work to improve the software, but is there plans to create a seamless, interactive (i.e. not "go read the documentation first then come back and try again") onboarding system for the Visual Editor - that a first-time editor is presented with? There are obvious questions to answer about "would this interfere with the 'immediate satisfaction of seeing your changes' that gets many anon's to start editing in the first place?" and "would this be presented to existing users who are using the VE for the first time, or only to newly registered users?". But, as a general idea, is this on the drawing board?
Hi Liam, so I think that what you want is something like this. I'd +1 your idea so badly. Unfortunately, as you can see, there's code writing involved (not exactly my "piatto forte" ;) ) and there may be blockers behind the initiative (like this one) on which I have no control either. Maybe James will come up with an even better idea!
I'd also look at what Jack Herrick at WikiHow has done in this regard, as they did lots of testing and tweaking to find out what the first edit experience would be like for WikiHow. He's done Wikimania talks about this in the past, but I'm sure he'd be happy to share this verbally too.
Thanks, Andrew!
Actually, I just learned that [1] exists :)
Yes, that is a good idea! I realised after my initial suggestion that the two distinct user-groups (new wikimedians vs. existing Wikimedians using the VE for the first time) have quite different needs... The former group would probably benefit most from a guided tour that focused more on the "rules of wikipedia" but the latter group would benefit most from a technical tour specifically designed to highlight the "new ways to do x, y and z". Not only are these different things, these require different wording. e.g. for a guided tour about external links. We would want to tell:
- Newbie editors about what kinds of links are appropriate (referring to "reliable source" policies).
- Existing editors to place the text they want linked first and thento highlight those words and click the "link" icon - not the other way around which they are used to.
The table editing functionality is very much wanted. Will this be available with MediaWiki 1.23?
It's very unlikely. Back-porting that much code would be perilous and complicated, and it's not something we're planning to work on at WMF.
Thank you for your reply.
May I ask for an advice?
We are finishing an upgrade of our wiki from MW 1.16 with FCEditor extension.
We decided to use MW 1.23. The reason is: MW 1.23 is a LTS version.
We want to use VisualEditor, but without table editor it seems like we will offer our editors poorer functionality with VisualEditor than the existing functionallity they experience with FCEditor.
Will VisualEditor in combination with MW 1.24 (latest stable) give us table editor?
Will MW 1.25 be a better choice?
We are not in a position where we can use much resources on keeping MediaWiki and extensions up to date. That is why we wanted a LTS version.
Paugul
Why is the VisualEditor "Save" button is at the end of the toolbar? (Right in LTR, left in RTL.)
In other desktop word processors the save button is in the beginning of the toolbar.
I somehow didn't think about this till now because it didn't bother me personally, but a user in the Hebrew Wikipedia asked about this, so I'm wondering: why is it so?
It is a very good way of editing. I can't see what I am editing when normal editing, and I make mistakes on edits. but the visual editor solves all that. I wish it becomes a permanent thing on wiki.
We would like to have VE enabled on the Sandbox on the Finnish Wikipedia. As the Sandbox is in Wikipedia namepace it's not possible to use it there. I found out that on en-wiki they created another sandbox for user page, because VE is enabled on user pages. Anyway, I think that VE is not going to be enabled on Wikipedia namespace since there are many forums or so, I wonder would it be possible to enable it for the Sandbox?
You can create a draft namespace (enWP ns118, ruWP ns102). For this namespace enable VE and transfer sandbox or create new draft:sandbox for VE in this namespace.
It can be configured per namespace, but I do not believe that it can be turned on for a single page within a namespace. Сунприат's suggestion of using the Draft namespace is one possible solution. Alternatively, you could create a "User:Sandbox" or just a subpage in your own userspace, and invite people to use that instead.
VisualEditor is offered there by default. Do you think that people really need a separate sandbox for it?
Well, the sandbox is supposed to be like a real article, so that we can try and learn our skills.
I have encountered this issue before on Wikipedia : the training or teaching stuff does not match the real stuff.
For example, I encountered this :
On a real article, I edit. I get the Visual Editor. I want to try something. So I go to the sandbox, and I edit. But now I get a different thing, which is not the Visual Editor. This is a problem.
Some months ago, on en.wiki, I suggested this. If you have a page like User:Sandbox you can update any relevant documentation to allow people to test in that page directly with VE by giving them the relevant URL to load it (the ?veaction=edit bit). Depending on which wiki you are talking about, there may be different ways to reach the sandbox. For example, on en.wiki, if I click on the link "Sandbox" in the top right bar, I get to my sandbox and then I have the option to click on Edit beta to launch VE. On other wikis, that link might open your sandbox in the wikitext editor instead; these wikis just have to fiddle with local configuration if they want to change this behaviour.
On en.wikipedia.org and on fr.wikipedia.org, I usually reach the sandbox by typing WP:SANDBOX.
[Reposting from the English Wikipedia; no response there in over a week.]
The option, under the Cite menu, to paste or type a URL and have VE (via Citoid) build a citation is great. But:
- Right now, after the URL is put into the dialog, and the user clicks "Insert", the dialog closes. This makes no sense. The dialog box should remain open, showing the citation that has been built. If Citoid were perfect, then of course it would be fine to close the dialog. But it's not perfect. For example in the MSNBC article whose URL I used (http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/obamas-real-record-poverty ), VE/Citoid didn't add a date (though it did create an accessdate), it put "|MSNBC" in the title, it didn't list a publisher, and it didn't create first and last fields for the author's name. So the dialog should stay open so that a user can fix Citoid errors and incompleteness.
- The Cite from URL dialog retains the last URL used when opening. It should not. First, it's unlikely that the user is going to want to use the same URL twice. Second, it's contrary to Wikipedia procedures to create two distinct but identical citations. That's why "Re-use" is an item in the Cite menu. So, can we nix the retained URL thing, please?
I've been playing with the table editor in VE - seeing what it can do. It's a GREAT improvement and has enabled me to do things I wouldn't have done before! It still has bugs (like how to activate a cell, keyboard shortcuts [e.g. tab, or arrows] don't work to navigate around, and double-clicking on links in cells cause the screen to jump around), but I'm very happy with how it's working so far.
For what it's worth: if I was able to vote on the next feature that would be super-useful to add, is to make it possible to "move" (drag) a column or row to a different place in the table. I consistently find this to be the thing that I keep expecting to be possible (even though it was not possible in the traditional editor) and frustrated when it's not possible.
Also, one tiny thing about merged cells:
- When I have a merged cell, and I go to "de-merge" it, the button still says "merge". When the highlighted cell is already merged, the text on the button should instead say "un-merge" or "de-merge" to indicate to the user what will happen.
Hey Liam,
Dragging columns and rows is definitely the thing we're looking to implement next with regards to tables; it's a particularly challenging thing to re-order a column in wikitext, so making it much easier would be a real value for users. However, we've decided that it's not as urgent as performance work, so it will have to take a back seat for a while, sorry.
On the labelling of controls, this is the standard that we use in VisualEditor to mirror other editors – when you select some text which is bold, the bold button is depressed to indicate it's "on" and clicking it will remove it; it isn't labelled "De-Bold".
You are quite correct about the "de-bold" example... Now that you explain it that way, I can indeed see that when my cursor is on a merged cell, the "merge" button is in a darker shaded background - in the same way that the "bold" button has a darker background when my cursor is on bold text. I suppose then, that my feedback is that this visual feedback was not sufficient to subconsciously indicate to me that there was a state change active. In short, the colouring change was too subtle for me to "get" it. Perhaps that's just me being dimwitted, but there you go... Is something more prounouced possible (for all the things - not just 'merge'), or would that go against some styleguide?
I understand that "dragging columns/rows" is but one feature request among many. It just surfaced very quickly in my editing Tables with the VisualEditor as the KEY missing thing that I kept trying to do and forgetting wasn't possible. I realise that it wasn't possible before (in the code editor), but that just goes to show how clearly it stood out as the obvious next big thing that the table editor needed. I'll try to come to the Wednesday IRC meeting where you're soliciting for "community priorities" and see if I can't get it prioritised there :-)
You've being doing an excellent job in the last months. Thanks. I really like the possibility to add templates directly when typing "{{" in visual editor. But I would appreciate if you could manage to set directly the focus to the corresponding input field appearing on the screen. Now, I need to move my mouse and click in the field to be able to start typing the name of the template I want to add (using FF38.0a1). Thanks.
It seems to do this very shortly, and then it looses the focus again. I have filed ticket: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T87777
This was https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T85484 which is now fixed in development, but not yet deployed.
First in German, (my native language, sorry/google-translated:
- Ich sehe, es fehlt ein Befehl "Zelle einfügen"/I see it is missing an "Insert cell"-command.
- Wie kriege ich die Spalten sortierbar/How do I get the columns sortable?
- Eine fertige Vorlage zur Quelleneinfügung mit Platzhaltern: Sinnvoll/A finished template to insert source wildcard: It makes sense?, [1]. Greetings, THANXALOT for doing this!!!
Unfortunately the Modern skin isn't supported any more. It's possible that a volunteer might build this support, though.
Thank you for response. Could you outline a roadmap for such support, which steps should be done by a volonteer developer to adopt Visual Editor for additional skin? (E. g., which php sources need to be extended, how many css should be rewritten, etc.?)
How much work is hard to tell, but you would need to add something like http://git.wikimedia.org/blob/mediawiki%2Fextensions%2FVisualEditor/d64aa82c4a1436cb13995729c390906c67235117/modules%2Fve-mw%2Finit%2Fstyles%2Fve.init.mw.ViewPageTarget-monobook.css
But then modern specific instead of mono book specific.
And then register that one the root VisualEditor.php file.
I've gotten VisualEditor installed and running with Parsoid, or I think so anyway. But when I go to edit a page, it loads for a moment, then lets me edit, however the behavior is extremely erratic; Typing in text will put it all on one line regardless of breaks, using Enter usually puts the break above the line you're on, and saving changes results in a blank page with an odd character for each time you hit Enter.
Any advice or ideas on what I've done wrong here? I'm on the latest mediawiki version. Thanks for the app guys, if I can get VE working it'll be fantastic!
The visual editor of Wikipedia is very good on all aspects but while mentioning any external links I've not got any option to attach a label to the link.
Type the label first. Then select it and add a link.
Alternatively, if you add a link (so that it looks like this: [[1] ), then you can select the link, open the link tool, and you should get a button that will allow you to add a label.
It is great that table editing has been added :). Will some table settings be added in some way soon? I'm thinking of common things like making a table sortable or if there should be a border or not etc without going into edit source mode.
Regards, Daniel
In monobook we had the right margin. In vector theme of this margin is not. There is a feeling (especially in VE) of infinity on the right and edit not the page, - some "corner". I changed CSS to .mw-body {border-width: 1px 1px 1px 1px; margin-right: 1em;} and this look is much more conventional, more like editing in usual text editor (ms word, lo writer), not so frightens non-standard form editing, directly feel more confident. In my opinion, the addition of right border&margin (may be just border when VE open) may contribute to greater popularity VE. http://i60.tinypic.com/f4l3kx.png
Sometimes, starting from this morning, it took forever to load the VisualEditor. Here's the error found in the browser console:
"TypeError: mw.config.get(...) is null" TypeError: mw.config.get(...) is null Pelacakan susunan: util.getUrl@https://bits.wikimedia.org/www.mediawiki.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=id&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20150107T194503Z line 4 > eval:9:119 VeInitMwTarget@https://bits.wikimedia.org/www.mediawiki.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=id&modules=Base64.js%7Ceasy-deflate.core%2Cdeflate%7Cext.visualEditor.base%2Ccore%2Cmediawiki%2CviewPageTarget%7Cext.visualEditor.core.desktop%7Cjquery.visibleText%7Cmediawiki.api.edit%7Cmediawiki.feedback%2Ctemplate%7Coojs%2Coojs-ui%2Cpapaparse%2Crangefix%2Cunicodejs%7Coojs-ui.styles&skin=vector&version=20150107T194504Z&*:641:594 VeInitMwViewPageTarget@https://bits.wikimedia.org/www.mediawiki.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=id&modules=Base64.js%7Ceasy-deflate.core%2Cdeflate%7Cext.visualEditor.base%2Ccore%2Cmediawiki%2CviewPageTarget%7Cext.visualEditor.core.desktop%7Cjquery.visibleText%7Cmediawiki.api.edit%7Cmediawiki.feedback%2Ctemplate%7Coojs%2Coojs-ui%2Cpapaparse%2Crangefix%2Cunicodejs%7Coojs-ui.styles&skin=vector&version=20150107T194504Z&*:671:643 getTarget/targetPromise<@https://bits.wikimedia.org/www.mediawiki.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=id&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20150107T194503Z line 4 > eval:53:1245 .Deferred/promise.then/</</<@https://bits.wikimedia.org/www.mediawiki.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=id&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20150107T194503Z:47:126 jQuery.Callbacks/fire@https://bits.wikimedia.org/www.mediawiki.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=id&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20150107T194503Z:45:106 jQuery.Callbacks/self.fireWith@https://bits.wikimedia.org/www.mediawiki.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=id&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20150107T194503Z:46:431 .Deferred/</deferred[tuple[0]]@https://bits.wikimedia.org/www.mediawiki.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=id&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20150107T194503Z:47:765 handlePending@https://bits.wikimedia.org/www.mediawiki.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=id&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20150107T194503Z:159:424 runScript@https://bits.wikimedia.org/www.mediawiki.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=id&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20150107T194503Z:161:140 execute/</checkCssHandles@https://bits.wikimedia.org/www.mediawiki.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=id&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20150107T194503Z:161:613 execute/</cssHandle/<@https://bits.wikimedia.org/www.mediawiki.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=id&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20150107T194503Z:161:743 jQuery.Callbacks/fire@https://bits.wikimedia.org/www.mediawiki.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=id&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20150107T194503Z:45:106 jQuery.Callbacks/self.fireWith@https://bits.wikimedia.org/www.mediawiki.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=id&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20150107T194503Z:46:431 jQuery.Callbacks/self.fire@https://bits.wikimedia.org/www.mediawiki.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=id&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20150107T194503Z:46:474 addEmbeddedCSS@https://bits.wikimedia.org/www.mediawiki.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=id&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20150107T194503Z:156:502 addEmbeddedCSS/<@https://bits.wikimedia.org/www.mediawiki.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=id&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20150107T194503Z:155:963 load.php:150
Additional information: This only occured if I'm logged in.
Anyone having this problem too? I also cannot edit translation in Special:Translate
If you're talking about id.wiki, looks like several people are not having any issues with VE. The fact that the error occurs when you're logged in makes me think you have probably changed some setting (probably enabled some gadget or changed some script) recently which conflicts with VE.
No. The VE in id.wiki is fine. The one in mediawiki which is having this issue (I tried the VE on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Sandbox?veaction=edit). Sometimes the VE works, but sometimes not. But editing string in Special:Translate in mediawiki now always not works :(
User:William Surya Permana, do you have HotCat enabled? If so, turn it off. I believe tat Special:Translate will start working then.
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