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Image link is not working when adding files from wikimedia commons SariSabban (talk) 08:27, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

@SariSabban: to get this clear, you are trying to create a LINK to an imagepage on Commons, not to "include" an image from Commons ? That indeed isn't possible right now (just as including a link to the Polish Wikipedia isn't possible). This might be slightly confusing I guess because the Commons pages are 'first class' citizens when including them as images. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:54, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

I've noticed a few problems with the logo. The line spacing seems to be messed up, it looks its been set to "1ex", 3ex is a more typical value. However the insertion cursor is looking like its been give an 220% fontsize. There is also a bug with the insertion cursor partially obscuring the character under it and shifts the character under it leftwards. (The line spacing might be baseline:subscript, but that can't be as VE does not support subscripts.)

I've tried to reproduce the bug using CSS: visua|editor

Should I file a bug report? We would not want the logo to give a negative impression of the project. --Salix (talk): 14:11, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Where is this a problem? — Edokter (talk) — 15:13, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

I find Visual Editor useless for long articles, because even when I use the Edit tab on one subsection, the system insists on loading the whole #$%?&* article and scrolls at the speed of molasses. Yesterday I wanted to make a very simple edit - to change "is" to "are". Unfortunately the article was 73K long and VE loaded it all, then it took 5 minutes to scroll and find the sentence which needed changing as Ctrl-F worked VERY slowly, and I finally changed "is" to "are". Then I tried to look at my edit before saving - possible but took another 5 minutes! Then I saved at looked at the revision history, and was horrified to see that my revision was marked not (+1) for adding one (net) character, but (+4,036)! The system had duplicated a whole table from one point in the article to another, and a quote box as well, and the article was now not 73K but 77K. Possibly I clicked somewhere I shouldn't while waiting for the interminable load or the interminable scroll. Fortunately I was able to undo the damage much more quickly with Edit Source; I reverted my own edit and then edited the one subsection and changed "is" to "are" again all in 1-2 minutes.

This was all very frustrating and I will not be using VE again except for the shortest articles, at least until it is possible to load and scroll a single (sub)section and edit it alone in isolation as is possible with Edit Source. Dirac66 (talk) 20:07, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for reporting. I went and looked at your recent edits and found that you had edited Chemical element. I investigated the problem with the table duplication and as it turns out the problem was with Template:Periodic_table_(nutritional_elements) which had an unclosed table which I fixed. While this wont solve the slowness issue you experienced, this should at least fix the problem with duplicating a table. Ssastry (talk) 21:17, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for finding the error - now I know it wasn't something I did 8-)) This means though that Visual Editor is susceptible to some embedded errors with Templates. When I redid the edit 3 minutes later with Edit Source no such problem occurred. Dirac66 (talk) 21:47, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

The following discussion is marked as answered. If you have a new comment, place it just below the box.

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54228

In this [1] edit, and the preceding edit which created the article, I had attempted to add a lineup of refs and in both edits. I had expected to have a total of 7 refs like this [2], however, in both edits, managed to add one ref only. Rest of the refs disappeared magically. This seems to be some kind of bug.OrangesRyellow (talk) 04:08, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not disputing that there is a bug, but you might want to read WP:OVERCITE before continuing this approach to adding citations. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 04:31, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

I accept WP:OVERCITE is relevant there. I had added that many refs because I had just created the article and did not want it to get deleted due to notability concerns. The refs will be more spread out as I develop the the article and use those refs to get in more content. So, the OVERCITE problem will disappear as we go along. Thanks for the pointer though.OrangesRyellow (talk) 06:16, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

@OrangesRyellow: Notability concerns are absolutely a priority when creating an article. An alternative, I think, would be to put online sources into the "External links" section and non-online sources into a "Further reading" section, just above the EL section. My (limited, admittedly) experience with deletion discussions is that editors don't look at where sources appear in the article, but rather just at the quality of those sources and their relevance to the topic.

And, to return to the main topic at hand, it would be good if someone else were to test whether adding (say) seven footnotes in a row results in anything unusual happening with VE. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:07, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

@ John Broughton. Yes. Putting excess links in FR/EL sections looks like a good idea. In my experience, even trying to add two refs in a row (in one edit) results in one of them disappearing.OrangesRyellow (talk) 06:01, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

In my first test, VE seemed okay with 6 refs in a row. On my 7th, using Chrome, the editor seemed to get really upset with me. It wouldn't allow me to exit the reference tool, and it would not save the reference or the changes I had already made. I'm going to test that again. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 16:06, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Okay, I replicated the bug at 6 refs. See screencap. Seeing how many it will permit. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 16:52, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Seems like it will permit one. At least using bare urls, it would not even save two for me on Chrome, using Windows 7. This is a problem. Filing. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 16:55, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

First of all, the panel is currently almost totally unlabeled, which is very confusing. Anyway...

It seems to me that almost all citations are (and should be) created via templates, but this interface encourages manual formatting, which seems like a Bad Idea. Sure, you can include a template with the dauntingly-named "Transclusion" button, but then you are staring at another bafflingly labeled panel with a text field. This doesn't really make finding the template you need easier.

So here's what I propose: Templates work with Wikipedia categories. So why not set up a category namespace just for citation templates, with a nice taxonomical structure. Then you have a UI in the reference panel for drilling down through that structure. So if I wanted to cite a podcast, I might click "Multimedia", then "Audio", then "Podcast". Or if I wanted to cite a journal article, I could navigate through "Print -> Academic -> Journal". Then I'd be taken to a form to fill out the fields for that template. This could be a walk through sort of "wizard" or just a tree-view like any old file browser. Doesn't really matter. Note that a template could still be in more than one category if it made sense, e.g. "Map" could be filed under both "Multimedia -> Visual" and "Print -> Reference".

There are several really nice features of this proposal. First, it would be totally backward compatible with how things already work; it just needs UI on top of it and volunteers categorize the templates. Second, it finally fixes a major pain point in adding actual substance to articles, since searching for citation templates has always been laborious for occasional contributors (I have at least once given up on an edit because I lost patience). Finally, it would make the organization of the citation UI totally user driven - was the template for "DVD notes" not where I expected it? I can fix it myself! mistercow (talk) 00:47, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

@Mistercow: There are only fifteen specific citation templates, plus an overall ((Citation)) template, per Wikipedia:Citation templates . You're not really proposing a separate namespace with a total of sixteen pages, are you? Similarly, given the relatively few citation templates, why is searching for citation templates "laborious"?

There has been some discussion of just putting citation templates on a menu, within the References dialog box. They you'd only need a single click to select the citation template you want. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:59, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

@John Broughton: Wikipedia:Citation templates does not list all of the templates there are. There are 28 templates under Category:Citation Style 1 templates alone. I understand how it seems aesthetically awkward to create a namespace for a relatively few pages (though far more than 16). But the purpose of using a namespace for this is to use an existing technical feature to mark those categories as meaningful to the reference editor. The main purpose of namespaces in programming is to keep names sanitary. The number of items in a namespace really isn't that important of a consideration.

The same effect could be achieved by using a specific category within the main Category namespace, but that is more likely to lead to accidental contamination by users. A new namespace would make it clear that these particular categories are of special importance to the MediaWiki software. Also keep in mind that MediaWiki is not just used by Wikipedia. Other wikis will have different citation templates. Giving a category special meaning to the software without a new namespace would be an exceptionally bad idea. mistercow (talk) 12:02, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Five templates, ((cite book)), ((cite web)), ((cite journal)), ((cite news)), and ((citation)) account for about 95% of templated citations. Most of the existing ref tools focus supported between 3 and 8 templates. One can cover most use cases with a relatively small support set. Dragons flight (talk) 16:31, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

That seems a sensible way to improve the VE cul-de-sac. ((sfn)) and ((efn)) with ((convert)) are the two templates I need all the time during page generation. These should be a one touch control key sequence- it is a shame the Ctrl-t is already taken. The notes/footnote/citation blocks are c&p'ed from a similar article and the unused ones deleted at the end, <sarcasm> thank goodness you can safely C&P all these references from a similar article </sarcasm>. The other task is to hunt out ((cn)) templates and convert them into ((sfn)), ((cite book)), ((cite web)), ((cite journal)), ((cite news)), and ((citation)).

Finally, WP code is written for 'users' convenience not that of the 'coders'- so when will this made-up word 'transclusion' be replaced with a term that is Joe Bloggs normal vocabulary. Take a step back- just try googling for it in the non wikiworld. -- Clem Rutter (talk) 18:43, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

The following discussion is marked as answered. If you have a new comment, place it just below the box.

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Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54243

Go to any page that is a subpage, such as a user sandbox. Observe the link to the parent page, located just under "From Wikipedia...". Activate VE. Observe that the aforementioned link disappears. Hover over that area. The link, though not visible, is still clickable. This occurs in Firefox v22.0 and Chrome v28.0. This occurs in Vector and Monobook skins. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 05:08, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Followup: The same thing happens when I try to VEdit an old revision of a page. The warning message at the top ("This is an old revision of this page, as edited by...") introduces phantom links. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 00:30, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Great find! Now reported :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:56, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Keep getting this error on edits Error loading data from server: Unsuccessful request: Invalid token. DennisDaniels (talk) 07:23, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Oh dear; that looks like a timing out bug. Does it occur regularly/consistently? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:58, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

The gallery at the bottom of GNB2 renders very differently in VE for me in Firefox, with three columns instead of four. The ((Gallery)) invocation for that page is at ((PDB Gallery/2783)). Has this type of problem been reported? John Vandenberg ^(chat) 11:48, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

This gallery is a 'width' based gallery, and does not have a fixed amount of columns. It seems the width of the cells is slightly different in VE mode. Minor issue. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:46, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Worse is that it has double captions, caused by incorrect interpretation of the inline mode of image transclusion. This is part of the VE that is still heavily in development. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:48, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

@TheDJ:, thanks for figuring it out. Have you seen a bug about this? I couldnt find one in the 'visualeditor caption' quicksearch list. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 14:46, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

The Visual Editor should be disabled for the following types of pages (in main and user space) because it is of absolutely no use there:

• the Main Page - Rarely will one encounter a Main Page with editable content; it is usually just transcluded pages or parameter-less templates.
• user .js and .css pages - a no-brainer; VE is useless for editing code.

— Edokter (talk) — 15:07, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

(Removed unrelated personal opinion.) I would appriciate not hijacking this thread to spew personal opinions. Let's keep on topic. — Edokter (talk) — 15:45, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

The Main Page is editable only by admins, since it's fully protected; I wouldn't expect the VE team to be interested in coding an exception just for admins.

I looked at a user .js page and a user .css page, for me, and I didn't see VE enabled for them. So either the VE team anticipated your proposal, or reacted very quickly to it, or the two of us are seeing different things. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:20, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

It seems they already fixed that one indeed. That leaves the Main Page; VE is pretty useless there, even for admins. Besides, it would save loading stub code for VE that is not used there anyway, which could save quite some bandwidth for the most openend page. — Edokter (talk) — 20:31, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Try copying the mainpage to a user subpage, and editing in VE. It might work fine. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 21:29, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Doesn't work at all; all content is transcluded. — Edokter (talk) — 22:11, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

On the Main Page, your point is well taken - the English version gets 9 million page views per day, on average; that's an opportunity to load VE stub code 9 million fewer times per day,just for the English version of that page. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:31, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Non-admins don't see VE on the main page, and I doubt the VE stub is the biggest performance hit with regards to bandwidth of the main page. ($.ime appears to be one of the biggest problems on a cold cache, as it is not needed to render the main page (but it might be needed for the search box?)) I'm sure the network guys will yell at the devs if they leave too much unneeded JS being sent 9 million times per day ;-) John Vandenberg ^(chat) 03:13, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

With the way the devs are treating us editors with our comments its unlikley they would do anything even if the network guys did complain. Kumioko (talk) 13:30, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I followed a link to German Wikipedia, so lets give you a few more bugs.

• I have done everything possible to opt out of the the shoddy beta version- to my horror, you have to opt out all over again. Instead of the clean 'bearbeiten' we now have 'bearbeiten/quelltext bearbeiten'.
• Following the ?BETA button on the top bar I get a popup telling me to read the manual.
• I cant cut and paste the text here as C&P is disabled.
• I click on the link Lies das Benutzerhandbuch and I linked to the English Language version which suggests to me that these messages have been hardcoded- rather than filtered through a data-dictionary, so whole of the Visual Editor source code will need to be rewritten when a new language is added!
• The German feedback page is regimented into threads which IMHO makes it deliberately unusable.
• There is no table on this page to links to similar feedback pages.

It was an interesting trip to make. Are we going to be given statistics for VE take up in the other wikipedias? When can we expect global opt-out?-- Clem Rutter (talk) 23:39, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

You'll find dashboards for VE on other Wikipedias at meta:Research:VisualEditor's effect on newly registered editors. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:10, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Just for information, the German Wikipedia created also a poll about VE, overwhelming consensus against the deployment as the default editor de:Wikipedia:Umfragen/VisualEditor_Opt-in. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 04:26, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor has been changed to opt-in at the German Wikipedia, per this statement from the WMF. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:20, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

So what's it going to take to get the same treatment here?—Kww(talk) 16:32, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

A similar poll ? (wishful thinking...) --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 16:37, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Die Verwendung von Wikitext wird selbstverständlich auch nach der

Wiederaktivierung des VisualEditor möglich sein. Der VisualEditor ist und

bleibt optional, und kann während der Beta-Phase auch komplett aus der

Benutzeroberfläche entfernt werden.

-- James Forrester, Produktmanager, VisualEditor-Team

I don't want to spoil good news but why, when you have opted-out of VE in one language do you get thrown back into it when you enter another. und kann während der Beta-Phase auch komplett aus der Benutzeroberfläche entfernt werden seems a little ingenuous, or out of touch. So what was de:wikipedias secret, could they share with us a pointer to the type of pressure they used to rescue their users? -- Clem Rutter (talk) 18:00, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't know if anything could lead to a similar treatment here, but I will highlight what I think dewiki did right. They avoided distractions. Their poll was a simple actionable question. Given the current state of VE, it should A) be deployed by default for anons and everyone else, B) be deployed by default for registered users but not anons, or C) be made opt-in only for all users. (This was slightly undermined by the addition of a confusing fourth choice after polling started.) If you want to give clear guidance about what people think about a software package, it helps to ask clear questions. By comparison, enwiki's discussions have been scattered and the polling we have done on the subject has been confused by too many options or questions that don't easily lead to actionable responses. Dragons flight (talk) 18:35, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree with you, that's why I talked about a similar poll (the one that was held on enwiki was too confused and too far from being neutral). I also think that there's been a beginning of change in WMF position about the same time as Jimmy got back from holidays (first, the option to opt-out, then this decision for dewiki). --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 18:40, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Should we run a new poll here? I mean, WP:VE/FAQ already shows fairly strong support, but I'm not that concerned if it's preferred to restart. We should probably have a sitenotice, though, to get widespread input. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 18:56, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I think a new poll would be a good idea. I wouldn't have thought a community poll would be enough to sway them but now that the precendant has been set we should go forward with the idea as well. I also think it needs to be limited to 2 options. A) Keep the editor enabled by default, as it is now; B) Make the Visual Editor opt in only. We can always reenable it for all users later when the problems have been resolved but I think we nearly all agree that there are just too many problems currently. Kumioko (talk) 19:00, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

The elephant in the room: the German Wikipedia already made one credible threat to fork, over the image filter. It is much easier to give them the off switch than to risk such a movement again - David Gerard (talk) 19:41, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I also think a new poll would be a good idea, with just a choice between "enabled by default" or "opt-in" (and if "opt-in" is decided, it can be changed later). And eventually a site notice or edit notice to have user know about the poll. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 20:24, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

For what it is worth, if we are going to have another poll, I would include all three states that the WMF has been using in their deployment choices, i.e. enable for all, enable for registered users only, opt-in only. Dragons flight (talk) 20:33, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Its all to do with pushback. I had an email exchange with Sue Gardner, basically all the angst about VE was expected. I think they were planning for a lot of "resistance to change" (my words) for the release. People screaming for it to be switched off was expected. People calling it a buggy piece of rubbish was expected. The foundation was actually surprised how little pushback there was before July when you had to opt-in, and pushback now is about what is expected.

So far the pushback from en wikipedia has not be strong enough, de was more organised with a greater number of votes: 480 for opt in our RFC with only 39 for disabling just does not measure up. de has also been better in taking things to bugzilla, which is where the developers listen. Posts on-wiki have little effect where the foundation/developers are concerned. The Dutch wikipedia has done even better you can't even use VE there, but this is mainly due to a bug which badly affected that wiki. We have had some success and have been successful with the disable VE preference, we are likely to see action on the hover effect on edit|edit source T52540.--Salix (talk): 21:18, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, I think they are mistaking "resistance to change" with people being fed up with the deployment of a buggy, unfinished and non fully functional software (which is an objective statement I think, and not just "resistance to change"). The fact that they got less pushback than expected before July is a clear indication that it's not just resistance to change, but really a resistance to buggy software: before July, I think most people here didn't believe that WMF would really proceed with the deployment (as the number of bugs was important and major features were even thought through). So, people just took it quietly, expecting bugs to be fixed and features added before the roll-out.

dewiki and nlwiki handled things a lot better, but they also had a few weeks to prepare themselves, here we were fighting every week to stop the deployment for going an other step further. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 21:43, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

See #RFC over default state below.—Kww(talk) 03:04, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

This edit makes me fell like im more likely to make changes as it looks less imposing 142.162.223.104 (talk) 01:36, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Great to hear! Let us know if you see any bugs. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:04, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I think we should, if there is sufficient interest, create a WikiProject for VE, at Wikipedia:WikiProject VisualEditor. At Wikipedia talk:VisualEditor#WikiProject VisualEditor, I've listed a number of tasks that such a WikiProject could work on. Please comment on this proposal (including an interest in participating) at that talk page, not here. Thanks. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:16, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Default State RFC has been opened. Be nice. Be respectful. Don't vent.—Kww(talk) 01:30, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Pretty please with sugar on top, could we please get a countdown to the end of the VisualEditor beta? For whatever reason, there are a group of people that miss all the messages when there's a change. I fear that when the beta phase of the VisualEditor ends, we will have to go through the whole VE switchover thing all over again. So I think it would be helpful if there was a m:CentralNotice that counted down the last 5 days before the VisualEditor beta period ends and the switch to VE becomes finalized.

There are a lot of good people helping others learn how to use the VisualEditor and answering questions, but they have been through a lot recently and I would hate to see them have to go through that all over again. I think a countdown would help these dedicated folks and their efforts to help others with the VisualEditor. Thanks for considering this suggestion. 64.40.54.39 (talk) 01:31, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, we'll definitely need to do lots of communications around the end of the beta time period. It's almost certain that some users will continue to hide VisualEditor completely via a gadget, as well. Markup editing is not going anywhere -- users will continue to have the choice between the two modes.--Eloquence* 02:58, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks very much, Erik. You've done a great deal of work improving our projects over the years, so it means a lot to me to have your support. I sincerly appreciate your efforts. Kind regards. 64.40.54.39 (talk) 03:42, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

I've not followed all the discussions about references, but it's still a nightmare. Click on "Add a reference", and unless you know about "cite web" etc there's no clue what to do except to add a free-formatted reference with no links etc.

Having added a couple of references, I want to re-use one of them. There's a helpful looking button saying "Use an existing reference". It leads me to a box asking "What do you want to reference"? What? I want to re-use my existing Ref 2, at the point where I've got the cursor. What sort of question is that? No clue as to how to do anything. Will have to add that reference out in Edit Source. (Have the existing references got names? If not, will have to add a name, too). Not going well. PamD 11:04, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

It would be good if the most common cases were intuitive. i.e. adding a webpage or journal article can be done without any help pages. We could add an icon after the transclusion icon, which offers : webpage, journal, book, doi, pmid ; clicking on one of them would automatically set up the right transclusion dialog. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 11:41, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

I too think that adding new references is comparatively cumbersome in VE. I find the referencing tool in the old editor very convenient. However, for reusing an existing ref, I think the VE is more convenient. If you look below the box saying "What do you want to reference"?, the existing refs should be listed there. You can click on any one of them and go on to reuse them. Actually, the box containing the message "What do you want to reference"? is a search box. If you type any word in that search box, the list showing existing refs would be whittled down to the refs containing that word. So, finding the desired ref is easy. You can click on the desired ref, and reuse it.OrangesRyellow (talk) 11:56, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, Oranges: my two refs weren't listed as you describe, so I don't know what was going wrong there.

In general terms, when I've clicked on "Add reference", there should be some buttons for "Get help to add a reference to a: book / website / journal article / newspaper item", to lead to the citation templates, rather than expecting the editor to (a) guess to click on the transclusion icon, and then (b) know the name of the template they want. We could bypass those two stages and lead the editor to the appropriate citation template. And within that template, having added one or more parameters, we need "Add another parameter" rather than having to click back on the template name. I don't think an inexperienced user has a cat in hell's chance of adding a reference at present. PamD 12:38, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, reopened it in VE and the "use existing reference" worked like a dream. I wonder why it didn't work first time? PamD 12:46, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Did you save the two refs before trying to reuse them? Reuse function does not work on refs which have not been saved yet. I second your request to bypass the two stages you described. I guess we are requesting a workflow similar to the referencing workflow in the source editor referencing tool. I think improvement in the referencing technique of VE should speed up its usage across Wikipedia. I think the VE has the potential to have a referencing technique superior to the source editor. It just needs some tweaking to the community's tastes.OrangesRyellow (talk) 12:55, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm actually talking to James about this today. I'm going to try and write up what comes out of the conversation. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:18, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Apart from reproducing the old cite toolbar functionality, a nice feature to include would be another button beside "Use existing reference", one that says something like "Modify existing reference and use here". When you click on this it brings you to essentially the same list of existing references, but when you click on one of them in this list, it makes a new reference but copies all the old information from the existing reference that was selected and then places it in this new reference, and then the dialog goes back to the original reference view so that the editor can change the page number, etc. This allows quick referencing, comparable or perhaps even quicker than source-code, of the same work or volume when just a new page or chapter is being cited; since most articles don't use Template:rp.

On top of this another couple of useful features would be (1) some note in the normal reference view when a reference is used more than once, "This reference is used in multiple locations in this article." And (2), when this is the case, a checkbox with a label like "Modify for this location only." Then, if this checkbox is checked, and any changes are made, when the editor presses "Apply changes", a new reference is made with the content as modified and put in that location, but the old reference is left unchanged. This way one can change an incorrect page number without having to create a new reference, nor run any extra risk of accidentally changing a reference for all locations when only one location needed fixing. --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 18:57, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

I think I like this idea. If you've got several similar sources (e.g., side-by-side articles from the same periodical or chapters from a book), you could save some time by copying the one and changing only the titles and authors. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:59, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

@Okeyes. Thanks. IMO, the important things to keep in mind is that, like in the source editor referencing tool(SERT), getting to the common ref templates like cite news, cite web, cite book, cite journal should require as few clicks as possible. Like in the SERT, clicking on those templates should provide a ready-made form with 5-10 commonly used parameters visible all at once, with an option to show some additional less commonly used parameters, so that most users can get done without requiring to add parameters one by one. Having to select and add parameters every time one wants to add a ref is cumbersome. It can be made even better if users had an option to devise and save their own ready-made forms with pre-selected parameters for any ref template, and access these self devised templates from buttons on the VE. Next time they want to use the ref template with the same set of parameters, they just need to click a button and start adding the data. This should be a big advancement on the SERT, and please power users, besides being convenient for eds who use various types of specialized ref templates. I understand adding a functionality like this may not be easy. I am willing to give it some time...OrangesRyellow (talk) 09:18, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

@Okeyes (WMF), PamD, and John Vandenberg: In the meantime, would someone mind submitting a bug report that the search box hint, "What do you want to reference", should say "What existing reference do you want to use?" Because, as Pam pointed out, the existing hint can be read as asking the user "What text do you want this citation to apply to?" Hopefully this is something that is easy to change. Maybe it's something that we here can fix via localization rather than waiting for the VE team to react? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:22, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

The search bar should actually have been removed; are you still getting it? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:00, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

@Okeyes (WMF): The search bar in the References dialog box, visible after one clicks on "Use an existing resource', is very much still there (Chrome, Firefox, Safari). Are you saying that it's going to be removed, or that a different search bar has already been removed? (I ask because I'm trying to keep the User guide current.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:37, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Neither; it should've been removed, and has been for me. How very strange :/. O...kay. I'm going to go down to 3rd and headscratch with the devs about this.

Unrelated; I had the chat about referencing with James F on Thursday. Basically they're looking to make some general improvements to reference editing as it stands, but more importantly integrate (on a per-wiki basis) equivalents to the cite functions that exist in the markup editor. You'll get a set of buttons pointing at commonly used templates, and clicking will open up a template dialog populated with the various parameters. Obviously this can be made more elegant (and the template dialog itself needs to be made more elegant) but they hope to have that in place in August (taking into account Wikimania). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:44, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

@ Okeyes (WMF). Thanks for the update. The plan looks good. The search bar is still there for me. Besides not having to learn and wade through complicated wikicode, the search bar is one of the smartest things about VE. It is very easy to reuse refs through that search bar, particularly when the article contains a large number of refs. (Try reusing a ref in an article with 100-150 refs through source editor and then in VE through search bar, and you will see the argument). So, I would request that the search bar should be kept. I feel most people do not know about the search bar because the present caption "What do you want to reference ?" seems confusing and does not provide a good clue that it is a search box. I think the caption should be changed to something like "Search and reuse existing references". That should immediately convey the meaning and purpose of the search bar. I guess, people will like the VE lot more if they saw this search bar there. Reusing refs in source editor seems comparatively difficult to me and the VE clearly outscores it there. Why delete a smart feature?OrangesRyellow (talk) 07:43, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

I wouldn't treat this as a permanent removal; more a "we know bits don't work very well, so let's strip it down to something more basic and build off that". This isn't to say the search bar won't be returning - I don't know the answer to that question, I'm afraid - but instead that something being removed doesn't mean it's gone forever. The restoration of the old interface serves as a good case in point, I reckon :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:13, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

For problem cases like List of X-Men (TV series) episodes where Visual Editor cannot be safely used, I've developed two little templates: ((disable VE top)) and ((disable VE bottom)). Any text that lies between those two templates cannot be edited by the Visual Editor. If you place them in an article, please make sure that an edit notice like Template:Editnotices/Page/List of X-Men (TV series) episodes is in place to make editors aware that the inability to edit the section is intentional.—Kww(talk) 05:44, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

If we add a specific class to that template as an option, we can use MediaWiki:Common.css to hide the edit links to the VE on these pages using the same rules as found at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Opt-out#Firefox, leaving only 'edit source' links which go to the SE. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 06:22, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

I've got no objection to that, but I think we'd need a wider consensus than just us. The template as it stands can be used to protect a subsection as well: if there's an individual table that causes trouble, only the table needs to be protected.—Kww(talk) 06:32, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

@Kww: "only the table needs to be protected" - have you tested that? John Vandenberg ^(chat) 14:50, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Not heavily. Certainly wouldn't hurt if you wanted to play with it.—Kww(talk) 15:44, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

The only problem I see: when the dev team releases a significant update, we'll get a better sense of the update's effectiveness if this template isn't used. Many eyes make shallow bugs, right? --Cryptic C62 · Talk 00:54, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Procedure: Go to George W. Bush. Click "edit this page" to activate VE. Press Ctrl+A, the shortcut to highlight all text. I got the following error:

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.

Script: https://bits.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=ext.visualEditor.base%2Cmediawiki%2CviewPageTarget%7Cjquery.visibleText%7Coojs%7Cunicodejs.wordbreak&skin=monobook&version=20130727T023558Z&*:2

Alternatively, if I scroll down a bit before pressing Ctrl+A, my browser scrolls down to the bottom of the page and then freezes for a few seconds.

Using Monobook in Firefox v22.0 on Windows 7

-- Cryptic C62 · Talk 00:47, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Ctrl+A isn't one of the shortcuts listed at mw:VisualEditor/Portal/Keyboard shortcuts. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:15, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Listed or not, it certainly functions as expected, and selects everything on the page.—Kww(talk) 03:22, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I have intentionally avoided looking at any documentation pages, including the keyboard shortcuts page. I'm not interested in seeing how VE reacts to some hypothetical contributor who colors in between the lines. I'm interested in seeing how VE reacts when you actually try to use it. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 12:41, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

This page is certainly a nice performance test case. On my 6-year-old 2Ghz desktop PC, I can't reproduce the aforementioned issue either in Chrome or FF. It definitely takes a while to load the whole thing, and then CPU is usage is pretty high, so with a slower machine it seems likely to be operating near the limit.

Is it just Ctrl+A that triggers the warning, or does it also happen if you interact with the document in other ways?--Eloquence* 06:06, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

@Eloquence: After highlighting the entire article, pressing the bold, italics, or numbered list buttons cause the multi-error behavior that John describes below. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 12:41, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

It takes my Dell Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz (5985 bogomips) computer 2'15" to switch into VE mode on the GW Bush article, with the busy script warning appearing twice. After pressing Ctrl+A, then delete, the warning appeared 10 times, and I gave up and cancelled it after 10 minutes, and I am left with a half deleted article. This computer has no problems performing other tasks for my day job, and Google Docs never causes that warning. Just to compare, I copy the entire G W Bush article into a Google Doc, and it is instantly visible and I can scroll through it - No worries - I dont get a script warning. However to be fair, Google Docs eventually tells me I am disconnected from the server, and it hasnt saved the document ;-) However I've worked on some large spreadsheets and docs without problems, so I think their app doesnt like something about the G. W. Bush article. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 07:33, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

It's bizarre to see it be that much slower on a faster computer. What OS/browser is that? Here's a full measurement on my machine (4000 bogomips/2 Ghz):

Chrome 28/Ubuntu 12.04

Switch into VE: 13 secs

Ctrl+A: instant

Delete all: about 5 secs

Firefox 22/Ubuntu 12.04

Switch into VE: 26 secs

Ctrl+A: instant

Delete all: 5 secs

I wonder if there's any other JS that might be slowing down execution. Do you see the same performance editing a long article as an IP?--Eloquence* 15:23, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I do seem to remember that VE/Parsoid is very dependent on caching. So probably if you reload the same page twice, it will be significantly faster. Another issue might be cache fragmentation between users due to options these users have set. If you have an option enabled that is 'not default', it might be that it has to start from scratch for certain users. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:55, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

My test results, all done on List of jōyō kanji on Windows Vista (2.00 Ghz):

Quick summary: Load times and errors do not appear to be affected by user status, but are affected by browser. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 22:07, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Adding a reference link is too hard for your target audience. I did ask weeks ago for the planning documents, design mockups, or whatever concerning the reference template interface. Maggie said she'd look into it. Did these ever turn up? - David Gerard (talk) 18:27, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

We've already changed the references panel a fair bit, getting rid of the confusion of presenting the user with a prominent choice of selecting an existing reference. The mid term plan is to implement support for citation templates (in a manner where each community can configure its set of preferred templates, if any). I know Vibha (Interaction Designer) has done some initial thinking on that, let me ping her to see if there's anything in shareable form yet.

I suspect T54241 also plays a role here; the fact that URLs show up as plaintext is confusing.--Eloquence* 20:31, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I think it's more that adding references is actually harder with the VE, and that how to give a text label to a URL is still all but undiscoverable. (I remember there's a way, I forget what it actually is, and if I have to read a manual then the VE interface has failed.) - David Gerard (talk) 20:56, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

The easiest way is type text->select text->add link. The reason it doesn't show a "link label" type dialog when you add a new link or edit an existing one is that this would require yet another full-fledged VisualEditor invocation, as links can be made around mixed content (including e.g. inline images). However, we could show a link label input when a new link is being added, and possibly when we detect that the link is purely unformatted text (the majority case).--Eloquence* 21:42, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

See Bugzilla:50945 and Bugzilla:48789 for discussion about link label input. Thryduulf (talk) 11:05, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

While I was hoping for a visual editor, it just makes it more difficult to make things like infoboxes, references, etc. MatthewHoobin (talk) 21:45, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor is still very much a work in progress and so things should get better as bugs get fixed, etc. If you have any specific issues then please note them here so particular improvements can be identified and tracked. Thryduulf (talk) 11:19, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

The recent (last couple of days?) improvement in the template interface -- presenting some documentation information on screen in the jigsaw puzzle piece dialog -- makes a huge difference in usability; thanks for that. I have been using VE whenever I could while editing an article with lots of templates, and was unable to quickly figure out how to use the parameters in a template I wasn't familiar with. That's no worse than ordinary editing; normally what I'd do is bring up a second tab with the template documentation and work from that. However, now that the params have definitions on screen, the interface is significantly better than with the wikitext editor -- I'm still going to have to go to the template page for some things, but this is a big milestone and very welcome. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:03, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll pass this on to the dev team :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:45, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

I've experienced issues to do with image search, size and captions. AFAICS these aren't fully documented in the existing bug reports:

• When adding a new image, the media search feature doesn't find long names.

Steps to reproduce (tested in Chrome 28.0.1500.72m on Windows 8 Pro 64-bit, logged in to https:enwiki as Pointillist (talk · contribs)):

1. Find an image on commons with a long filename (e.g. File:St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph.org.uk - 501812.jpg).

2. Choose a relevant article in which to insert it (e.g. W. S. Lach-Szyrma).

3. Click the "Edit" tab to edit the entire page using VE.

4. Place the caret at an appropriate insertion point and then click the media button.

5. Enter the filename in the search box (e.g. St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph.org.uk - 501812.jpg)

The image is not found

6. Progressively trim the filename by destructively backspacing from the end of the string. After each backspace, pause to allow the search results to refresh:

In my test, the search first succeeded with the string "St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph.or"

Search also succeeded with "St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph.o"

Search then failed with "St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph."

Search then failed with "St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph"

Search then succeeded with "St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograp" and all shorter strings

7. Save the page (the result was this version).

• The image was inserted with a fixed size (in this case 225x225px). As discussed (here) a few weeks ago the Forced image size guideline discourages this, saying that fixed image sizes "should be avoided where possible, since it overrides the user's default." Bug 50379 says it would be preferable to have no explicit size. It might be better to make upright=1.0 be the standard for newly inserted images.
• The VE provides convenient grab handles for resizing images. I question the need for this. It is just making it easy for inexperienced users to do something they shouldn't be doing. If an experienced user has a valid reason for using a non-standard image size, they can edit the source. Image resizing should be done using the upright parameter anyway. Ideally an attempt to re-size an image using VE should convert the pixel-based width into the equivalent upright parameter using the contributor's current or default preference. That would transparently promote best practice rather than undermining it. It would also help with bug 47804.
• For similar reasons the proposed image property dialog (bug 38129) should default to using upright-based ratios.
• When I clicked on the search thumbnail to select the picture I wanted, the image was immediately inserted into the article. I had to manually invoke the Caption dialog. The contributor should automatically be prompted to provide a caption when inserting a new image. Perhaps this could be added to the improvements listed in bug 49662 or bug 38129.

Thanks - Pointillist (talk) 11:04, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

To elaborate on the last item - currently there are two image-related dialogs: "Insert media" and "Media settings". There should be just a single dialog: Media. If the dialog begins with an image selected, then it would offer various edit options, plus the options to replace and to delete the selected image. If it begins without an image selected, then it would offer the option of selecting a new one. In both situations, the dialog box would include edit options for thumb versus frame versus full (radio buttons; default is thumb), the text of the caption (including retaining the existing caption for a replacement image), and left versus right alignment (radio buttons; default is right). And selecting an image would not terminate the dialog; it would move the user to the choices related to that image, including size. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:12, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

That sounds like a very good approach. - Pointillist (talk) 17:12, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

There is now a provisional WONTFIX on the nowiki bug T52527. JDF thinks its better left to an abuse filters, like Special:AbuseFilter/550. As there is no likelihood of this getting better we might need to toughen up the filter. One thing which could be done is to set it to "Prevent the user from performing the action in question" but only if the edit comes from VE. I'm not quite sure how to test for such though.--Salix (talk): 16:19, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

The point of the bug was to have what the AbuseFilter currently does baked into the software. I'm not sure how rejecting that request means we need to strengthen the AF. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:42, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Because as it stands, the abuse filter can't block the edit. It has a non-zero false positive rate, and VE's habit of placing the nowikis in really odd places relative to what it is trying to escape makes a regular expression nearly impossible to code. On the other hand, if VE would just stop behaving in a way that every user that has commented on it says that it should not, the problem could actually be fixed.—Kww(talk) 16:49, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

I think it also still the case that VE doesn't tell the user in any manner useful to humans why an edit blocked by the edit filter didn't succeed. Thryduulf (talk) 17:06, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

That has been fixed: the edit filter notice is displayed properly now.—Kww(talk) 18:28, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Can I just clarify: are you saying that there is no intention to stop VE spraying text with nowikis? -- Clem Rutter (talk) 18:36, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes; James and Erik have stated in some detail (I can't find the specific bug, I'm afraid) that this will remain the case. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:49, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Then I think using Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Default_State_RFC to ask the WMF to turn VE off is the right step, if VE is not going to be fixed. Look, I'm trying to rant less, but I really do think the VE team is horribly ignorant of what users actually want out of VE. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 18:58, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

In that case, a major task for the proposed WikiProject VE will to plan and organise a permanent, ongoing clean-up-after-VE task force: devise scripts to list affected articles, see how much can be entrusted to bots and how much will have to be done by human volunteers. There will be a lot of work: I see that Filter 550 was tripped 50 times in the hour from 18:00 to 18:59. JohnCD (talk) 19:09, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Even at 50 trips per hour, this can be managed feasibly with AWB. I am not competent enough to start doing this on my own, but am teachable. We need the edit filter that logs new nowiki tags to produce a list of articles, so we can review each one quickly in AWB. AWB can automatically remove the nowiki tags, and the operator can skip any new tags that are warranted (which appears to be the small minority).

Just so we are clear though - we are talking about maybe an hour of experienced editor time to manage this, every day forever, because WMF is unwilling to accept feedback on how the software is actually used. Sheesh. VQuakr (talk) 19:55, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Yeah that's pretty much correct. Creating a script for AWB or something else to strip the nowiki tags is easy. The problem lies in that we have no way of knowing for sure of the nowiki tags on an article were placed in error by Visual Editor or were there already for some valid reason. It would be better IMO to assume that the users want stuff to display rather than assume they do not and surround the text with nowiki tags. This adding of nowiki tags wsa stupid to begin with there is no reason to continue doing it. It needs to stop. That's not a request or a suggestion. That is a requirement if the WMF wants VE to be accepted by the community. Kumioko (talk) 20:17, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Agreed that we cannot write a bot to remove all article space nowiki tags, for the same reasons that we cannot block all nowiki tags via an edit filter. Fixing this will require a person in the loop, and will be more efficient if performed using a semi-automated script. VQuakr (talk) 21:40, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

That clearly demonstrates that the VE leader doesn't give a damn about the encyclopedia quality, with hundreds of articles being damaged every day for nearly a month. Stop that nonsense and shut VE down. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 20:40, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

On a more constructive note, WPCleaner now has some functionality to deal with 550 errors (see Wikipedia talk:WPCleaner#Fixing VisualEditor errors). There was also some discussion at WP:BOTREQ about coding a bot, but that has been archived. I remain convinced that a bot that posted a note on user talk pages would really be helpful: "You seem to have damaged [article name] with [diff this edit]. Please help repair that damage. If you intend on continuing to use VisualEditor, please don't use wikitext. If you used VisualEditor by mistake, you may want to opt out." -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:28, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Meh. We can discuss more on the bot page about notification functionality, but do we really need another bot throwing out notifications that no one will read? Putting the cart before the horse by attempting to modify user behavior to fit a crappy interface never works. Better to just clean up the nowikis and move on. VQuakr (talk) 02:19, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Can 550 be set to identify VE edits and disallow? That would solve 99% of the problems. Black Kite (talk) 02:23, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

There is presently no way to distinguish VE edits from other edits with the filters. There is a bug report requesting that ability. Dragons flight (talk) 02:30, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Bah. I was hoping it was possible to distinguish ?veaction from ?action. Black Kite (talk) 02:37, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

I am confused by 550 log entries. There are lot of entries there, but only a fraction (~110 in 12 hours that I counted) have a diff link that corresponds to a nowiki being actually added. I looked at last 500 entries tagged VisualEditor and found only 5 entries in the 1 hour that the log corresponded to (21:46 to 22:46 CST). So, the current rate of nowiki seems to be < 10 an hour and not 50 an hour as has been claimed earlier in this thread. Can someone independently verify this? Ssastry (talk) 03:57, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

The filter has been set to warn editor before they save, giving them a chance to correct their work. This means some have "Actions taken: Warn;" (a warning to the user) and others have "Actions taken: Tag;" (the edit was actually saved). You can ignore the warnings. Also of note is the filter instructs them to try source editing to remove the nowiki, so you do see a number of cases where the user corrects in a subsequent edit.--Salix (talk): 05:45, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Over the last few days- possibly the same time frame where the "opt-out" was introduced- I'm getting several-minute load times and pages that load with no content. Edits and previews may time out instead of completing. This is browser-specific and site-specific: The slowdowns occur only on Wikipedia and only in Safari 5, which is unsupported and doesn't even give me the option of using VE in the first place. It's clearly not a CPU issue, or the fan would rattle loudly. Yes, the obvious answer would be to use a different browser, but I have my workflow set up. A new computer is not in my near future, so it's only a matter of time before VE supports none of my browsers. It's just a web page: It ought to work.

I don't have a complaint with the existence of a visual editor, but it should be an "opt-in" thing, not the other way around. It could be handy for small edits, but I do a lot of copy editing, the kind of project that works better in a text-based editor. Why make it harder on the people who have demonstrated the most commitment to the site in an effort to accommodate those who have made little or no commitment? Is there really a huge pool of talent just sitting there waiting to make its presence felt if only there were a visual editor? Dementia13 (talk) 14:44, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

I too have suggested the "opt-in" but like everyone else on here making valid suggestions, it was shot down in the rudest manner by people who seek to remind us that wikipedia is not a democracy. What future does a website have if it doesn't listen to the people who use that website? The answer is it doesn't have one. I too have had the problem of slow loading times and glitching and thus have been going elsewhere to find my information. I say vote with your feet and do the same. You're not going to get civility, sensible answers, compromise or common sense from the people running this fiasco. --Rushton2010 (talk) 18:30, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

@Dementia13 and Rushton2010: - Just to be clear, have you opted out via the new preference (the one on the editing tab, not [just] the one on the gadgets tab)? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:23, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

It's possible this is an issue with the mw:Universal Language Selector, which was introduced at the same time and gave strange bugs of this sort. Ask on Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) - David Gerard (talk) 08:24, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm opted out via prefs: There's no sense opting out via gadgets, as VE doesn't display in my browser anyway. Regarding ULS, I tried the suggestion of loading some different Wikipedias that have not yet enabled VE, and I'm having trouble with those as well. This suggests that ULS might be the problem, and it offers even less recourse. I've heard of Safari slowdowns with the introduction of style sheet elements that it can't render, so I'll give that style sheet-based solution a shot. If that doesn't help, I might finish the article I've been working on and then ride off into the sunset. Dementia13 (talk) 16:19, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I imagine speed improvements are probably high on the list of ULS focus areas; I appreciate this is very frustrating. @Runab WMF: any updates coming down the pipe? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:02, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Might want to take a look at this, where a good-faith attempt by an unregistered editor to update a table on a sportsman's page resulted in...very strange things happening to the table. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 18:52, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

It looks to me like it's just "tidying" the formatting of the table code. This may or may not be desirable, but is essentially harmless - unless I'm missing something and it has altered the table display at all? Thryduulf (talk) 19:01, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, it did, see the lower right corner. I just encountered this, possibly related. The table originally contained invalid html-leftovers, but displayed correctly. VE tidied that up by adding more invalid code, with a result that wouldn't display as a table anymore. Of course it's not VE's fault if there is invalid code beforehand, but we have to expect that such invalid, but correctly displaying code is present on many pages, and transforming it into invalid, wrongly displaying code is not too helpful... — HHHIPPO 19:13, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Ah yes, I see the problem in the first diff now, it seems to be an instance of T53954. The second diff you give is a different bug, but I don't have time right now to investigate whether it's a known one or not. Thryduulf (talk) 19:57, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

So in the second case the > definitely wasn't intended? The rankings table actually doesn't look broken to me. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:22, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, try the immediately following edit. That added another >, this time on the line the table starts, which breaks it. It's definitely a VE artifact, you can verify that by editing one of those revisions: make a trivial change anywhere else on the page and then 'review your changes'. What triggers VE to do that seems to be the extra > at the end of the line the table starts, but I've no idea why it's doing it. — HHHIPPO 21:26, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Why abuse nowiki for situations such as James' mistake"? Shouldn't it be marked ''James'<!-- -->'' mistake? If marked correctly, it also has the advantage of being far easier to find the bad nowikis. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 20:09, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Another option is James' mistake. GoingBatty (talk) 03:05, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, we could, but it would prevent the problematic text being visible at all, and would cause snarl-ups once we get HTML comment viewing and editing fucntional within the VE. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:42, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

while attempting to change List of Minor Recurring Characters in Star Trek The Next Generation. Error happens in beta version, on Fx 22 AllanVS ^{talk contribs} 20:35, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

This is some sort of timeout error, see the section with this same title further up this page. Thryduulf (talk) 21:43, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Is this happening consistently? How long did you have the page open for prior to hitting save? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:43, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

There's a request to advertise Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Default State RFC at the watchlist at MediaWiki talk:Watchlist-details#Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Default State RFC. Participation in either or both discussions is appreciated.—Kww(talk) 22:31, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

• Related poll at German WP of 98% to make VE only opt-in: The similar, but 2-day, poll (27 July 2013) at German Wikipedia logged 98% of 465 reponses under the choice to keep VE as only Opt-in. See 458 responses (in German) on page:

• de:WP:Umfragen/VisualEditor_Opt-in#VE vorerst nur als Opt-in (wie vorher)

That thread translates as "VE only as Opt-in (like before)" and had 458 responses (98.49% of 465) within 2 days, while 7 responded to extend VE as the default for IP users (although one said the extension was to increase WMF's damage to the German Wikipedia, to show more people what the Foundation was planning to do). Anyway, the only-Opt-in decision, of the German WP poll, was submitted as Phabricator to leave VE configured as the initial user-opt-in feature. -Wikid77 (talk) 08:38, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

That bug is marked "RESOLVED". Here's why (7/29 posting):

In response to community feedback, VisualEditor will be temporarily switched back into opt-in mode on the German Wikipedia. We don’t intend to otherwise alter the near-term VisualEditor deployment schedule, except in case of emergencies.

As we did in the case of Dutch Wikipedia, for instance, which was exempted from the phase 2 rollout, we try to accommodate community concern in the process of this rollout. VisualEditor is the single largest and most disruptive change to the user experience in the history of our projects. Not only is it still beta software, it also depends on us working together in partnership to update documentation, add template metadata (which is used by VisualEditor to make templates more user-friendly), and deal with unexpected issues. We appreciate your patience and feedback, and we have no intent of taking your partnership for granted.

We also recognize that there are still significant areas for improvement (e.g. performance, handling of tables, insertion of special characters) as well as work we can do to reduce the incidence rate of problematic markup changes. As we continue to support the beta where it is deployed, we’ll also update the German Wikipedia community on progress in these areas, and prepare for re-enabling VisualEditor later in the calendar year.

As a reminder, VisualEditor has always been optional to use, and can now also be completely hidden from the user experience (as an individual preference) in wikis where it is enabled by default.

-- James Forrester, Product Manager, VisualEditor team

-- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:45, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

The following discussion is marked as answered. If you have a new comment, place it just below the box.

---

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54317

Editing a stub I clicked Save Page and the box appeared dropped down the screen so that the "Save Page" button wasn't visible unless I scrolled it.

Tried to follow Thryduulf's notes on how to upload a screenshot but they don't match my on-screen experience (Vista, Firefox22, vector I think): no "summary" box visible, no indication how to proceed, thoroughly frustrated - there must be an easy way to add illustrations to this page?

... and now that I tab back to the offending page, the dialog box has moved back up to the top where it should be. But I've still got the screenshot, could upload if useful if given advice on how to do so. Perhaps it was just VE being v-e-r-y slow. PamD 07:32, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

PamD, the save box did exactly that to me at around 05.01 UTC. It moved to the bottom left corner of the screen, partially off screen, with the only way to click its contained buttons being to use a scroll bar. I assumed it was because I had just made a change to my vector.js (adding John V's switch editor script), so i cleared my cache and everything was back to normal. Now I wonder if it was just a temporary site js/css glitch if it affected you too. That's all I've got... Begoon ^talk 11:11, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, the screenshot would be helpful as I can't quite picture what you mean. Sorry the instructions don't work for you - I don't have a Windows computer so I can't see what you are seeing. If someone who does can help, please edit User:Thryduulf/How to upload screenshots of Wikipedia to improve it. Thryduulf (talk) 09:56, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

I've made some changes to the guide, including adding a couple of screenshots (don't know why I dind't think of that earlier!), let me know if that has helped. I have also added a link to it from the editnotice here, Maggie/Oliver/etc do feel free to move or copy it to somewhere else if you think that is better. Thryduulf (talk) 11:02, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Believe it or not, when making a change to the guide I think I've encountered the problem described - see screenshot! It seems that the top right of the dialog box is positoned below the location of the last change, without reference to placement within the window. As my change was to the left end of the page, the left of the dialog was off screen, although there was plenty of vertical space here so it looks like no scrolling was required. Was this what you saw? Thryduulf (talk) 12:04, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Almost, but mine was off the very left hand edge and bottom of the screen, and the save box had a vertical scrollbar which I needed to use to even make the buttons visible for clicking. I didn't take a screenshot unfortunately, because I thought it was a js/css cache glitch, having just updated my vector.js.

From memory, though I'd say your astute observation that it positioned relative to the change made sounds correct - I was editing at the very bottom of the screen.

I'll try and make the same sequence of edits again exactly - to see if I can replicate it. Begoon ^talk 12:23, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Heh - that actually worked, it replicated - Windows XP SP3/Chrome Version 29.0.1547.18 dev-m - edits in my contribution history from [7] marked as test sequence in edit summaries. Note that the edit isn't marked as Visual editor in my history because I used JV's switch editor before saving, as that's what I did last time - but the glitch occurs before that, when I click save in VE to invoke the save box, then save again without putting a summary - that's why you can see the edit summary warning (it was similar to yours before that but then "moved" to the "worse" position) Begoon ^talk 13:04, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't use the switcher so that isn't relevant. After a bit of testing it seems that if an element is selected (picture, link, template) when you click save then the dialog aligns itself to the top right of that element, regardless of whether there is space on screen for it, with scroll bars if there isn't sufficient vertical space in the window to show the whole dialog. If you close the dialog, deselect the element then open the save box again it appears in the same place, only based on what that element is in the view now. If you close and select a different element then save, it relates to that element. If you have not selected any elements during your edit it appears overthe save button. Thryduulf (talk) 13:43, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Well I guess all I can say to that is that I'm utterly amazed we seem to be the first people to report it... That's the kind of dialog I'd just centre on screen, or tie to the green save button top right maybe if I was programming it. Letting it wander off screen with inaccessible buttons I can't believe hasn't caused more issues. But what do I know? Begoon ^talk 14:20, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

It seems we aren't the first to report it - see Bugzilla:52317. I've just linked this thread and added my observations to that, and feel free to add yours too. Thryduulf (talk) 14:27, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I just saw the report below too. JohnCD must be right - it surely has to be caused by a recent change.Begoon ^talk 14:29, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Indeed, it must have been introduced in the latest deployment - something that is consistent with this being alpha software rather than production ready. Thryduulf (talk) 15:12, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Yeah - I used the word alpha in the RFC, and I haven't yet wondered if that was too harsh. It's a shame, and I think we'll only go anywhere once that reality is accepted, but I'm not holding my breath. Your work here deserves a medal, by the way. Begoon ^talk 15:57, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

And here, to show that Thryduulf's revised how-to-do-it notes really work, is my screenshot from this morning! PamD 16:28, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Horray - you're a star - that's another thing that irks me - how hard simple things like providing that screenshot is for people who don't do that kind of thing frequently - but whoa, off-topic, and yay - you did it. Seems like the error is well known now, but you know what, I reckon you were the first to report it, and yours is a nice different example to ours. Begoon ^talk 16:41, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

The following discussion is marked as answered. If you have a new comment, place it just below the box.

---

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54326

In Firefox 22 on Linux with Monobook skin (not tested in other combinations) sometimes the VE toolbar overlaps the page head links and tabs (userpage etc). See the screenshot attached to the bug.

I haven't figured out how to reliably reproduce this but the following sequence usually seems to work.

1. Make one or more changes to a page in VE
2. click on an element near the left or bottom of the window (to trigger T54317)
3. open the save page dialog
4. with the dialog still open, scroll to the very top and very bottom of the page
5. close the save dialog without saving
6. click a different element and repeat steps 3 to 5.
7. scroll to the top of the screen and observe the position of the toolbar.

• If it doesn't work, try again from step 2.

It doesn't always work, but actions like this do seem to trigger it more often than not. I don't know whether this is dependent on bug 52317 but it was in testing that bug that I found this one.

Is anyone able to reproduce this in other browser/skin/os combinations, and/or figure out how to reliably reproduce it? Thryduulf (talk) 14:48, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

I'll give it a shot.

• Firefox 22 / Monobook / Windows Vista: Reproduced (followed steps, occurred in one attempt)
• Chrome 28 / Vector / Windows Vista: Found similar effect after step 3. See screenshot.

--Cryptic C62 · Talk 15:22, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, I've added that to the report. Thryduulf (talk) 17:20, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

I think we should recognize that VisualEditor is the future and try to spend time and energy focusing on possible real, actionable improvements to VisualEditor. --MZMcBride (talk) 17:19, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't personally believe its the future but if the WMF is going to force us to use it, then I agree it needs to be improved. Its still a long way from being a useful integrated part of Wikilife IMO. Kumioko (talk) 17:23, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Kumioko: Nobody is being forced to use VisualEditor. But from everyone I've talked to and listened to, it does seem that VisualEditor will be a major part of the next chapters in Wikimedia's history. We can work together to provide, for example, an easier opt-out mechanism for VisualEditor (going to Special:Preferences is annoying and disruptive to user workflow). --MZMcBride (talk) 18:04, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Again, I understand what your saying but we disagree. The WMF is forcing us and others to use VE whether the application itself or cleaning up all the mess and problems it leaves behind. That's why I haven't edited much for the last month or so. The WMF doesn't want to listen to our concerns but wants us to clean up their mess. I have a major problem with that mentality. But we do agree on the underlying problem that the VE app needs to be improved. We just disagree with why. Kumioko (talk) 18:20, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

I've got no problem with the idea of working to improve Visual Editor so long as improving Visual Editor doesn't get in the way of improving the encyclopedia.—Kww(talk) 17:30, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Kww: I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. In fact, I think the two go hand-in-hand. :-) We can focus on both making VisualEditor better and making it easier to disable/re-enable. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:06, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Absolutely. That's why I spend time working up little test cases and trying to find the simplest cases that can reproduce bugs. I don't see that as conflicting with my drive to ensure that unwitting people aren't exposed to buggy and incomplete software.—Kww(talk) 18:17, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

The reason why I spend time on this page is to try and enable those improvements by making the devs aware of what needs to be done, and making the commenters on this page aware of what the devs do and don't know. I'm not a good content editor myself, so I spend my time trying to enable those that are to add that content and trying to help readers find the content those people add. Thryduulf (talk) 17:50, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

And as I mentioned in one of the above sections, you deserve a medal for that. I genuinely mean that. I can't imagine where the WMF would be without the kind of help and support you've given here, and I'm certain they can't either. I hope they've tried to imagine it though - such a thought experiment would be educational for them. Begoon ^talk 17:58, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Thryduulf: I see the "Feedback" page as somewhat distinct from the "Improvements" page. "Feedback" is basically a way to filter/triage issues before they reach Bugzilla. "Improvements" is a way to (hopefully) focus on the most annoying/cumbersome/painful aspects of VisualEditor and try to see what can be done to immediately improve the user experience. I think there are also some higher-level issues (such as advertising that VisualEditor is beta software) that wouldn't get reported on a "Feedback" page, but could be discussed on an "Improvements" page. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:02, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

@MZMcBride: I'm ok for talking about improving VE, but just reading the first sentence of improvements made me go away from this page (The ongoing default state RFC ... does not seem to be particularly constructive). The feeling for many users is that currently VE is doing more damages than good on the encyclopedia, and that the VE team isn't even listening to that (the bugzilla which creates most of the nowiki in filter 550 has just been marked as WONT FIX): the opt-in would allow to reduce the rate of damages and focus on improvements. So, honestly, if you want editors to help on improving VE, that kind of introduction should be removed...

About improving VE, I still don't understand why the VE team is not proactive on that: they never came here to ask what important features of VE should do, and how. Why don't they launch focused discussions on some points: template editor, reference editor ? From my point of view here, they seem to be developing features without specifying before. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 21:29, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

[[File:(filename)|thumb|700px|center| (caption here) |alt= (alt text here) ]]

Hey - I'm able to edit this page 'Omerta' when I should be in the view-only mode. Please address this issue asap. -- 170.121.14.12 (talk) 20:59, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not seeing any page protection for Omertà. Assuming you're talking about another page, my guess is that you can go into edit mode (that's a bug, though a minor one), but are still prevented from actually saving your changes.

It would be helpful if you did a very minor change (for example, inserting an extra space at the end of one sentence, immediately after the period) and then tried to save your edit. If you actually are able to save the change, please let us know. Thanks. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:39, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

I've got no VisualEditor option even though I have "Remove VisualEditor from the user interface" in my Preferences unchecked. Please fix this. --Sp33dyphil ©^hat_ontributions 07:47, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

What browser do you use? VisualEditor does not work with InternetExplorer and some other browsers. Try using Firefox or Chrome.--Salix (talk): 08:27, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Same here. I disabled it originally because it was so buggy but now I can't find it again. I also have "Remove VisualEditor from the user interface" in my Preferences unchecked, and under Gadgets > Editing I have "Remove VisualEditor from the user interface" unchecked. This in spite of the fact that I must have checked at least one of them in the past to get rid of it in the first place. Odd. Using a rather old Firefox (aka Iceweasel) v 3.5.16. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 19:57, 29 July 2013 (UTC) [Update 20:02, 29 July 2013 (UTC). Same issue with Epiphany 2.30.6]

Yeah, it's not going to work (read: ever) on firefox 3, I'm afraid. I think it appeared to start with because of blacklist/whitelist problems that are now fixed. @Sp33dyphil: what browser are you using? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:13, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Opera v15. It worked originally but for some unknown reason the VE option has disappeared. --Sp33dyphil ©^hat_ontributions 05:34, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Opera after version 12 look like they are supported. It was removed from the blacklist on the 29th and should be useable on this wiki in a day or so.T52813--Salix (talk): 06:29, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Problem is fixed. Cheers --Sp33dyphil ©^hat_ontributions 06:57, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

OK, thanks Okeyes. It would be nice if the "no dice" help messages included a bit more about older browsers than just IE. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 10:57, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

@Steelpillow: the one on the VE page, or...? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:09, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, also the FAQ and anywhere else that explains you need a modern browser; explain that the user won't even see VE as an option in the UI unless the browser is supported (or whatever). Maybe also add a FAQ question "Why can't I see VE in the UI, even though I have disabled the options to turn it off?" — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 10:29, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

I also get "no VE". Also while using Iceweasel v3 — perhaps not considered "modern"? Well, I'm fine with this feature, but perhaps there ought to be a notice somewhere (user preferences?) when options are curtailed on the basis of the browser one is using. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:01, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Since all VE talk is lead here, this should be a Village Pump page. -DePiep (talk) 01:37, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Meh, this may or not be an active page in the long run. VP/T may become the target for VE comments once the volume comes down. VQuakr (talk) 04:01, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Indeed. All AFT5 comments went one place, all Page Curation comments went one place... we'd end up with a village pump for every extension. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:50, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

What it says in the title really. Takes ages to load, and when it has loaded, doesn't seem to actually do anything except enable the spell checker and make the page slow to a crawl. --Muzer (talk) 14:14, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

@Muzar: what version of Opera? Are you getting a note warning about Opera support when you load the editor? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:09, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Just been told that it is now working in Opera. With Opera 12.14 (the last usable version for me) it also loads very slowly. I did not try and edit anything before I rapidly disabled it in my preferences. I got the note warning me it was not a version officially supported by VE. Dsergeant (talk) 05:51, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Darn. It's hard to tell if that's Opera-specific or general slowness; does anyone here have Opera + experience using the VE in other browsers? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:51, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

The following table of results may be helpful.

Detailed results
Pattern	Original	Spellcheck	Ctrl+Z
No change	shamrads	shamrocks	shamrads
	turkleglove	turtledove	turkleglove
	trugde	trudge	trugde
	droconian	draconian	droconian
Multiword	metacritic	meta-critic	metacritic
		meta critic	metacritic
	dumpnuts	dump-nuts	dumpnuts
		dump nuts	dumpnuts
Lead break	blumpkin	pumpkin	blumpkin
	apathosaurus	brontosaurus	apathosaurus
	chrsky	Chomsky	chrsky
	hotsaucebottle	bluebottle	hotsaucebottle
	aoeign	foreign	aoeign
	coroglian	Carolingian	coroglian
Lead break (undo only)	gloading	loading	gloading
	vbirth	birth	vbirth
End break	soliquilistry	soliloquies	soliquilistry
	lethrym	lethargy	lethrym
	lrkwd	legwork	lrkwd
End break (undo only)	wrenchj	wrench	wrenchj
	cubew	cube	cubew
Full break	meepblossom	blossomy	meepblossom
	bumguitar	guitarist	bumguitar

I've developed an incomplete understanding of the different patterns, but it's not always clear why a particular pattern will occur for a given string (or why the bug occurs at all). --Cryptic C62 · Talk 02:57, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

I've not done any better at understanding this, so I've now reported it as bugzilla:52372. Do say if you gain any further insights. 07:53, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, both! This is a great catch. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:20, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

If I see a notice where the first heading, which is larger than all the later headings, is "If ..." (eg "If you are here for information on disabling Visual Editor") and the condition is false, I will probably not look at any of the box including the two sections with smaller headings, inferring that the irrelevant content has sub-sections. The edit notice might be more useful if the three headings were the same size, or if in some other way we highlight that the second and third paras are independent of the first heading. PamD 22:53, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi PamD, thanks for the feedback. Usually, I'd be bold and reduce the size, but the two threads below suggest me it wouldn't help much ;) Rephrasing the first sentence might not work as well, because different sizes, as you say, seem to imply that the rest of the content is still related to the first one. Also, since it actually isn't, it needs to stay separated, and this text would be read even less if it was just attached at the end of the first paragraph. So, apart from increasing the size of those two headings, does anybody else have another solution? Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:25, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Would making it into two separate columns help? Put the info about disabling VE into the first column with a header like "How to disable VisualEditor" and give the right column an equally sized "Other issues" (or similar) heading. Thryduulf (talk) 09:48, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, I thought of this as well; we would not even need a real table, writing something to the left and the rest to the right of a vertical bar might do, but I am no expert in doing it so that it shows up nicely :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:58, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

A bit of fiddling has produced this:

That's probably bad coding/syntax and I can't get the header centered, but other than that how does it look? Thryduulf (talk) 10:24, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, that's why I did not even try in the first place :p It might work, if you ask me. Let's wait for more feedback though. Thank you. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:37, 1 August 2013 (UTC) PS: I am also wondering, after reading Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback#No_VE, if info about browsers belongs to this editnotice space instead than to the top of the feedback page, where only IE is mentioned? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:40, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

How freaky, what happened to the wikitext editor? (i know i know it's a beta-run but what a goddammed unpleasant surprise) Beuurrkk! --2.0.94.224 (talk) 22:53, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

The wikitext editing method is still available as noted elsewhere on this page. Just choose to "edit source". --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 00:23, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Is there anything specific that doesn't work for you? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:23, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

The markup warning currently reads:

• "You are using VisualEditor - wikitext does not work here. Click "Edit source" to edit the page in wikitext mode – unsaved changes will be lost."

But the first hyphen should be changed to an n dash:

• "You are using VisualEditor – wikitext does not work here. Click "Edit source" to edit the page in wikitext mode – unsaved changes will be lost.

--Cryptic C62 · Talk 03:22, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

@Cryptic C62: Thanks for the suggestion; do you think two endashes is too much? What about "You are using VisualEditor; wikitext does not work here. Click "Edit source" to edit the page in wikitext mode – unsaved changes will be lost." instead? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 03:33, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

@Jdforrester (WMF): I'm down with that. Another idea: "Edit source" should be a link. This changes the user experience from "Oh, a warning! Edit source... where is that?" to "Oh, a warning! Edit source, that's what I want." Surely it must be possible to pull the page title into the markup warning, yes? --Cryptic C62 · Talk 03:40, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

@Jdforrester (WMF) and Cryptic C62: I'd go with something like "You are using VisualEditor; wikitext does not work here. Click "Edit source" to edit the page in wikitext mode (unsaved changes will be lost)." Making "Edit source" a link is a good idea, but more in-depth than changing the display text, I imagine... (PS is there a Bugzilla for this yet?) Ignatzmice•talk 03:50, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi Ignatzmice, I found two open bugs related to that pop-up message, but they are not dealing with punctuation or wording. Since James is reading this thread, I think we can just keep posting proposals here, and once we all (well, more or less, of course) agree on one of it, we might bring that up on Bugzilla. Just my 2c here, please feel free to act differently if it makes more sense to you. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:13, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

I thought about opening a bug, but basically all I could say was that this discussion was happening and ongoing. The only thing such a bug could practically achieve would be to make James aware of this discussion, but it couldn't even do that as he is already actively contributing here. Like Elitre notes, once we have agreement on what to change it to (and I rather like Ignatzmice's suggestion) then we can have a bug that says "Change X to Y" and James can assign that to one of the team (who will probably like having something simpler to do than figure out the spell check bug above!). Thryduulf (talk) 09:42, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

I am not sure if James will like what I say, but we completely rephrased that pop-up at it.wp :p It now reads something like "Wikitext won't work here. To link, use the "chain" icon, and click here to learn more. If you ignore this message, you'll need to fix your edit later!" with the bold part linking to VE's user guide. Some patrollers felt this would help more against avoidable nowiki tags. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:53, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

@Cryptic C62: Yes, we could make it a link, but it's a bit fiddly (we'd need to preserve random attributes, your entry point, and other bits and bobs), and we'd need to change how the interaction with these notifications works (currently a click dismisses MediaWiki's notifications, rather than taking any particular action). Changing the language is something we can do in a few seconds, though. :-)

@Ignatzmice: I'm not sure I like using brackets in this context over an endash – the claim isn't a sub-ordinate clause that users can safely ignore, but a run-on observation.

@Elitre (WMF): Hmm; the request from the community was to warn against using wikitext, rather than encourage to understand how to use VisualEditor, but I can see that that might work. However, changing it that much probably needs a proper discussion about what's working and what people want.

@Thryduulf: Yeah, no need to open a bug. :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:19, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi everybody. Earlier today James Forrester posted this message at one of the ongoing RfCs' talk. It is a proposal of four changes, so feedback is welcome; I am not sure how many of you are actively following these discussions, but it would be very useful if people who are using VE daily considered reading and commenting this proposal. (The thread also contains an explanation about how VE is benefiting right now from a large and diverse pool of users making real world edits). As usual, thanks for your time! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:02, 1 August 2013 (UTC) Please remember to add comments there, not below ;)

Thank you for the note, I've not been actively following all of those discussions as there is too much vitriol from some quarters for my liking. Thryduulf (talk) 09:36, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

The following discussion is marked as answered. If you have a new comment, place it just below the box.

---

I tried VEditing Chess, which makes extensive use of ((Chess diagram small)). I found that VE does not display this template correctly. In the image at right, the upper section shows how the chess boards are displayed in view mode. The bottom section shows how they are displayed in VE. This occurs in Firefox 22.0 and Chrome 28.0; this occurs in Monobook and Vector. Presumably, this is related to an existing bug, but I don't know which it would be.

In terms of pervasiveness, ((Chess diagram)) is transcluded onto 778 pages, and ((Chess diagram small)) is transcluded onto 256 pages. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 14:23, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi there. There's an open bug related to chess, Bug 51932. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:27, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Ah, I didn't even think to Ctrl+F for "chess". Thanks! --Cryptic C62 · Talk 14:49, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Today, while fiddling with VE, I clicked on the "Page settings" button for the very first time. I was very surprised to find that it contained UIs for categories and interlanguage links. Here are some thoughts:

• When I imagine what might be found in "Page settings", I think of display options, such as font size. Neither categories nor interlanguage links match up with my notion of what constitutes a "setting" in this context.
• Any UI for categories should be placed near the bottom of the VE window. Why? Because that's where the categories are displayed in view mode. Hiding it in a menu at the top of the screen is not intuitive.
• The languages tab claims that the interlanguage links "can only be edited in source mode", which is simply untrue. Look at the toolbars on the left side of the screen. Scroll down until you see the "languages" box. Scroll down to the bottom of that box. Ctrl+Click on "edit links". Done. I'm not sure why you would want to take the time to write a new UI for this when one already exists.

-- Cryptic C62 · Talk 14:47, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi there, as for your third point, I believe that the point of that message is "you can't use VE to edit interlinks right now". In order to edit those, you are redirected to Wikidata. If you do that while editing with VE, wouldn't you lose your changes? (I haven't tested this myself yet). So the real point is that you can add interlinks without editing the rest of the page, with or without VE. I suspect the original wording might have been chosen even before Wikidata arrived, so it might be updated. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:25, 1 August 2013 (UTC) PS: I am not implying anything BTW, but it would sound reasonable to me if somewhere in the future VE managed to handle interwikis so that those you wanted to add ended up straight on Wikidata. Now that would be cool!

"Page settings" is a cryptic label, especially since we older editors think of the category tag as being part of the page, rather than something about the page. But so far, nobody's come up with an alternative that's relatively compact and makes sense. If you've got suggestions, please post them. Even if you don't think it's a good suggestion, maybe it will inspire someone else. I think that everyone's agreed that the name needs to be improved. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:00, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

@Elitre (WMF): Ctrl+Click opens the Wikidata page in a new tab, which prevents you from losing changes.

@Whatamidoing (WMF): Should we even assume that interlanguage links and category pages need to live together? Why not just have a button for each? We can fuss around with a single name all we like, but nothing is going to be more self-evident than this. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 02:19, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Page Metadata (or just metadata?) is one possibility. Ssastry (talk) 04:09, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Right now there is an option to opt-out while it's in BETA. I would like to see this option given permanently for registered users. CRRaysHead90 | ^{Get Some!} 17:47, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Your opinion should be made known at the Default State RFC. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 17:55, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Get rid of it. --Astrocratic demokraut (talk) 21:40, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

There are a few ongoing, related RfC: I am not sure if you are familiar with them, but I'd suggest some rewording before writing there :) We are actually interested in hearing from you if you encountered specific problems. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 21:43, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Visual editor is horrible and so wikia like. I hate visual editor for people just can click on stuff automatically without having them learn anything. It is like giving a easy job to a person who has no idea of the job.--Micronationalist1999 (talk) YOUR PROUD BANANA 22:27, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

I'd say they still have to learn *a lot* of stuff. Just think about all our policies, guide lines, rules... This way, at least, they can focus just on that. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 22:33, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Take a look at radiocarbon dating, and in particular see the Notes section, which has four text notes showing. Edit the article with VE; scroll back down to that section and you'll see that only three are visible. The first one is defined in an image caption, which I suspect is why it's invisible. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:41, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

This the same sort of thing as T53829 which is about references in infoboxes not showing in the reflist. That bug is marked as fixed but the fix hasn't been deployed yet. I'm don't know how specific the fix is though, so I can't say for certain whether this will solve the issue or not (although obviously I hope it will!). I've asked on the bugzilla page though. Thryduulf (talk) 22:54, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Well I got a reply much sooner than I was expecting, and it seems this is a new bug :(. I've reported it as T54427, sorry to get your hopes up for a quick fix. Thryduulf (talk) 23:05, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Do you think this is distinct from T54300?—Kww(talk) 23:16, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, in that bug the reference is defined in the body of the article and appears wrongly, in this one the reference is defined in the image caption and doesn't appear at all. Thryduulf (talk) 23:31, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

It appears to me that we need a better way of documenting problems and feature requests for VE. Using AWB as an example, when someone submits a bug or suggestion they are asked to fill out a template that gives some details about the problem. This helps to document the problem and reduce questions. I think if we are going to continue using VE in its current state (which I still think is a tremendously bad idea) then we need to start to work smarter not harder. I suggest creating a template with the following fields:

((VE bug
 |status      = new <!-- when fixed replace with "fixed" -->
 |description = <!-- Place description of the bug here --> ~~~~
 |reproduce   = <!-- Directions to recreate the bug (i.e. what did you do that caused this bug); leave blank if unknown or not applicable -->
 |page        = <!-- The page you were working with when the error occurred -->
 |OS          = <!-- Your operating system (Windows, Linux, Ubuntu, etc.) -->
 |net         = <!-- What version of .NET Framework you're using -->
 |browser     = <!-- What internet browser you're using -->
 |skin        = <!-- What skin you're using (usually Monobook or Vector) -->
 |workaround  = <!-- Any workaround for the problem -->
 |bugzilla     = <!-- Bugzilla tracking number if applicable -->
))

Any objections? Kumioko (talk) 20:28, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Seems sensible to me. I made a few changes. It might be good to have a few more statuses: "tracked" for when it has been added to bugzilla, and "wontfix". --Cryptic C62 · Talk 00:49, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

This is a great idea, Kumioko! Is the .NET parameter helpful for troubleshooting VE? I suggest we encourage users to specify the version of the browser (e.g. Firefox 22 vs Firefox 3). Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 03:09, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, I honestly don't know if there is value in the .net for this or not. I agree that certainly the browser is important. I also agree that some additional statuses would be useful. Just getting ready for bed now though. I'll create the template and link it tomorrow unless someone beats me too it. Kumioko (talk) 03:14, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Well please don't make ".net" a compulsory parameter, as I haven't a clue what it is, or what mine is! A question: where's this going to be used? On this feedback page, or where? Is it just a reporting mechanism, or intended to be an ongoing record? (The feedback page gets archived very quickly.) PamD 08:09, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

I would say it would generally be used on this page. The template or the fields in it shouldn't be required IMO. Just available for those that are submitting problems if they want to use it. The more information we can give the developers about the problem the better and easier they can fix it or respond to it. Kumioko (talk) 11:30, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Could even be used with a "preload" and an "add report" button to give reporters a blank template to complete. We do that at the Graphics workshops, and most people fill it in just fine. Even when they don't fill the whole thing out correctly we get more info than if it wasn't given as a blank. Cool idea. Begoon ^talk 11:38, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

This is great. Improves usability (making it easier for users) and prompts users for additional information. Can you please put this at the top of the page and/or include the template in the new section page? CaseyPenk (talk) 15:20, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

That's what my "preload" comment was about. We could replace the current Add a new comment link at the top of the page, which currently just adds a new section, with a link which preloads this new template as a blank for people to fill in, or with a nice big attractive graphical button which does the same thing. Easy enough to do once the template is finalised, and works well on many other pages, such as the Graphics lab ones I mentioned. Begoon ^talk 16:12, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Ok I made the template andn setup the preload at the top of the page. The documentation still needs some work and we might need to tweak the template as we go but its a start anyway. Kumioko (talk) 16:58, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Kumioko, that's simply brilliant. It's late here, so no time tonight, but tomorrow I'll play with some graphics if you don't mind - just to make it a bit more "in your face" and attractive, but I'll bet your dollar to my cent that you've already increased the usefulness of responses here by a huge margin, and anything I do will just be tinkering. Kudos. Begoon ^talk 17:28, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Test bug report

For those who are interested this is a sample of what the Report a bug functionality looks like when filled out. Kumioko (talk) 18:24, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Status	New:
Description	This is a sample bug report Kumioko (talk) 18:23, 31 July 2013 (UTC)
To duplicate:
Operating system	Windows 7
Web browser	IE 8
Site	En-WP
Workaround	N/A
Skin	Monobook
Resolution	Unresolved
Bugzilla	N/A

Actual bug report

Here's a bug I found a few days ago in the proposed format:

Status	New:
Description	When adding a new image, the media search feature doesn't find long names
To duplicate:	1. Find an image on commons with a long filename (e.g. File:St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph.org.uk - 501812.jpg). 2. Choose a relevant article in which to insert it (e.g. W. S. Lach-Szyrma). 3. Click the "Edit" tab to edit the entire page using VE. 4. Place the caret at an appropriate insertion point and then click the media button. 5. Enter the filename in the search box (e.g. St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph.org.uk - 501812.jpg) The image is not found 6. Progressively trim the filename by destructively backspacing from the end of the string. After each backspace, pause to allow the search results to refresh: In my test, the search first succeeded with the string "St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph.or" Search also succeeded with "St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph.o" Search then failed with "St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph." Search then failed with "St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograph" Search then succeeded with "St Peter's Church, Newlyn - geograp" and all shorter strings 7. Save the page (the result was this version).
Operating system	Windows 8 Pro 64-bit
Site	En-WP via https
.NET Version	2.0.50727.4927, 3.0.30729.4926, 3.5.30729.4926, 4.5.50709 client & full
Internet browser	Chrome 28.0.1500.72m
Workaround	N/A
Skin	Vector
Resolution	Unresolved
Bugzilla	N/A

A few points occurred to me while I completed the template:

• To create a multi-line list of steps to duplicate, it's necessary to put <br /> elements between lines. When there's a list of steps, it might be simpler just to put it underneath the completed template.
• The template doesn't prompt for date/time the bug was encountered, which could help to identify what version of VE was in use when the bug was seen.
• Perhaps it would also be relevant whether the user was logged-in at the time?
• Not sure how the .NET versions are used, but it's quite fiddly to find them. Per Microsoft KB318785 you have to dig around in the registry and then copy/paste the strings.
• A "comment" field might be useful, e.g.:

Happy editing - Pointillist (talk) 07:26, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Just my 2c here - it looks really promising, thanks everybody for coming up with this. I am looking forward to importing the final version on my home wiki :) A few questions:

Is the .NET version field really necessary?

The resolution field refers to the Bugzilla status. Should we use a different field for the discussion status, so that we don't need to use the "Answered" template anymore?

If discussion is going to happen outside the form, I'd say the Comment field is not really required as well - but as I said, this is just my reaction after first reading this :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:11, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Comments aren't essential. I just thought having a specific field might be a way of improving the feedback to the WMF tester/developer without overloading the other fields. In my example I was saying, sort of, "hey I appreciate that you have already implemented a really clever search, it is just this [maybe] edge case that should be supported too." Sometimes developers can feel unappreciated when they receive a bug report that doesn't acknowledge what's already been achieved. - Pointillist (talk) 12:43, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying this. I assumed that, since the form is going to be used here and not on Bugzilla, it should be more "testers-oriented", which is, helpful for those who test reported bugs before going to report them furtherly on Bugzilla. From this POV it makes sense to me that there is a Comment part where the first person reporting the bug tries to guess what went wrong and why and, if he/she knows how to do so, also proposes some solutions. Do you have ideas as to how to use the form once it is fully filled, with regards to Bugzilla? Copy/pasting does not seem doable :) Thanks! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:54, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Regarding the status part, I've just discovered there is a gadget in special:preferences that reads the status of a bug a bugzilla and updates the ((tracked)) template. I haven't a clue how that works but it might be possible to link to this template somehow. Thryduulf (talk) 13:21, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

It would be good if plain numbers input into the "Bugzilla" field automatically linked to the bugzilla bug. Thryduulf (talk) 08:46, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Update: it's now been labelled as "Highest normal" - but it was created on 19th July, which makes one wonder how long it's taking for bugs to be considered and prioritised.

On the other hand, I'm amazed it was only created on 19th July. Presumably very few editors have persevered to try using VE when creating a serious article with references, and most of us have just given up on it. Or people just accept that the whole references area is a mess and aren't picking out particular elements to report as bugs.

I haven't done much work adding references in VE - a lot of what I do is stub-sorting and miscellaneous cleanup of those stubs, and working on dabs and hatnotes, and I don't create very many articles. The experience which led me to comment on this bug was creating a stub to resolve a redlink in a hatnote in a stub I was sorting: that's pretty typical. I wonder how many articles are being created in VE, whether by newbies or experienced editors: and how many of those editors then choose VE next time they want to create an article? PamD 06:59, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I do get the impression that most people who are actively reporting bugs seem to be gnomish editors rather than detailed content writers. I guess that the latter are generally going to be less interested in trying new things. Also bug reporting tends to be a series of small tasks (identify problem, test problem, describe problem, report problem) that more naturally fits with the way gnomes work than the single bigger task that major content editors typically do. As gnomes generally don't do much adding of multiple references this means that bugs affecting that workflow are going to take longer to be observed. This is all just guesswork though! Thryduulf (talk) 08:06, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

When you've got a chunk of material like this with lots of quotes and references, it is much more effective to work offline. You can spend as long as you want getting the content right, having multiple edit windows open and copy/pasting between them. Once the text is good to go, you can transfer it as a single edit without little risk of edit conflicts when you save. As we know, VE's handling of references isn't yet adequately baked – IMO would benefit from an up-front requirements process – so VE is only really suitable for simple edits at the moment. But that's how inexperienced contributors get started. - Pointillist (talk) 08:52, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I hadn't thought about that, but you are right. VE's handling of copy/paste also needs work before this sort of workflow is possible with it. Thryduulf (talk) 09:37, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I'll just add some more examples here as I come across them, to see whether it happens a lot (too often certainly) and if there are any patterns to it. Fram (talk) 11:38, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

• [9]

I sometimes receive the above error message when attempting to load VE on large (>200kB) pages. This only happens when I use Safari 5.1.7 on Windows Vista. Unlike some of the other error messages that pop up, this one crashes the loader and forces me to refresh the page. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 02:00, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Possibly related: partial logout?

After the above error message occurred, I reloaded the page I had been looking at: List of moths of Turkey. I clicked "edit this page" again, and VE loaded with no problems... but then I got a notice saying that I was logged out, even though the rest of the interface appeared as though I was still logged in. Clicking on a link confirmed that I had actually been logged out. Two questions: How did I get logged out midway through the VE loader? Why did the interface not change when I got logged out? --Cryptic C62 · Talk 02:12, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

As for the first issue, I don't think it is strictly VE-related, I googled that process and it seems a quite common issue with Safari (you might want to re-do such a search in order to find a solution closely related to your OS or computer make). As for the second, as you said, it might be related to the first one, and also a cache problem might explain that, although I'd like to hear more than a second opinion on this. Thanks (also for the screenshot). --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:54, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I like updating the independent baseball team rosters but it won't let me. I am also trying to add my images of the managers of the league that are former MLB players and it won't let me. Asapherg (talk) 02:16, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

There are currently types of content that visual editor can't edit (such as block quotes), some that it can only partly edit (e.g you can only edit existing cells of a table), and others that you have to edit through a dialog (e.g. templates). There should be no issue with editing most lists or adding pictures though. It's difficult to know whats happening without being able to see the articles you are having trouble on, could you give some links please? Also it would be useful if you could note what browser and operating system you are using. Thryduulf (talk) 07:50, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I did not find place to let comment about my own correction

so it seems to be little unusefriendly Chudzoskruo (talk) 06:41, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

If you are talking about leaving an edit summary, then you do this after loading the save page dialog. Thryduulf (talk) 07:58, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

The equivalent of a macro facility is needed to insert references. The names of the fields can be difficult to remember.

A paste of the [...] from Wiki Commons should insert a picture. Andrew Swallow (talk) 07:01, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

The reference editor will definitely be improved. If by "names of the fields" you are talking about references generated by specific templates, the one you used probably lacks TemplateData to work properly - when it does, you don't really need to remember anything :) As for the [...], I am not sure what it stands for? Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:44, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Status	New:
Description	Pressing down kicks you to end of page. Cainamarques (talk) 07:18, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
To duplicate:	Edit the page Laurence of Canterbury, specifically this version leave the cursor at the top of the page press down (the cursor will move to the right of the hatnote template) press down again
Operating system	Windows 7
Web browser	Firefox 22.0
Site	En-WP
Workaround
Skin	Monobook
Resolution
Bugzilla	T54445

I've confirmed with a bit of testing that this affects all articles with a single-line hatnote template, e.g Oxford. You can't scroll down at all if the hatnote has more than one line, e.g. An American in Paris. I've reported it as T54445. Thryduulf (talk) 08:45, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

In Firefox ESR on Linux, I don't see the bug on the given page [11] but I see it with [12].

With [13] the cursor can be seen to stay at the end of the hatnote as I keep pressing the down arrow, but once I type something, the text appears at the lower, correct position. —rybec 20:20, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I think you should restrict use of this new tool: otherwise you're gonna get soooo much vandalism, it'll be hard to control! Thanks for the attention. Keep up the good work... Monozigote (talk) 08:48, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi there. As long as we work on open wikis, there will always be vandalisms ;) There's something we need to decide here: if VE is slooow as some say, it ain't gonna cause more vandalism now because, you know, I guess vandals don't really like having to wait so much to reach their intended outcome! (there is also a related part at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/FAQ). --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:04, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

With wikitext sometimes I might write something up but run out of time before finishing, so I copy it to a notepad (I use Zotero), and finish it later. Are there any plans to bring functionality like that to VE? --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 09:09, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi there, I don't recall a specific request on Bugzilla, but there are a number of open bugs there which aim at improving VE's behavior about copy/paste, so I guess that when it is more stable, this is definitely something worth asking. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:26, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I can see the advantage in something like an offline VisualEditor that generates all the code and saves it via an API (or something) or maybe just gives it to you to paste into the source editor, offering you the chance to deal with edit conflicts, etc. As Elitre says though it's not worth doing anything about it until VE is stable though. Thryduulf (talk) 09:42, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

How about a "save to a sandbox" option? Of course, full copy/paste functionality would work too. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:02, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Beta didn't inform me, until after I'd already gotten deeply into editing an article, that my changes would not be saved. I'd rather not have this feature at all, if it will waste my time that way. Froid (talk) 10:39, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Froid, thanks for warning us with yet another horror story; several editors have noted trying long edits, unable to Save at end. -Wikid77 12:48, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Froid, it's sad to hear this, but this should not have happened, of course (you should always be able to save). Can you provide more details so that we can try to figure out what happened? Thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:44, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

There are known issues with blocked users, but you don't appear to be blocked so that's unlikely to be related. Based on your contributions, the most likely article you experienced this on was Blowing Smoke which is not protected, so as Elitre says there should be nothing stopping you save. Did you perhaps try and enter wikitext (e.g. [[ or (() and get a pop-up warning you about it? If so the warning just means that edits wont be saved if you change to the source editor without explicitly saving your VisualEditor edits. If that is what you encountered then we need to improve the wording. Thryduulf (talk) 10:59, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

• Perhaps click on warning to proceed to Save: Others have noted a warning which seems to deter the Save, and the advice was to click-clear the warning so then a Save would be allowed. Does that sound logical, or is that still the case? -Wikid77 12:48, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
  • The aim of the dialog is to discourage people from adding wikimarkup but not to discourage them from saving at all so we need to strike a balance. I'm not sure that a bold like that wouldn't undermine the first aim. Relatedly T53701 would help here (basically it says to hide the warning when the markup that caused it is removed), as would T54386 which is about making it clearer that the popup can be closed, which again might help. Thryduulf (talk) 13:17, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I've just notices that that foul and egregious visual editor crap seems to have returned, even though I specifically set my preferences in such a way that it was banished forever to the realms of "never see". Short of coming round and personally throttling the developers, is there any way that I can make it so that it never again blights my editing sessions? I mean, come on, Wikipedian techies - are you seriously trying to rival Facebook for the annual "worst possible unwarranted changes on a website" award? Grutness...wha? 11:29, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

PS - I mean no offence to the techies in this. My complains are solely with VisualDung. For that reason I have deliberately made my comments as calm and restrained as possible :) Grutness...wha? 11:36, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) It seems that the update to VE last night broke the unsupported gadget that some people used to hide VE. There is now a proper opt-out available in the editing section of your preferences (as noted in the FAQ and the large edit notice above).

If you want to opt out of using the VisualEditor while it is in beta testing, go to the "Editing" tab of your preferences and scroll to the bottom of the page. Tick the box labelled "Temporarily disable VisualEditor while it is in beta" located in the "Usability features" section, then click "Save".

Whether this option remains after the beta ends is currently unknown, but you can make a civil comment in the RfC linked from the top of every page. Thryduulf (talk) 11:38, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I'd clicked that "no beta" option, and it didn't do any good. For some reason, though, it seems to have gone again. Chalk it up as another bug undocumented feature. As to a civil comment, this was civil. You should have seen what I considered writing. Grutness...wha? 12:23, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

And this was not expected or intended, for what it's worth. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:45, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Good to hear :) Grutness...wha? 12:23, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I have mentioned this last month at another page, but it doesn't seem to be solved yet, so a repeat performance; it should be made impossible that when people move images in VE (which is very easy), they put it (inadvertently) in the middle of a word. Preferably, images should only be movable to spaces between paragraphs, but they certainly shouldn't be movable to the middle of a word. Example: [17].

The problem seems to be that when you move a picture, the final location is not decided by the upper left corner of the image (which seems more intuitive to me), but by the location of your cursor somewhere in the middle of the picture. Fram (talk) 11:43, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, this is T53292 which is marked as having a high priority. I've copied your comments above to the bug, which will remind the devs of its existence. Thryduulf (talk) 11:53, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. Fram (talk) 12:01, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

while it good for correcting spelling errors and such, it is horrible because you can't add anything to tables and charts. 74.139.33.169 (talk) 11:52, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi, proper handling of the elements you mentioned is definitely planned. I'd also note that some tables are already supported (at itwp I actually have grateful reports of people being able to edit tables in a simpler and faster way). Do come back should you need further help with something. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:55, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Bear with me :-) This has nothing to do with people adding wikicode, but with VE adding nowikis on its own and where it isn't necessary or even wanted. If people accidentally select part of a term instead of the full one, and then add a link (using the VE link button), Ve will not only add a piped link (perhaps understandable but not really smart), but will add a closing "nowiki" between the piped wikilink and the remaining letters. This is totally unnecessary in nearly all cases: editors very rarely want part of the word to be blue, and part to remain black (which is the effect of this "nowiki"). This is an example where I corrected an old instance (few days), but I could easily reproduce the problem.

Suggested solution: when the part inside the link plus the part not linked are together the same as the wanted link, don't create a piped link plus nowiki remainder, but create a simple link instead; when the two are not the same, pipe the link but don't nowiki the remainder, unless there is a hyphen (or other dash) or slash between the two parts (as in that case they may really be two parts, something like Armenian-American or the like). The current situation creates many incorrect nowikis for only a handful of correct ones. Fram (talk) 12:43, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Just tried to edit some images with the VE, and here are some suggestions for improvements:

• Show a tooltip with the full image name if you hoover the mouse over one with a long name
• After an image is inserted, it would be helpful to directly open the dialog for editing the caption
• If you add an image, could the caption be autofilled with the description from the file on wikipedia or commons?

This is T53032. --WS (talk) 14:49, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

• When you have a block of text selected, and the add an image, the text disappears. This is most likely not what most people want/expect and will lead to unintended deletion of text (also does not happen in the same way while inserting templates).
• Images that are added have their size in px specified; only specifying thumb should be enough unless they are resized by the editor
• For templates that have a field for an image or media file, could the media chooser be integrated there? (its need could be specified by templatedata)
• When editing the caption, it would be nice to have a preview of the image displayed in the dialog
• It is should be possible to move/drag the image as well as the template dialog around, they are in a fixed position right now
• Can the image and template dialogs have a cancel button next to apply changes? you can only quit them by pressing the X in the upper-right corner, but it is not obvious if this will cancel your changes or not (same goes for the save your changes dialog).
• When no image is found, please display a message saying so, now it looks like nothing is happening (especially is yoou missed the short busy animation of the search bar)
• It would be great if the image addition dialog could suggest images that are being used in the same article in other languages as a suggestion in addition to just searching for the article title

That's it for now. --WS (talk) 14:14, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Going through your points in order:

• "Show a tooltip with the full image name" Good idea, noted as T54459
• "directly open the dialog for editing the caption" There was recently a suggestion, which I can't currently find, to instead combine the two dialogs. Which would you prefer? Thryduulf (talk) 16:33, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

If it is only the caption, you can combine them, but I imaging other things such as image size and placement will be added later so that could be cluttered then. --WS (talk) 16:50, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

• T53032 as you note
• "When you have a block of text selected, and the add an image, the text disappears." Reported as T54460
• Don't specify thumbnail size: Indeeed, that is T52379.
• "For templates that have a field for an image or media file..." I'm not entirely sure I understand what you are asking there, sorry.

e.g. an image shown in an infobox in the lead, instead of entering the filename in a textbox, show the image editor. --WS (talk) 16:50, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

• show a preview while entering image caption: Very good idea, reported as T54461
• Draggable dialogs is T6969
• Cancel buttons: T53288, T54462
• "When no image is found" another good idea, see T54463
• suggest images used on other languages: and again, see T54464.Thryduulf (talk) 16:33, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for going through them! --WS (talk) 16:50, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

On Premier League, every recent edit using Visual Editor seems to add a stray line of code: || 18 || 12 || 12 || 21 above a table. Examples: 1, 2, 3, 4. Every edit using VE has added the code. Is this a bug? Woody (talk) 14:31, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, it's T51839. I've added the missing quote [18] that it was failing to correctly deal with so you shouldn't see this problem on that article again. Thryduulf (talk) 15:33, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Status	New:
Description	VE strips some table attributes for no reason. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:45, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
To duplicate:	See [19]. Since this was done by someone else, I have no idea what OS/.net/browser/etc... the editor was using.
Operating system
Web browser
Site
Workaround
Skin
Resolution
Bugzilla	T54473

This is a Parsoid issue. I filed a bug reported and updated the table above. Ssastry (talk) 19:12, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

On going to a redlink, I'm offered "Create^beta" or "Create source". If I click for VE, I get a notice telling me - among other things - that I can look for another title to redirect the page to. However, there's no apparent way to create a redirect using VE. Until this functionality is included, should we suppress this suggestion? Andrew Gray (talk) 18:11, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, but it isn't as simple as that unfortunately. That text is pulled from MediaWiki:Newarticletext and is the same as appears above the edit window in the source editor (note the MediaWiki page generates different content based on the namespace, so it doesn't look the same when viewing the MW namespace page). AFAIK there is no way for MediaWiki messages or editnotices to detect whether they are being displayed in the source or visual editor. I've raised T54471 as a request for this. Thryduulf (talk) 18:51, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I tried to leave feedback, but received this error. —rybec 18:44, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi Rybec, did you mean "leave feedback" about an article with the relevant feature? Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:22, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

In Firefox ESR on Linux, the text below was not fully readable. I suggest shortening it, increasing the size of the window it's shown in, providing a scroll bar, or (if possible) having a window that adjusts to the size of the text.

This is our new, easier way to edit. It's still in beta, which means you might find parts of the page you can't edit, or encounter issues that need to be fixed. We encourage you to review your changes, and we welcome reports abou t any issues you might encounter in using VisualEditor (click the 'beta' button to submit feedback). You can keep using the wikitext editor by clicking the "Edit source" tab instead - unsaved changes will be lost. —rybec 18:45, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I believe this happens because ESR is not supported. There's a bug about it here, and I am adding your comment there, please read that discussion, and add here or there the number of your version. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:24, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Status	New:
Description	It's probably an existing bug, but: if I add invisible matter to an article (eg ((coord missing))), it's too easy to delete it later in the same edit while "tidying up" blank lines etc. I notice that ((Use British English)) seems to be automatically put at the end of the article, and it seems impossible to delete it there by using delete or backspace keys: perhaps all templates which produce no visible output should be placed at the end (though probably playing havoc with WP:ORDER). I seem to remember similarly losing a more substantial edit - something with multiple parameters perhaps - recently, but didn't record it at the time and can't remember what it was. If I hadn't used "Review changes" mid-edit, ie if I'd just been editing rather than testing the bug, I'd have assumed I'd forgotten to click "Apply changes" and not added the template as I'd intended to. PamD 18:57, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
To duplicate:	Add ((coord missing)). Check in SavePage, ReviewChanges, that it's there. Do some other edits. Backspace to remove some blank lines in the area where you put the template. Check in SavePage, ReviewChanges: it's gone.
Operating system	Vista
Web browser	Firefox22
Site
Workaround	Edit with 100% concentration and alertness at all times, paying special attention to the vicinity of any possible hidden templates, don't make any attempt to remedy dodgy formatting in existing articles, ... ???
Skin	Vector
Resolution
Bugzilla

This is covered by T51806 ("Hidden templates should display as an icon in-page so they can be interacted with (e.g. a puzzle piece?) ") which has a high priority major impact rating. Other than encouraging the relevant people to fix that bug I don't know what can be done. Any ideas? I have had an idea - just treat them like <noiki>s and make them undeleteable in VE. Occasionally it might leave in ones that were intended to be deleted but that's going to be very rare and this would just be a workaround until they were handled properly Thryduulf (talk) 19:22, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I have an existing document that contains a hyperlink enclosed in square brackets, like [20]. Instead of this being displayed as a number enclosed in square brackets, I want to add text that will be displayed, like example.com Web site. In the traditional editor I would insert, after the hyperlink but before the closing bracket, a space and the link text, and I'd be done. In VE I clicked on the number, then on the chain icon, and found nowhere to add the link text. The "Editing links" section of the user guide covers the case of adding a hyperlink to text that already exists, but not adding text where the link already exists. It seems that completing this task in VE may involve either:

1. clicking the existing link
2. clicking the chain icon
3. highlighting the URL happens automatically
4. copying the URL
5. closing the hyperlink dialog
6. typing the desired link text
7. highlighting new text
8. clicking chain icon
9. pasting URL into dialog
10. closing dialog

or retyping the URL. This seems inefficient. —rybec 19:06, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, this is a frustrating bug. At present the method that should work is to change the text to what you want the link to display as, select the link and all that you want to show as the link, open the link dialog and confirm the existing link. However, this is buggy and can produce all sorts of strange wikicode. For the requested improvement see T50789 (comment #3). Thryduulf (talk) 19:31, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

There needs to be a way of adding a ref name inside VE, or I end up adding the ref in VE, then placing the ref name and the child references in the source editor. Insulam Simia (talk) 19:12, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Can you clarify? I thought about requesting this enhancement but so far I haven't found I need it; I just add the new reference in VE, then click "Use existing reference" to add it in other locations. Is that not what you're looking for? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 19:14, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Well the my problem is that when I added a new ref to the Danny Worsnop article, it didn't show up in the 'Use an existing reference' feature. Insulam Simia (talk) 21:16, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

This has to do with the absence of a full featured preview mode; in such a preview, everything edited would be available to build upon through the interface. The classic editing preview is about as full featured as you can get. The VE preview has a long way to go to catch up. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 22:09, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Yes, that is a known issue - T53689. It is marked as "highest" priority so hopefully it shouldn't be too long before it is fixed. Thryduulf (talk) 22:12, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Status	New:
Description	Clicking on the "Read the User Guide" link (within the Beta/questionmark popup) has the effect of losing all current editing, because it opens the User Guide in the current window, without warning that it's going to do so. Imagine: half an hour's editing, find a problem, remember seeing that link and think it might offer advice, click for the popup, click to open the User Guide, and ... one very unhappy editor. I suggest that either the User Guide should open in a new tab or window, or, if this is impossible, there should be a warning "Read the User Guide (and lose any current edits)". PamD 19:28, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
To duplicate:	Make an edit, click the BETA popup, click the "Read the User Guide" link.... Use Back button to revisit the page you were editing, observe that your edit has vanished.
Operating system	Vista
Web browser	Firefox22
Site	En-WP
Workaround
Skin	Vector
Resolution
Bugzilla

I've reported as T54475. As a workaround you can hold down CTRL while clicking on a link and it will open in a new window/tab. This will work on almost every link on almost every website so it's a useful one to know. I don't expect you'll have to wait long though as the similar T54093 which asked for the same thing for the "wikitext" link in the popup warning was fixed rather quickly. Thryduulf (talk) 19:40, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

When I said it would likely be quick I didn't think it would have been fixed in less than 2 hours! Don't expect to see the fix instantly though as James' comment when marking it fixed was "next scheduled deployment is not until 15 August, however. :-(". Thryduulf (talk) 20:29, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks: Good that it's been "fixed", rather depressing to hear that, if I understand James rightly, nothing about VE, including this, is going to get any better for almost a fortnight. Ye gods. PamD 22:50, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Well if anything major crops up then I'm sure the fix will be deployed as fast as they can do it, as they did with the save page issue. If that happens then other fixes waiting in the wings will, I think, be deployed too. The chances of that happening are slim though :/. I'll ask whether adding something like "(hold ctrl while clicking this link to open it in a new window)" could be added to the note sooner. If it can then that would help a little bit. Thryduulf (talk) 23:17, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

James has commented on my suggestion, "The text is controlled by MediaWiki:Visualeditor-help-label - but I'd counsel against putting a lot of text into it, as it may not look very good.". Brevity is very much not my strong point, so suggestions please! Thryduulf (talk) 23:45, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

the create account / login button in the top right is covered up poorly while in edit mode. maybe hide it when entering edit mode? 74.202.39.3 (talk) 19:30, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi, actually it shouldn't be covered in that, when you are at the top of the page, the bar should load below. Browser/OS/wikipedia skin? Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:11, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

With the traditional editor, I made a page containing only:

[http://example.com]

I wanted to try using VE to change that to:

[http://example.com example.com Web site]

by the procedure I described in another feedback post

1. clicking the existing link
2. clicking the chain icon
3. copying the URL
4. closing the hyperlink dialog
5. typing the desired link text
6. highlighting the new text
7. clicking the chain icon
8. pasting the URL into the hyperlink dialog
9. closing the dialog

I didn't bother deleting the original hyperlink; the numeral "1" surrounded by brackets (what one would see while viewing the rendered wiki) and nowiki tags was added to the document: [21]. —rybec 19:38, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure where to post this since the talk page of that subpage redirects to the main WT:VE, but my comments are indeed regarding this. I think this is a good idea. I have a habit of clicking right next to the "read" button and I often end having to wait for the buggy VE to load before being able to change to the wikitext editor. In addition the clear "beta" label was a good idea. Finally, a step in the right direction. — kikichugirl ^inquire 19:48, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Kikichugirl, here will do :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:12, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

In the WYSIWYG editor, the topicons do not appear where they normally would and there are blank lines around them that do not appear in the rendered page. APerson (talk!) 22:00, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, this is a known issue - T53420. Thryduulf (talk) 22:18, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

So this happened. Anyone know what's up? Kevin Rutherford (talk) 22:33, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

When VE does things like that it's often (but not always) due to a formatting error somewhere in there. Particularly check whether there are any unmatched quotes anywhere. I'm neither awake enough nor sober enough to spot anything at that level of detail! That might not be the cause but it's not a bad place to start looking. Thryduulf (talk) 23:22, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Can the cite toolbar be made available in VE?

I had to switch to "Edit Source" in order to cite a source for an edit that I otherwise happily made using VE. APerson (talk!) 02:01, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

This has been asked before, and the answer apparently is no (I can't remember why, sorry). It is known that there needs to be significant improvements to reference editing in VE, and I the aim is for it to become at least as easy as the cite toolbar, but it's not there yet. Thryduulf (talk) 06:27, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

When referencing, can there be a field so you can put in the name of a named reference?

You could put the text field in the "Options" section, along with the group. APerson (talk!) 02:09, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, this is something that needs to be done - see T52568. I've added your suggestion there, thanks. Thryduulf (talk) 06:31, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

This article version starts with a bulleted list (i.e. there is a star as the first character). When I tried editing it in VE, I was unable to move the cursor earlier than the first bullet, to add something before all of the bullets. Neither mouse clicks nor arrow keys worked. OS X / Chrome / MonoBook. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:14, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

I was not able to find a related bug, I'd need a second search, but in the meanwhile, hope you can appreciate a workaround for this: after clicking Edit beta, click on the bullet list and then press Enter. You should now be able to add text, you just need to put the first item back in the bullet list. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 07:32, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Hey all, I've spent the past few days collecting data on VE load times for large articles in different browsers. The main graph is at right. Full results can be found here. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 03:31, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

That's both very interesting and very useful data, thank you. Pinging @Jdforrester (WMF) and Eloquence: to make them aware of this. Thryduulf (talk) 06:41, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

I wonder what makes it exponential (lined up in semilog plot) instead of linear. Anyone know? 70.59.30.138 (talk) 08:20, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure that's a valid conclusion. If you look at each browser individually, they look not far from linear up to 400KB, and there are only a few data points larger than that, which are probably unusual articles -- lots of references or lots of templates, maybe. Looie496 (talk) 22:52, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Are you serious? each browser individually is much closer to exponential on this graph than linear. 70.59.30.138 (talk) 01:49, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

@Looie496: The graph looks linear because the t-axis is displayed with a logarithmic scale. If you check out the full study results, you'll see every exponential regression has a significantly higher correlation coefficient than the corresponding linear regression. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 22:18, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

I attempted to edit List of United States counties and county-equivalents in Firefox ESR on Linux. First I tried the traditional editor: the load time was around 5 seconds. On my first attempt with VE, Firefox informed me that

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.

Script: https://bits.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=ext.visualEdito r.core%2Cicons-vector%7Cext.visualEditor.viewPageTarget.icons-vector%7Crangy&skin=vector&version=2013080

3T022159Z&*:131

and the browser became generally very slow to respond, and I noticed in top that it was consuming around 520 MB more RAM. I closed Firefox without letting the page load completely in VE.

I had had some other tabs open (as I had with the old editor). I made another attempt, with nothing else opened.

• Firefox showing just a blank page consumed 549 MB
• 612 MB for the page opened in the old editor [22] with JS turned off
• while loading the page in VE [23], RAM use gradually increased, peaking at around 1518 MB
• once the page was fully loaded, RAM use dropped to 1398 MB
• load time with the old editor was around 7 seconds
• load time with VE was around 10 minutes 44 seconds
• loading was CPU-bound, with Firefox showing ~100% CPU usage
• during my second test, the Firefox process was small enough that swapping was unnecessary
• once the page loaded in VE, I clicked on "cancel"; cancelling took around 52 seconds

Figures for "RAM use" are from the "VIRT" column shown by top:

o: VIRT -- Virtual Image (kb) The total amount of virtual memory used by the task. It includes all code, data and shared

libraries plus pages that have been swapped out.

—rybec 22:59, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

I am trying to use the Visual Editor as my predominant editor while working on my personal computer (Chrome / Linux). However, I've found it quite difficult to use VE on Safari on the iPad and have decided not to try any longer, using the Wikitext Editor when on that device. This does seem counterintuitive as VE would seem to be a more touch-friendly interface than WE. One thing for further development to consider is a revision of scope for VE, focusing down on editing from a mobile device. I think this would be an area for major improvement over the Wikitext editor and would align reasonably well with the massive increase in use of mobile devices over deskbound PCs in general. There are some stats available somewhere related to what platform people are editing from, I think -- anyone know where these stats are? --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 01:47, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

What specific things are not working/could be done better? I don't recall seeing any stats about which platforms people are using to access VE, but I would be interested in them if anyone knows where they are? Thryduulf (talk) 06:23, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

I should come with specifics, yes. One of the problems is the invariant size of the dialog boxes like those used to add a reference or a template. These should be better scaled for the mobile platform. Another item is mouseover behavior; as far as I can tell, on the iPad there is no equivalent of mouseover behavior, so clicking an element is always equivalent to doubleclicking and the mouseover event is not supported as a "fingerover" event. A third item is the edit/save bar which in a browser like Chrome under Linux floats and is present when you scroll down a page; on Safari on the iPad, it is necessary to scroll up to the top to get to this toolbar (i.e. in order to add a template or save the page), which is doable but quite inconvenient. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 12:48, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

A separate version of VisualEditor is being worked on for iPads and mobile editing. When it's released (no reliable date announced, AFAIK) I think you'll find many fewer of these problems. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:35, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Chrome on iPad 3

I started fiddling with VE in Chrome on my ladypal's iPad 3, and I've found some usability issues as well:

• Broken spellcheck/undo is back with a vengeance
• No way to resize images
• Toolbar stuck at the top of the page
• Loading VE on large pages causes the browser to freeze

I'll update this list whenever I get more fiddling time. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 03:26, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

great idea,... work more before pushing this: by first experience was *****, lots of black boxed instead of images?! (chrome) Sorin Sbârnea (talk) 07:52, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

I can't find related bugs and it's the first time I hear this. Can you try with a different browser? Also, Wikipedia skin and OS? It sounds more like a browser-related thing than a VE one (maybe some plugin/extension interfering)? Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:09, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi Sorin Sbârnea,

Were these small boxes where you should have seen words? Which article did you attempt to edit? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:57, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

The following discussion is marked as answered. If you have a new comment, place it just below the box.

---

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54504

While creating Liquorice (disambiguation) I found that the top bar of editing icons etc was scrolling away out of sight instead of staying fixed at the top of the screen. It was persistent enough for me to scroll up and down a few times and get screenshots. I've tried creating a couple more articles, and haven't been able to reproduce it. It's obviously very serious when it happens, as it's pretty much impossible to add templates etc to the end of the article if you can't see the bottom of the article and the editing bar at the same time (I was about to add ((In title)) to the "See also" section but had to give up.) PamD 18:07, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Hey PamD, I think that it is related to something included in that specific page. As a matter of fact, I pasted the content into my sandbox and voilà, toolbar gone for me as well. I am going to test now again removing each element to understand which one is causing this. After that, I will see whether it is known and will let you know. Thanks in the meanwhile :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 19:23, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

It's the first line which actually causes this! ?!? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 19:30, 3 August 2013 (UTC) PS: Also, did you notice the little "arrow point" at the beginning of the article when editing? Not sure whether it has to do with recent changes to VE, I'll find out. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 19:34, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

It also happens if you do this (which is, if you add something "on" a link). --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:02, 3 August 2013 (UTC) PS: there you go, PamD.

Thanks for your work. Weird, because that first line looks quite respectable. I didn't notice any "arrow point" as far as I remember, and I don't see it if I open your 20:26 sandbox version in VE right now. (Vista, Firefox22, Vector). I still lose the top bar when I scroll the dab page, even after making a few minor edits today.

Ahah: unbolding unlinking the first word seems to make the difference. Given that most dab pages for topic which have a primary source start off with the main word linked and bolded, this is ... unfortunate. PamD 08:20, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

It's definitely the linked first word: compare problem and no problem. PamD 08:44, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

So to reproduce the problem, try editing London (disambiguation) or almost any similarly-titled dab page! PamD 08:50, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

I wonder whether someone thought that no correctly formatted WP article would ever start with a link? PamD 08:51, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

Even if no Wikipedia article should, there are lots of non-article userpages that begin with a link, or indeed contain nothing except a link. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:17, 5 August 2013 (UTC)