VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive/2015/03

Individuals as beta testers?

I'm not part of a community, I just have a wiki running at work and at home. The primary barrier to rolling out the wiki to everyone else at work is the editor. Is there a way for an individual user or customer of MediaWiki to become a beta tester of VisualEditor and provide feedback? Parrotheadcali (talk) 20:48, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

On your local wiki, you mean? You could set VisualEditor as a Beta Feature, I guess - there's a related extension, but I don't know what you would need to do after installing it, so I recommend asking the VE team live on IRC, #mediawiki-visualeditor ^connect, usually after 5pm UTC. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:44, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Welcome to mediawiki.org, Parrotheadcali. You can provide feedback on VisualEditor here, even if you don't contribute to Wikipedia or similar public communities. Many people who use VisualEditor at work use this page to let us know about the problems they encounter and the ideas they have. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:36, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Updated special character inserter tool

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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The new design for the special character tool is available here at mediawiki.org. You can test it by going to http://mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Sandbox?veaction=edit and choosing the "Ω" button in the main toolbar.

This wiki (currently) only has a small, basic set of characters. The list can be expanded and customized at each wiki. Follow the instructions at VisualEditor/Special characters to add more characters. However, the method for customizing the tool will probably change during the coming months.

Please test this out and let the devs know what you think about it. Is this new, full-width tool better than the old floating palette in VisualEditor? How could it be improved? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:47, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Far better than the old one. Especially I like that this does not get closed after clicking a character. Maybe box size of characters could be a bit smaller, idk, but at least it's easier now to choose correct character on mobile version. Stryn (talk) 19:20, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Seems a lot better than the one I tried a long time ago.

I also like the fact that it stays visible after adding one character, so you can keep adding other characters.

First suggestions for improvements:

• Loosing less space: reducing line height for titles ; smaller boxes around charaters ; less space between boxes ; smaller font (same size as the rest of the menus ?)
• Ability to resize vertically the special characters area
• Behavior for quotes is not intuitive when text is already selected: I expected the quotes to go around the selected text (which is the current behavior on the French Wikipedia for the special characters tools that appears below the wikitext editing zone ; which is also the behavior for the tool that is available in the toolbar above the wikitext editing zone in this wiki) not to replace the selected text
• I also prefer the behavior of the wikitext characters tool when text is selected: the selected text is not deleted NicoV (talk) 19:57, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Agree very much with these points. Resize would definitely be nice. Smaller boxes would also be great so you don't have to scroll so much when more characters are added (perhaps the box borders could be removed altogether?) Overall a great improvement already! Danmichaelo (talk) 20:13, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

It seems far better than the old one. Like previous commenters I think that the quotation marks as well as some other tools would benefit from wrap-in instead of overwrite behaviour and that fitting more characters in the same space would make sense. One idea was to make the characters itself smaller. In addition I would suggest to reduce the space that is taken by the navigation to character categories: There is the sidebar with the TOC and the headlines above each section. This takes about 1/3 of the space. Shrinking the sidebar and rotating the headlines by 90° or getting rid of the headlines altogether or somehow integrating the headlines into the symbols grid (start of the row or so) would be worth trying. Simulo (talk) 08:59, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

Simulo (talk) 08:59, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

This new character tool is much better designed.

At first sight, it is great ! There is just a tiny defect : the tool does not work ! It does not insert any character.

The categories being one above another are a nice idea. Being able to scroll from one to another would be even better. The previous category is visible above. It is inconsistent that I cannot scroll up to it.

The name of the category "Lettres accentuées" is not correct. In this cat, some characters are not accented letters (œ, ø...). I suggest to name this cat "Lettres".

I have Safari on iOS 7 on an iPad mini.

Thank you for the improvements !

Cheers, Nnemo (talk) 14:24, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

In english, this is even worse.

The cat is named "Accents". I suggest to name it "Letters". And another cat is named "Mathematical". Some word is missing. I suggest to name this cat "Mathematics" or "Maths". It will be simpler.

Thank you. Nnemo (talk) 14:48, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi,

Following your suggestion, I replaced "Lettres accentuées" by "Lettres". However I don't know when the translation will be available on the French Wikipedia. The translation for special characters currently in use is very old. NemesisIII (talk) 10:58, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Are the existing local symbols going to be automatically imported? If not that is bad news. They have already had to be re-entered by hand once because they were lost when vised was first implemented. Having to do it a second time is just make work for someone else. SpinningSpark 13:33, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

It's using the old JSON format for now. Eventually, a better system will be added. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:49, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

It is much better than the old one, yet I would still prefer if it was located below the actual editing box and not above it. I think the common paradigm (also seen on mobile phones) is to have input tool placed on the bottom. Smihael (talk) 14:54, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

I agree with the size issue. VE always tends to make things bigger than needed. For the maths symbols I didn't think much of the initial selection, use of the special superscript character is discouraged for maths articles its better to use the sup tag ^1234567890 compared to superscript chars ¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹⁰. The ²³ have some use for doing units like m² but the other have very limited use. Salix alba (talk) 08:05, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

I think that whether it's bigger than needed depends upon your computer set up as well as your vision. We have more than one user who zooms in to be able to see things comfortably in VisualEditor. (The toolbar, in particular, needs to be re-designed to behave better when zoomed. Right now, it wraps and covers a lot of the screen.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:07, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi, the new special character insertion tool is a lot better than the previous one: It now takes two clicks to insert a special character instead of four. However, that is still twice as many clicks as in the Wikitext editor, where inserting a special character only takes one click, thanks to the extended editing toolbar.

Quotation marks that wrap around selected text (as they do in the existing Wikitext editor) would be really cool. To highlight the importance of this feature, please note that, for example, the German-language community will have to insert each and every quotation mark using this tool because German uses different quotation marks than English ("" vs. „“). The same, as far as I know, goes for French ("" vs. «»).

Thanks, Gnom1 (talk) 14:22, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Hey User:Gnom1, by "extended editing toolbar" do you mean the Sonderzeichen one inside the toolbar, or the one at the bottom of the page? Thanks, Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:47, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi, I totally agree with the users above. The new tool is much better than the previous one. I also think the tool should a bit smaller because it takes a lot of space on small screens. Otherwise, it is much more practical and easier to use. You did a good job with this.

Thanks, NemesisIII (talk) 10:51, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Unfortunately the new special character inserter tool doesn't work in the reference editor. NemesisIII (talk) 11:50, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Or for typing in the names of templates or categories, or several other issues. Those items are on the list as necessary improvements for the future. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:05, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

This is an immense improvement over initial attempts. Good job!

I would welcome some improvements mentioned by other people above, such as the behaviour for quotation marks and the ability to resize... but these are more nice-to-have details. The only major issue that I see now is that it works only in the main text zone, not in references and other templates. Klipe (talk) 17:32, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Two quick points...

First, a technical one: the padding-top:0.5em imposed by some .css definition somewhere in that class-name orgy probably should be nullified somehow imho. This would shrink the h3 headings rendered in the right panel (i.e Latin, IPA, Symbols & the like) enough to always show 3 complete corresponding rows of the "button" (character) set instead of the 2.7849643 rows I'm seeing now (Win 8.1 / IE 11).

Second, a plea: for the love of God, please give us a way to pick the sets we want loaded (note: I damn well know how to (display:none) hide something after the fact; that's not any sort of solution). In short, duplicating WikiEditor's deficiencies in this aspect would not be any sort of added value in the end. George Orwell III (talk) 00:39, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): It is "heavy".

Why the right shows all the blocks of symbols - scroll so long and terrible.

I want to see to see the whole block at once, a hard limit - it is again "look through the keyhole" - I want the opportunity to expand the box to see all separate characters block. Сунприат (talk) 05:09, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Having all the characters in a long list enables easier browsing, if someone doesn't know which section a particular character is in. Otherwise, we have to click on each individual section-name in order to see the list.

Regarding the height (vertical size) of the box with all the characters, I believe it is currently set to a size that will work on the majority of common screen sizes. It is more difficult (adding code complexity) to automatically change the height based on browser-window size, and even more difficult to add a manual "click and drag to expand" re-size control.

However, we can individually override the size with user.css using something like this (adjust as needed if you have a very large monitor, and keep in mind that it may break in unexpected ways - I am not a dev!)

.ve-ui-toolbarDialog.oo-ui-window-ready {

max-height: 350px !important;

}

.ve-ui-specialCharacterDialog .oo-ui-bookletLayout {

height: 350px !important;

}

(defaults are 150px)

Hope that helps. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:38, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

changing / correcting links

Hi I found it is sometimes impossible to correct links in the VE. I wanted to correct after seeing that it was misspelled , at other times to exchange the link completely. Does not work in VE, the first inserted link remains and is just a renamed on the surface (thus getting [[tpping eroor|typing error]] which does not help). Had to save, go into the source editing and do it there. Kipala (talk) 07:18, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

What's impossible about clicking on the link and clicking edit? 124.181.128.160 09:10, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

In the wikitext editor, if the link is [[tpping eroor]], and you change what you see to [[typing error]], then you're done. But in VisualEditor, you have to change both the visible label and the underlying link, which requires two separate actions: change what you see, and then open the link tool and change the underlying link. It is not exactly intuitive, and there are multiple suggestions about how to improve it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:14, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

And? That doesn't make editing a link impossible, as OP complained about. I don't know what OP is expecting. VisualEditor allows you to edit the visuals. Is it not expected that changing the text won't change the link? And to change the link you press edit? It seems obvious, and a perfectly acceptable compromise for not having to deal with wikitext. This is how it works in any rich text editor, and is the only sensible way it can be done. 121.220.99.147 13:28, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

Dear, surely you are right, but I am not so sure if we have the alle the people here who are right all the time. No, it is not at all obvious that "that changing the text won't change the link? And to change the link you press edit". Not a bit. Kipala (talk) 20:43, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

I agree with you, Kipala. We need to improve this and make it easy for everyone. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:18, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

missing jamii/ category input plus WHO CAN CHNGE THE MENUE WORDING

I have a workshop next week in Tanzania and try to prepare a simple guide for first-time editors on sw-wikipedia. I want to propose to them to start in VE and switch later to source editing after getting experience. So I have tried to familiarize myself with VE.

1) The main bug for starting new articles in VE as I found about so far: I see no option to enter a category - which features prominent in my guide how to start a new entry. Is it really necessary to save and the go back to source???

2) I have no idea who tried to translate the VisualEditor.toolbar into Swahili. (someone via google-bullshit-translate??). Urgently needs corrections. Who to talk to?? Kindly answer to my sw talk page, I am not often here Kipala (talk) 07:37, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

You can use the Link tool to add a category. FriedhelmW (talk) 11:45, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Translations can be contributed on http://Translatewiki.net

for this specific case: https://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special:Translate&group=ext-visualeditor-ve-mw&language=sw&filter=%21translated&action=translate —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 00:02, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Thx, but this only works partly. Some words of the menue do not appear in these list Kipala (talk) 20:39, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

Kipala, what's missing? If you click on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Candy&uselang=qqx&veaction=edit

you'll see the list of "code names" in VisualEditor. For example, in the "Page options" (three lines, next to the Save button) menu, you'll see an item with the label (visualeditor-categories-tool). That corresponds to a page MediaWiki:visualeditor-categories-tool, where the name can be changed locally (by any admin). Permanent, worldwide translations (not just for the Swahili Wikipedia, but for everyone using VisualEditor in Swahili, anywhere) should be made through TranslateWiki.net. If you're willing to do the translations, I can get you an account there. If it's just a couple of changes, then you can send the list to me, and I can enter them.

Some things have to be turned on locally. For example, the Cite menu will be nearly empty without local changes. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:15, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Special character list...edits do not appear

Web browser: Firefox 36.0.1 Operating system: Windows 7 Wiki skin: Monobook

I edited the special character list at https://nv.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Visualeditor-specialcharinspector-characterlist-insert When I try to edit an article, my edit to the list does not appear. I went to http://jsonlint.com/ to validate the code, and it says:

Parse error on line 1:

<!DOCTYPEhtml><htmll

^

Expecting '{', '['

However, I don't see anything like <!DOCTYPEhtml><htmll in the list. After trying to find <!DOCTYPEhtml><htmll, suddenly all the symbols and characters in the list changed to Unicode points (like "\u2212": "\u2212"). I don't know how that happened and I can't seem to revert it. Stephen G. Brown (talk) 17:50, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Works for me, for example try https://nv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iich%CA%BC%C4%85h?veaction=edit&uselang=nv Stryn (talk) 16:14, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Okay, I see what it is now. I have to have the Navajo language selected in my Preferences before I can see the edited list. That does not explain why all the symbols changed to Universal Character Names (UCN). I’m going to try re-entering each affected letter and symbol in the list to see if I can get the Unicode letters and symbols back again. Thanks. Stephen G. Brown (talk) 23:45, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Halleluia! Great revamp!

We were relectant to push the Visual Editor on the Welsh language wiki (cy), until now - it's absolutely brilliant! I do believe that it will help close the gender gap and bring in new editors. Well done all round! Llywelyn2000 (talk) 17:52, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:58, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi WMF staff, I tried it out on 2 Afrikaans pages, it gets my thumbs-up! af:Gebruiker:Aliwal2012 Aliwal2012 (talk) 19:02, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks!

I see that you switched mid-edit back to the wikitext editor recently. That kind of edit seems difficult to everyone at the moment. It can be done – just open the link tool and change the contents of the box – but it's not intuitive. They're going to work on that soon. I hope you'll like it even better then. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:07, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

How can I Use 'Table' and 'Gallery' in Visualeditor extension to MediaWiki 1.24.1.

I see the Media, Templeate, Comment, Formula, and Reference list in Insert Menu But, I can't find Gallery and Table.

How can I Use 'Table' and 'Gallery' in Visualeditor extension to MediaWiki 1.24.1.

I installed this version. VisualEditor-REL1_24-af11aa1.tar.gz. Redkreuz (talk) 05:34, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure, but I think that version is about a month before Table support was added. You might need to upgrade to the latest version. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:09, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

Very slow for average Africa

Hi, we had the first day of our workshop for introducing Swahili wikipedia and gaining new editors. We had planned to start the introduction with the Visual Editor. We had to cancel this because on a test run the evening before we could not open pages this way, whereas by going to source edit we entered in a short time (after 5-8 seconds, but waiting more than 10 minutes for Visual editor - in vain. Just now a night later test repeated: 4=5 sec source, 75 seconds VisEditor. I gladly keep on testing this as long as I am in the country. Kipala (talk) 22:06, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for this information. Some major improvements to performance were made late last week. I believe those improvements are why the performance improved from many minutes to 75 seconds. However, 75 seconds is still too long for people to wait. The team is working on speed as one of the most important needs for users. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:42, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Only 1 cite option?

Why am I seeing only 1 cite option (Basic) while in the user manual , it shows many more options?

On Internet Explorer 11 , Windows 8.1 . Leaderboard (talk) 20:08, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Which wiki? What you see depends upon the local configuration. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:04, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Well , I found this on the English Wikibooks and even the sandbox on MediaWiki. Leaderboard (talk) 11:40, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Yes. This is covered in Help:VisualEditor/User guide#Using standard cite templates. HTH. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:39, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Unexpected result when editting a template

Perhaps this has been mentioned before; there are so many threads, but I like to report my unexpected result.

In the article NL w:nl:Amsterdam, there are eight templates present starting with {{zie . When I editted one of them, lower in the text, the first one, on the top of the pages, was changed by the Editor. After the first time, a did an additional test to check myself and the result. Please look at the result in this edit:

https://nl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Amsterdam&diff=43690767&oldid=43690694

I am using browser Chrome version 41.0.2272.101 m on a Dell PC with Windows 7 professional.

BTW, even as an experienced editor, I like the visual editor! Very good work! Ellywa (talk) 08:35, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

P.S. my wiki skin is Vector Ellywa (talk) 08:37, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for your report and for your encouraging words. I'm reporting this on Phabricator now. It is now T93739. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:52, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

After 1.25 maintenance/update.php, attempts to Edit certain pages open other pages

Today, I ran maintenance/update.php on an installation. Now, when certain pages are invoked with "Edit," an entirely different page is invoked -- it is almost as if an index in the database were skewed. It is now possible to save the page and stomp over whatever was there before. Has this been observed before? I'm not even sure how to debug this -- suggestions will be appreciated!

Here is some version identification.

MediaWiki: 5a3173d06b605a8c86ace08efc9e9c290f7f171a VisualEditor: b6ad119f153cdd0f88e3152c5961785c3d46e72a Pickle-san (talk) 03:31, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

For posterity, this was solved; the Parsoid server was pointing at another wiki, so edit requests for a particular revision id came back with a totally wrong page. Whoops. :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 00:45, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

I love visual editor!

It makes editing so easy! However, I would like it to be applicable to talk page entries. Writer freak (talk) 14:48, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi there, thanks for your feedback. Another software will take care of that. You can try it here. Best, Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:17, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Editing red links

The other day at cawiki it came out the idea of defaulting the redlink creation to the visual editor instead of the code editor, to make it easier for novices to edit those links. Is this possible? Gerardduenas (talk) 09:47, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi. The related task is tagged as "Epic", although it also indicates the team will work on it in the next quarter. There's a quick workaround though, your community may try and change those messages which appear when a user lands on a non existing page, for example, so that they start the page in VE (you can see how this was done at plwiki, the first link allows page creation in VE). I see you already changed a Mediawiki message, see the box at the top of this page to learn about the others. Hope this helps, Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:13, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for your speedy reply, it helped a lot! Gerardduenas (talk) 15:17, 31 March 2015 (UTC)