Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback

Your feedback about VisualEditor

Use this page to tell the Wikimedia developers your ideas and issues about using VisualEditor. All comments are read, but personal replies are not guaranteed.

Feedback

Please click here to report a problem with VisualEditor.

Please include your web browser, computer operating system, and Wikipedia skin (usually Vector, sometimes Monobook).

Please click here to make a suggestion.

Ideas about user interface choices and the priorities for adding new features are especially welcome.

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Help VisualEditor is available at most projects alongside the original wikitext editor if you opt-in, by changing your preferences. VisualEditor is not currently available to unregistered users here at the English Wikipedia, or to users of Internet Explorer 9 anywhere. Read the user guide (or the version at MediaWiki.org) Sign up for the newsletter in English or in other languages.

Local archives 2012: 1 2013: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 2014: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 2015: 1

Citoid - some feedback

1. Not particular to Citoid, and so certainly reported elsewhere, but still: It would be really nice, when one adds a citation, to have the new citation appear in the list of citations. It's particularly problematical to have the citations renumber themselves, in the body of the text, as they do, but to have the list unchanged (so now the numbers in the body of the text don't match what is in the list, by number).

2. It's baffling to have the cite icon (castle?) sitting next to the drop-down for cites, and the two of them not behaving the same way as the paragraph, list/indentation, and insert icons and their related drop-downs. By this, I mean that for those three other icons and their adjacent down-pointing carets, it makes no difference whether one clicks on the icon or the caret - one gets the same menu choices. That's not at all true with the Cite icon (clicked on, it opens a dialog, primarily for Citoid) and its adjacent pull-down menu (which lacks a "Cite by URL or DOI" option, but lists six other options).

I understand that (eventually) most people will use Citoid, most of the time, so being able to access it directly on the toolbar (by clicking the Cite icon) saves one click. Fine. But that's no reason to exclude Citoid from the pull-down menu accessible via the caret. If Citoid is not on the regular pull-down menu, it's quite possible that a lot of people won't find it.

3. Clicking on the Cite icon opens a dialog with Citoid, plus this link: "Or use the full citation dialog to fill in the details yourself". That link wording may be technically correct, but it's both verbose and unclear. (A menu list may, technically, be a dialog, but that's not how most people think of it). The wording "Or use another type of citation" is both shorter and clearer.

4. I'm not found of YYYY-MM-DD as a date; I'd rather use Month DD, YYYY. I understand that preferences do vary. But it's going to get really old, really fast, to have to change the date format, every single time I use Citoid, to my preferred format. Is there, or could there be, some way to set a preference, so editors don't have to change the format, every single time they use Citoid?

5. After this sequence: click the "Cite" icon, paste a URL, click "Lookup", and click "Insert", then VE displays the citation in (what appears to be to me, anyway) a dialog, with the option of clicking "Edit". If I'm not interested in editing that citation, then I assume that I should press [esc] to dismiss the dialog - that's what I do with other dialogs. Nope - if I press [esc], VE thinks I'm trying to exit VE, and asks me whether I really do want to exit VE, or not. Such inconsistency is disconcerting.

6. If I insert a citation using Citoid, and click somewhere to avoid the Edit dialog (or non-dialog), then decide I don't like the citation and click Undo, on the toolbar, the citation is converted to an empty Basic citation. It takes a second "Undo" to completely remove it. I don't understand why a single "Undo" doesn't remove it completely. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 02:51, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

Hi John Broughton,

1. Use <references /> rather than {{Reflist}} if you want this behavior. It might someday be possible to update templates on the fly (without completely killing performance), but this is not likely to happen any time soon.
2. I believe that every right-thinking editor agrees with you, including the product manager. But the word is that this will take months, not days or weeks. (The icon is a book with a bookmark, and I don't believe that anyone actually loves that one, either.) Feel free to add ideas to phab: T96118.
3. I don't think that it's actually taking you to the usual dropdown, but I like your suggestion, and it's now phab:T96119.
4. Screwing up date formats is being discussed, but it seems dubious. Are you primarily thinking about the date field and/or the accessdate field?
5. It seems works like the same as the link dialog, if you (just) select one and then press escape. Does anyone here think that pressing Escape should exit VisualEditor without saving? (If you've made any changes, your browser should catch it and ask you if you really mean to close it, so you shouldn't lose any work. If you haven't made any changes, it just exits without warning.)
6. I've never tried that sequence before. When I don't like it, I backspace over it. It also creates an empty <ref/> tag if you don't undo twice. This is phab: T96120.

Thanks again for all of your help. I really do appreciate it, and I apologize for being slow in getting these filed in Phabricator. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 07:14, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

Re #5 above: I'm not crazy about Esc exiting VE, but I think it's OK. However, I think John is right to say that hitting Esc when you are apparently in a dialog feels odd. The user expectation is surely that Esc pops one consecutively out of a hierarchy of dialogs. Only when you're at the top level should Esc cause VE to quit. I suspect that the design concept is that some things are true dialogs and some are displays of attributes related to the point the cursor is at; the latter are not dismissed by Esc because the cursor hasn't moved so VE is at the top of its display hierarchy. Hence Esc dismisses VE, not the apparent dialog. I will get used to this behaviour but I think some users will stay confused for a while. Not top priority to fix, though; it does work and is internally consistent. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 00:29, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): Both the source date and url access date fields appear as follows: 2015-04-16. What I'm suggesting is that an editor be able to set an editing preference (presumably in the Editing tab of one's Preferences) so that when Citoid creates a date, it uses the preferred format. That may not be the ideal situation (per Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Formats, date formats should be consistent within an article), but it will reduce the amount of work an editor has to do to get the date into an acceptable form - because the English Manual of Style says that YYYY-MM-DD is generally not an acceptable style for dates within articles. Alternatively, I suppose, there could be a single default style for dates within a language Wikipedia, modifiable by administrators. But, again, YYYY-MM-DD is not acceptable for readers, and so editors using Citoid, in its current form, really should be changing one or both dates [accessdate isn't that important], every single time.

I note, for the sake of completeness, that the ideal solution is to allow viewers, when logged in, to specify the date format they prefer (including which calendar), the way that Microsoft Excel allows one to specify the visible format for a date while keeping the underlying date in a consistent format. And, of course, the Wikipedia community would decide the displayed format for readers not logged in, perhaps even varying by IP location? [Excel actually has three levels: what you see when viewing a cell, what you see when editing a cell, and the deep value - through how Microsoft set up the last of these is obviously subject to disagreement - see http://j-walk.com/ss/excel/usertips/tip028.htm , for example.] -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:11, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

John, if Citoid is inserting YYYY-MM-DD, that's because the source provided the date in that format. Try something from the Christian Science Monitor or from the Reuters website. You won't get YYYY-MM-DD from them. (Citoid does determine the format for access dates, and that could be changed if every language didn't have its own idea of what is "acceptable for readers".)

The main problem is that we're not talking about a simple question of starting with a validated, consistent date format (e.g., what Excel actually stores in its spreadsheets) and changing its appearance. Intead, we're talking about having Citoid change, and therefore in some cases corrupt, plain strings of text. You can see the request at phab:T95016, but I'm dubious about it. I'd rather have ugly formatting on dates than the wrong date. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:08, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Citation numbers messing up

Tracked in Phabricator (?)
Task T52474

Bug report	VisualEditor
Description	After clicking edit and the page loads the citation numbers are off. This does not impact the actual article just what I see when editing.
Intention:	I was trying to fix dead links to improve the quality of the wiki.
Steps to Reproduce:	Yes I tried to reproduce it.
Results:	It continued to happen.
Expectations:	That it would happen again because it has happened on several articles.
Page where the issue occurs	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zac_Brown_Band_discography This was the most notable but it happened on other articules.
Web browser	Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.118 Safari/537.36
Operating system	Windows 8.1
Skin	Whatever the normal one is.
Notes:
Workaround or suggested solution	Open the article in two tabs edit on one and look at the second one to see the correct numbers

BlueworldSpeccie (talk) 18:37, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Could you explain a bit as to what you mean by "the citation numbers are off" - off in what way? I opened the article you mentioned, above, in VE; when open for editing, it showed 64 citations, the same number as visible when just in read mode. So it's not obvious to me what the problem is. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:17, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

@John Broughton: Yeah, sure. It is not that citations are missing its that the numbers are different. Sorry for not making that clear in my first post. I grabbed two screenshots from the article I mentioned above the first one is the normal page - http://picpaste.com/No_Ve_normal-utjPNVYh.PNG , and the second one is with after I clicked the edit button and VE was on - http://picpaste.com/With_ve_not-HAJpsbz3.PNG. BlueworldSpeccie (talk) 17:35, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

@BlueworldSpeccie: Thanks. My first thought was that VE was just processing citations in the wrong order. But no, VE is mispositioning citation number and their associated text. To pick one example, in the table "2010s singles", footnote 38 is the citation for the text "US: 439,000", and the text for citation 38 is "Country Album Chart News: The Week of March 12, 2014: Eli Young Band “10,000 Towns” Hits Top Of The Charts ...". In VE (editing mode), the footnote number next to the text "US: 439,000" is number 31, and the associated citation text is "Zac Brown Band - Chart History ... ". So the citation numbers remain correctly paired with their citation text, but the citation numbers are in the wrong place. And that, of course, is highly problematical.

@Whatamidoing (WMF): Scrambling the location of citations makes it impossible to determine, in VE mode, whether text has a reliable source or not. I nominate this bug as a VE blocker, if it isn't already listed, unless someone can make a persuasive argument that this is an edge case. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:28, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

The problem appears to be the use of the unsupported local template, {{Certification Cite Ref}}, instead of the supported ref tags. Templates are not ref tags, and they don't get processed the same way. (They can't get processed the same way, or else you'd never be able to edit the template in VisualEditor.) If you want this template to work, then pull the <ref> tags out, and add the ref tags directly in the article. (You'll type <ref>{{Certification Cite Ref}}</ref> to use it in the wikitext editor—a bot can convert all the articles very easily).

You can test it here; when you open the page in VisualEditor and select the "[1]", it offers to let you edit the template. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:51, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): Edge case it is, then. Since the template was created (and the 6000+ uses of it apparently related to) a WikiProject, I've posted at the related page: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Albums. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:58, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

@John Broughton: I found another one. And I don't think that it a music template messing up. here vs. here with VE. Look at the line "In 2008, the Kansas City Zoo was voted one of America's best zoos." The citation number changes from 2 to 1. BlueworldSpeccie (talk) 14:32, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

I think there's a connection with T52474. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:07, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

(ec) Yes, both issues, "references in templates/infoboxes" and "references generated by templates", are mentioned in the linked Phab thread and have been known for 2 years now. I suggest to nominate this issue as VE blocker, as it hinders editing in many developed articles on en-Wiki. GermanJoe (talk) 15:25, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

+1 with GermanJoe. This should be fixed in VE, the templates work as designed and they work correctly in MediaWiki, there's no reason to pull the ref tags out of template simply because VE can't handle this. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 16:40, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): With no further comments, I have suggested the Phab task as Q4 blocker (although I am not totally sure, I did it correctly ;) ). It would be great, if we could get some progress towards a solution on this issue. GermanJoe (talk) 13:58, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

You have successfully nominated the task. The list is pretty long this week, so I don't know if it will get processed tomorrow or next Wednesday. We'll see. Realistically, I don't think that you should expect quick action. It's a hard problem. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:12, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

Visual editor loading bar never finishes loading

Tracked in Phabricator (?)
Task T97346

Bug report	VisualEditor
Description	Visual editor loading bar never finishes loading
Intention:	Edit any article page on English language Wikipedia
Steps to Reproduce:	Clicked the Edit button
Results:	Visual editor loading bar never finishes loading, cannot edit the page. If I try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sandbox?veaction=edit the loading bar starts full and then looks like it's loading backwards and freezes at the same point in the line
Expectations:	For it to finish and me to be able to edit the page
Page where the issue occurs	Any en.wikipedia article page
Web browser	Up to date Chrome
Operating system	Windows 8.1
Skin	Vector
Notes:
Workaround or suggested solution

Mrjohncummings (talk) 23:17, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

Mrjohncummings, I had this problem last week, but not this week. Has this continued for you? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:05, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

Hi Whatamidoing (WMF), yep I'm afraid so, the bar always freezes in the same place which looks to be just over 2/3rds full, I've tried both large and small articles. I just tried it with the up to date IE 11 on the same computer (Asus UX305 with up to date Windows 8.1) and I have exactly the same issue. Is there any other info that I can give that would be useful? Mrjohncummings (talk) 21:34, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

Mrjohncummings, does it happen if you're editing logged out/in a private browsing window? This link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sandbox?veaction=edit will still work even when you're logged out. Also, can you open this link? http://mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Whatamidoing_(WMF)/Sandbox?veaction=edit

Based on the question they asked me for phab:T67365 last year, they'd also like to know whether there are any errors in the Javascript console. If you know how to look that up, then that would help. In the meantime, I've filed phab: T97346 about this. If anyone else is having this problem, even occasionally, please let me know! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:33, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Whatamidoing (WMF), no idea how to look for errors in the Javascript console, happy to look if you can tell me how. Mrjohncummings (talk) 22:50, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

I don't know how to do it in Chrome or Internet Explorer, either, but this page seems to have some information about what to type or click on in Chrome. If those directions don't work for you, then someone else may know the answer. We have several experienced people on this page, and Chrome is the most popular browser among Wikipedia users. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:14, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

Insert media a bit confusing

I am teaching editing Wikipedia to ESL university students. They find inserting pictures in Visual Editor a bit confusing. Not all get that insert picture is a "unwritten" part of insert media. I'd therefore suggest changing "Media" to "Pictures and other media". It may take two lines, but space is not really an issue. Second, it is not really clear you can search for things through the search bar, nor that it accepts File:Name for specific files. Both me and all my students found it a bit confusing; particularly as the Wikipedia/Commons image search is still pretty bad. What we do is we go to a relevant category, look at the commons gallery there, chose a picture, copy the file name and paste it into the Insert Media. In other words, we find the current search promising but poor, and the fact that the tool doesn't say you can paste it File:Name into it confusing. The tool should understand and parse file names, with or without the File:, as well as URLs to wikipedia/commons images (simply remove the http blah blah junk). The window would benefit from a comment that you can paste specific file names / links there, as well as from a link to the Commons gallery. It could use template Commonscat and other commons templates, or just check whether relevant categories / pages exist on Commons,or just have links to them "relevant galleries may exist on Commons" or such. In summary, what most newbies see when they use it is a selection of mostly bad images. They don't know how to get more, nor how to link the ones they found on Commons or elsewhere. PS. Linking to Creative Commons BY-SA and such image searchers may be useful, too, but that's probably for after we get the basic functionality polished. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:37, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

I've been using VisualEditor for a little while now, and I didn't know until reading this that I could just paste a filename into the media search box if I know which image I want to use. That kind of workflow is convenient for me, especially since I often upload photos to Commons and then go insert them into Wikipedia articles, and I agree that it would be nice to make this more discoverable. Dreamyshade (talk) 09:07, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

Piotr Konieczny,

Here's a list of some of the ideas here:

1. Change the name from "Media settings" to "Pictures and other media". Length is a problem when translating (e.g., to Russian), but this is a large dialog box, so it might still be okay.
2. Make the search icon (magnifying glass) more prominent.
3. Make it possible to search for https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sandbox.png instead of just "File:Sandbox.png" or "Sandbox.png" (both of which already work).
4. Add a tooltip or GuidedTour that tells people how to search for files.
5. Search won't find non-Files on Commons. Galleries and Categories can't be inserted, so it's not appropriate to add them to results. However, it could provide a "Click here to go to Commons" link, which could be a link to the same search term at Commons, including cats and gallery pages.

Does this sound like a fair description of your ideas? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:22, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor Feedback

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/44.0.2376.0 Safari/537.36

It's perfect. Honestly, I wish editing Wikipedia was like this all along.

7degreedarkness (talk) 23:38, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the compliment, 7degreedarkness. Happy editing, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:12, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Speed check

This relates to Timeshifter's comments about VisualEditor "Lite" above. Would a few of you do a quick check on speed for me? Here's what you need to do:

1. Read Barack Obama. Just click the link to see how long it takes for the page to finish loading. (In my case, it takes longer when I'm logged in because of multiple scripts.)
2. Open it in VisualEditor. See how many seconds elapse between clicking the "Edit" link and when it looks like you could start typing. (The cancel/don't save.)
3. Open it in the wikitext editor. Same measurement: how many seconds before you can type?

Real-world results table

Username	Browser/OS	Read time	VisualEditor	Wikitext editor	Comments
User:WhatamIdoing	Firefox 36/Mac OS 10.10	15	13	8
User:Whatamidoing (WMF)	Safari 8/Mac OS 10.10	5	6	4
User:NicoV	Chrome 42/Win 7	8-9	13-14	7-8	Using Timeline tab in Chrome developer tools
User:NicoV	Chrome 42/Win 7	5	7-8	4-5	Just counting seconds
User:Dreamyshade	Chrome 42/OS X 10.9	4	6	3
User:Ypnypn	Firefox 37/Win 7	8	60	5	The 5 and 60 seconds may be off by about 1-2 sec
User:Ypnypn	Chrome 42/Win 7	5	6	5	May be off by 1 second
User:GermanJoe	Firefox 37.01, XP	20	28	15	from Germany, old PC, some scripts
User:Mike Christie	Chrome 42/Win 7 64-bit	2.9	3.3	2.8	manual timing with iPhone stopwatch. First time I opened the article it took 13 seconds, but it's reliably around 3 seconds now. I see I have the fastest times so far; this may partly explain why I like VE more than some other editors do. 8Gb of RAM might be helping too.
User:Mike Christie	Chrome 42/Win 7 32-bit	2.8	3.3	2.8	manual timing with iPhone stopwatch. 8Gb of RAM; this time it took about 9 seconds the first time I opened the article, but after that it takes under 3 seconds.
User:Timeshifter	Firefox 37.0.1, Win Vista 32-bit	22	22	5	timing via date/time control panel clock. 9 year old PC. 3 GB RAM. Maybe we could provide a number from one to five on all articles indicating the relative VE loading time in Firefox. One being fastest, five being slow loading like Barack Obama page.
User:Timeshifter	Firefox 37.0.1 safe mode, Win Vista 32-bit	9-15	22	5	I restarted Firefox in safe mode (all addons disabled). Time to load for reading was faster. VE and wikitext load times unchanged. I did a few runs, and cleared caches between each run (via history menu).
User:Timeshifter	Chrome 42, Win Vista 32-bit	6	8	4	Did several runs. Cleared all caches between runs (via history settings). I dislike using Chrome though, due to almighty Google spying on all we do.
User:Redfiona99	Chrome 40, Linux, Mint	7	6	3
User:Redfiona99	Firefox 36, Linux, Mint	6	16	3	The two runs were done back to back on the same machine.
User:This, that and the other	Firefox 37, Windows 8.1 (WOW64)	39 [1]	22 [2]	3	Notes: [1] I have the "auto-number headings" preference turned on, which means MediaWiki has to re-parse the page just for me (it can't use the parser cache). That probably helps to explain the high load time. [2] Failed the first time after 31 seconds, with error "Error loading data from server: HTTP 0. Would you like to retry?" (my translation of this: "the request timed out"). Then I clicked OK, and it took 22 more seconds.
User:NicoV	Firefox 31.2 ESR, Win XP	12	10	3-4	Just counting seconds
User:John Broughton	Firefox 37.0.1, Mac OS 10.10.3	8	21	3
User:SPage (WMF)	Browser/OS	Read time	VisualEditor	Wikitext editor	Comments
Your turn!

I'm expecting some variability in the results. One of the things I'm curious about is whether Firefox is always the slowest, or if it's just my account (or the thirty-odd tabs I have open in Firefox). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:05, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks to everyone who has posted information so far: User:NicoV, User:Dreamyshade, User:Ypnypn, User:GermanJoe, User:Mike Christie, User:Timeshifter, User:Redfiona99, User:This, that and the other. This is really great. If you haven't added your numbers yet, then please do!

I'm not surprised that it's faster the second time around. It probably has a lot of the page cached by that point. It looks like Firefox is slower than Chrome, which is consistent with what I'm hearing out of the lab. At a glance, our numbers seem more diverse but slower on average than theirs. I don't think that this is surprising, but it's good to have real-world data. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:56, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Fail to load VE immediately after a VE save

Tracked in Phabricator (?)
Task T97069

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.90 Safari/537.36

I'm working on User:Whiteghost.ink/Scheepvaarthuis. When I make any edit using VE and save, if I then immediately try to "edit" again the system gives me this message:

"Error loading data from server: ve-api: Revision IDs (doc=658818023,api=658818363) returned by server do not match. Would you like to try again?"

If I press cancel, refresh the page, then "edit" again, it works fine. However, this problem appears every time I save a change and want to continue editing.

I'm using v42 of Chrome on OSX 10.10.

Whiteghost.ink (talk) 10:00, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Hi Whiteghost.ink,

Thanks for this report. I've linked the bug here in case you want to track it. This should be fixed here now. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:11, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Not possible to drag an image outside current view

Tracked in Phabricator (?)
Task T53669

When in VE it is possible to "drag" an image to reposition it within the article - so far so good. The anchor moves as expected. However, if I wish to move the image further up or down the article than is currently visible I should be able to move my cursor (while dragging the anchor-point) to the edge of the scrollable area and for the article to start scrolling. This currently doesn't happen. This means I have to move the image in increments - to the top of the currently viewable area, drop, scroll the screen, re-select the image, drag to the top, repeat... Wittylama 16:11, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Wittylama, what's your browser/OS? This works for me (Safari/Mac), but when it happened last year, I believe it was browser-specific. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:58, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): - I'm on OSX 10.10 and Chrome 42. Wittylama 22:11, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

User:Elitre (WMF), do you have Chrome 42 and Mac OX 10.10? Could you try to replicate this?

Sure, my pleasure. See my report in the task. TL;DR, the only reliable way to make the page scroll is through the two-fingers scroll gesture. HTH, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:36, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

Wittylama, could you try one more thing? Some previous reports were bi-directional, and for others the problem was only dragging up or only dragging the image down. Does it work in either direction for you? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:30, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Weird bug when adding photo

Bug report	VisualEditor
Description	Adding random text from another article when trying to add photo
Intention:	Adding a photo from commons to an article
Steps to Reproduce:
Results:
Expectations:
Page where the issue occurs	https://no.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hilarion_Alfejev&diff=prev&oldid=13951674
Web browser	Firefox unknown version (work computer)
Operating system	Win7
Skin	Vector
Notes:
Workaround or suggested solution

Profoss (talk) 18:35, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

Hey Profoss, how exactly did you add the pic to the page, can you describe the steps? Did you do something else? I tested (in FF as well)and nothing weird happened. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 18:45, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

@Elitre (WMF), it was fairly straight forward, I started up the media insertion tool, copy pasted the name of the photo from Commons into the bar (at this point the page looked alright) and pressed save. I have never seen this bug before and never since. Profoss (talk) 11:47, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

This was T97155 which has since been fixed. SSastry (WMF) (talk) 15:34, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

@SSastry (WMF), lovely! thanks! Good to see that I wasn't the only one experiencing it. Profoss (talk) 15:08, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

You weren't, and thanks a lot for your report! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:58, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Citoid error

Citoid seems to have problems with some unicode characters. For example trying to format [1] it produces the title "Kielce: To by�a matka ca�ego �wiata - c�rka Ireny Sendler opowiedzia�a nam o swojej mamie" instead of "To była matka całego świata - córka Ireny Sendler opowiedziała nam o swojej mamie". --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 06:48, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Seems like it is interpreting the document as UTF-8, but it is in the 8859-2 charset as indicated by the Content-Type HTTP response header. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:32, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

See [2]. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:01, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

<a> and <style> tags added by VE

Tracked in Phabricator (?)
Task T97279

In this edit, VE added <style> with CSS code and <a> tags.

The <a> tags are forbidden and I doubt the style tags should be used with CSS inside. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 11:16, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

With all of the "badges.instagram.com/static/images/ig-badge-sprite-48@2x.png", I'm going to guess a copy-paste problem. It might be interesting to see whether anyone with an Instagram account can replicate this. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:04, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikisyntax replaced by HTML syntax

Tracked in Phabricator (?)
Task T97280

In this edit, VE replaced wikisyntax by HTML syntax :

• ''' by <b>
• === by <h3>, == by <h2>
• [[Image:...]] by <figure>
• '' by <i>

--NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 11:22, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Scrolling problems

CorporateM, I have a question about your /Archive 2015 1#Minor quips report: Is there any chance that the material you're pasting contains a tab character? That would be phab:T74390. Does it move the cursor to the top as well? That's probably phab:T73728, previously seen only in Safari (Safari and Chrome are related, though).

Mike Christie, your problem with scrolling down after pasting is now phab: T97359

Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:19, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure; I'll try to keep an eye on it. CorporateM (Talk) 01:18, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

Shortcut to insert your linked username

I wanted to add myself to a table of users, just like Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback#Speed_check on this page. VE's table editing rocks, but I wasn't sure how to insert "SPage (WMF)". It would be nice to automate this, if I'm logged in VE could add Insert > Signature/Username > (menu or dialog of different signatureflavors). Note I don't know how to easily do this in wikitext either, using ~~~ creates a (talk) link as well. I scanned Phabricator and didn't see a task for this. Thanks! -- SPage (WMF) (talk) 20:25, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

Personally, I don't think it's a good idea to add such things to VE: first, signatures are almost never wanted on pages that can be edited with VE on wikipedia; second, it will probably only result in new users adding their signature in the middle of articles, giving again more work to others to clean up articles. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 20:54, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

SPage (WMF), you can't use VisualEditor on this page anyway, so you're stuck with wikitext. I'll create a line for you, and you can fill in your numbers. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:08, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

In Flow's VE, they recently added a mention shortcut trough @ character, but that's a bit too easy to trigger outside of Flow. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 06:20, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Adding audio files

Tracked in Phabricator (?)
Task T69265

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36

I can't change the size or aspect ratio of the window.

Deubug (talk) 21:01, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

There are significant limits to what's possible (in wikitext). You can make these smaller but not wider, and you cannot control the aspect ratio. However, VisualEditor seems to be even more limited: you can't do anything, and what displays for me is (almost) nothing (in Safari—it depends on your web browser), although it appears that it will save correctly. I've added this to phab:T69265. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:09, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

Manually adding refname when using the same citation multiple times

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36

Is it possible to manually add the refname into the template as although it is irrelevant to VisualEditor users a source editor will find it easier to navigate through the references if the refname has a meaningful title rather than just a number?

Deubug (talk) 21:06, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

It's not currently possible, but it's planned for the future. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:44, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

Link tool

The link tool is being re-designed. If anyone wants to take a look, then you can try it out at on mediawiki.org. This will arrive here next Wednesday. What do you think? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:43, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator (?)
Task T98210

Tracked in Phabricator (?)
Task T55973

Tracked in Phabricator (?)
Task T55546

Tracked in Phabricator (?)
Task T97363

Tracked in Phabricator (?)
Task T98393

Actually, I'm a bit disappointed. If you edit a link with a destination already set, and switch from Search Articles to External Link and back, the destination disappears. Also, there's no cancel button.

Furthermore, if there's no relevant picture, what's the point of the placeholder image?

Finally, what I'd really like is two input boxes: one for the link text, and and on for the destination. -- Ypnypn (talk) 13:52, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

Ypnypn, I'm not sure about the placeholder image (on what they're calling the "context menu"). It's possible that they intend to have a preview of the link there someday. I'll ask and let you know if I hear anything interesting. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:47, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Ypnypn, I have an update: It is a preview system. If you go to mw: and try to make a link to "What", you'll find mw:What should I edit in the list of options, with a thumbnail of the page. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:52, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Article links still get immediately updated after editing (I don't even have to click "Done", leaving the window with "Esc" or clicking elsewhere also updates the link) - I still don't like this behaviour. Changes in the "edit link" window should be buffered, until the user clearly decides that they are OK and only then applied to the article. All other edit windows (cite, template, media) only cause updates, when "Done" (or "Apply changes") is explicitly clicked and they have a clear option to discard your changes, if something went wrong ("Cancel"). I don't understand, why this logical and save approach is skipped here just to save 1 click - especially when Visual Editor is supposed to be used by many inexperienced editors. GermanJoe (talk) 04:08, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

The general rule of thumb is that anything with an "inspector" happens instantly (links, math, galleries, etc.), and anything with a "dialog" (media, templates, citations) requires positive action. One of the interesting differences is that if you open a math or gallery inspector and close it again, they don't insert empty math or gallery markup. But unless you select a space, opening a link almost never creates empty markup (and if you do, it behaves like the other inspectors and fails to make a link). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:47, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Whatamidoing (WMF) Well, it's simple then: stop using an "inspector" and use a "dialog" instead... I'm not sure I've ever seen this VE notion of "inspector" in any other software, no wonder I feel it's totally not ergonomic. The closest think I can think of is dialog that would instantly apply what you're doing but only temporarily and you still have the option to validate (Done) or cancel (Esc). Why can't VE behave like most of the softwares out there ? --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 20:16, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Assuming inspectors with instant application of the changes are here to stay, "Cancel" in inspector windows should perform a proper rollback action (similar to the "undo" feature in the main window) to restore the last article status when the inspector window was opened. An "add link" window with 2 fields for visible text and piped link should be considered as well. GermanJoe (talk) 21:30, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Something else I noticed. If I try to insert something in the middle of a sentence and place the cursor on the spacechar before a word, then 'insert link', it will highlight the entire word following it. This just doesn't make sense to me. And like many others, i think we should just show the display text in the Editor as well. Even Google drive does this. And the tabs for 'search article' and 'external link' feels a bit out of place design wise, they could use a bit more work... —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:44, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

TheDJ, I think that both of these need new items in Phab, but I need new information.

If you place the cursor on the space character before a word, and then 'insert link', what do you expect to happen? [[ ]] is invalid (so not that), but what would you like?

Is your concern about the tabs for 'search article' and 'external link', their appearance, or their labels (e.g., external links vs external URL), or something else? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:47, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Not very intuitive...

• The behavior with Esc is just awful, against any normal behavior, and will lead again to many errors in page.
• Please add a field for the displayed text also, that will probably help solving many errors made by users like [[2000|2015]]
• The behavior with the tabs is awful too: deleting what the user has typed is just against any ergonomics I've ever seen. Combined with the behavior of automatically validating what you've done...
• The behavior with Done button is awful also: if you click it when the list of pages is open, the text you have actually typed is discreetly replaced by the first text that is in the list of pages.
• ...

Honestly, it looks a lot like the first "design" of the special characters tool: not designed at all, not tested at all, ... I don't believe I can make really constructive comments with its current status.

This will arrive here next Wednesday: please, no !!!!

--NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 20:06, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

The behavior with the Escape key is the same as it has always been. I believe that the request for a two-field input system is the most frequently suggested change. Deleting what you just typed was recently filed (number in the list above).

I think that the last one is 'working as designed'. The idea seems to be that if you click "Done", then whatever link you selected from the list is the one that should be added. By default, that's the first one in the list. If you wanted a different link, then you should have made sure that a different link (e.g., a red link) was highlighted. But that only works if you realize that something is actually selected. I've suggested phab:T98393 as a way of making that most obvious. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:47, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Whatamidoing (WMF) I never selected anything in the list, it's VE that decided to pop up that list and apparently select something it (but not showing it) without me doing anything for this. The normal behavior of a dropdown box in any normal software is that the actual value used is the one in the text field, and when you actually select something in the list, then the value in the text field is replaced by the one you selected. Why choosing a behavior that happens in no other software ? --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 20:21, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

When the link tool starts searching, it always auto-selects the first item in the list. It is showing the selection in an ugly medium-gray highlight, which IMO doesn't look like what any other software uses to select an item in a list. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:58, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for your quick feedback, Ypnypn, GermanJoe, TheDJ, and NicoV. Based on your comments, I have a fairly urgent question: Is it materially worse than what we have right now? For example, neither the current nor the planned have the oft-requested two-fields system to separate labels from their links, so the fact that it doesn't have that desired improvement makes it "just as bad as" rather than "worse than". Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:16, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Of course the sky won't fall with this new version. But this tool's window design is inherently flawed. When you add complexity and new features to such a design, you just increase the existing flaw and the possibility for errors (which other editors have to fix later). Don't get me wrong, the approach with 2 tabs "internal/external" could work, but the layout and behaviour of the window needs to be re-worked per the above comments. If it's technically possible, I'd withhold this specific feature for now to allow more discussion and possible design changes. I understand the intended design with 1 field, but I am unsure if it will ever work in a safe, error-resistant and transparent manner - it's just not intuitive enough and doesn't cover all possible situations in a safe way. GermanJoe (talk) 19:09, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

I hadn't tried the new link tool till just now. I just had a go at it and spent maybe a minute and a half puzzling over it, and I am not at all sure how it's intended to work. I went back to the existing link tool and tried that again and confirmed that it seems a lot easier to understand. This is not just familiarity; I have never tried putting in an external link with VE, but seeing that that was clearly one of the options, I tried it in both systems. I failed on mediawiki.org and succeeded on en-wiki. I think the new dialog is a step backwards. The gmail link editor interface is not just a great model, but it's already familiar to many users. Please put in another vote in favour of something like that. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 19:19, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

I also think that the new one is a step backwards, and will lead to even more problems than the current one. The current version is flawed also, far from being ergonomic, leading to many incorrect edits.

PS: I just tried with the current version, it has the same bug with clicking on "Done" when the list of possible pages is displayed: the typed text is silently replaced by VE with the first in the list. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 19:50, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Mike Christie, one of the goals with the new thing was to help people figure out that you can add external links. If anyone has ideas about how to make that more obvious, then please share. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:50, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Whatamidoing (WMF) Just throwing ideas... A toggle to let the user says that the text is for an external link ? If you want something more automatic: when the user edits the target, VE decides if the target is rather an external link (things starting by http://, ...) or an internal link, and displays that information in a button/toggle. If what VE has suggested is not what the user wanted, the user can click on that information to force it to be an external or an internal link. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 20:26, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

BAD GO BACK TO ORIGINAL

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; .NET4.0E; .NET4.0C; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; rv:11.0) like Gecko

I don't like this new editor because I can't do hyperlinks anymore because whenever I do a hyperlink it shows the website and not the words therefore I think the original was better than this.

Obdog (talk) 02:37, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Hi Obdog,

You might want to read the directions at mw:Help:VisualEditor/User guide#Editing links. The easiest approach is to type the words first, and then select them and add the link (like you would do in a word processing document). However, it's possible to change the label afterwards; just click in the middle of what looks like the website, and type in what you want, and then backspace over the parts that you don't want.

The link tool is being re-designed. I would be interested in your feedback on the new version (look at the comments just above this). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:43, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Two issues: Using Ref label/note templates, and copy-pasting references

How do you use the ref label template using VisualEditor. See this diff for the messy result of an already frustrating edit.

Second, while attempting to put in this note, I tried to copy-paste the citation listed right after it. I selected it, but because there was only another template before it, and not text, I was only able to bring up a browser option menu "View this image," "copy image," etc., instead of a copy-paste menu. I've had issues with this before, but usually I can highlight some text in the selection as well and copy-paste and then just delete the text, leaving the citation. But in this case there was only the other template, which I didn't want to copy.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 00:14, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

1. Why are you still using a citation template that the community has officially deprecated? Is this a leftover legacy for that page, or does it do something that you can't do any other way?
2. Is this reliably reproducible, or intermittent? As a workaround, did you try adding a single letter next to the template that you wanted to copy, and then trying to copy the letter and the template together? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:47, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Useless sup and abbr tags

In this edit, VE added useless sup and abbr tags around nothing... --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 21:22, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Editing watchlisted items cause them to be removed from it

Bug report	VisualEditor
Description	Editing watchlisted items cause them to be removed from it
Intention:
Steps to Reproduce:	Whenever I try to edit anything in my watchlist, the default gets set to remove it in my watchlist.
Results:	I thus unintentionally removed items from my watchlist through normal editing. Noticed it today, didn't experience this problem before.
Expectations:	In my preferences, only the option "watchlist items I create" is ticked and I manually add them. Regular editing doesn't remove them by default.
Page where the issue occurs	Any page in my watchlist
Web browser	Google-chrome 41.0.2272.118
Operating system	Gentoo
Skin	Vector
Notes:	I've retraced my contribs and found around 4 pages which were removed--only after 27 April. Before that, can't find any evidence of it happening.
Workaround or suggested solution

Ugog Nizdast (talk) 08:56, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Ugog Nizdast, this was filed last week. James Forrester put it on the list of this quarter's blockers, so it needs to be fixed soon. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:41, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Piping a link when I had a no idea that's what was going to happen

Tracked in Phabricator (?)
Task T56947

I made that edit to change the word on a wp:red link. It piped the link instead. This is a problem in my mind. How was I supposed to know that my edit would actually maintain what I realized was an incorrect link? How are newbies supposed to know? Maybe someone has thought long and hard about this and has a rational explanation, but I can't help but think the concept of piping links might need more explanation via a Visual Editor feature. Thanks. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 17:35, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the note, Biosthmors. It's a known problem. They've tried a couple of different things, but it still needs more work. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:00, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Agreed! Thanks. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 17:37, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Help:Cheatsheet explains "piping" on the third line. It's sad to see VE fail to help with this simple concept. =( Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 17:39, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Blacklisted external links

I used Citoid to create a citation using a url from the examiner dot com website, a website that is blacklisted - see Wikipedia:Spam blacklist. It was only when I did the final page save that VE objected - with a quite user-unfriendly message.

This is another opportunity for VE to be better than the wikitext editor. VE could validate a new url immediately upon its being added, rather than at the very end. VE could displayed a dialog saying something like "badurl.com is a blacklisted website. The url you added therefore cannot be used." Then clicking "Okay" (the only option) should cause VE to automatically delete the problematical url. (Dismissing the dialog, say with "esc", should be considered the same as clicking "okay".)

Or, at minimum, the VE existing error message needs to be improved. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:28, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Links to redirects

Links to valid redirects are not handled well (I am fairly sure, that was discussed a few months ago):

1. Start editing Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor
2. Click on Magyars in the 3rd paragraph and start editing the link.
3. Selection list auto-selects Magyarsarlós as first entry in the search list (and overwrites the completely valid "Magyars" link!)

The search feature lists "Magyars" as possible alternative at the end of the selection list and recognizes it as redirect, but fails to select it. Editing a Wiki-link, the selection link must auto-select the currently active link (if it's a blue link), no matter if the blue link points to a real article or "only" to a redirect. In this context redirects need to be treated just like normal article links. GermanJoe (talk) 23:29, 7 May 2015 (UTC)