Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback

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As of 2020, VisualEditor has been used more than 10 million times at the English Wikipedia.
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Help Local archives

Page options in Visual Editor

New users can easily reach the Categories, Page settings and Advanced settings screens, where many will experiment without understanding the effects of their actions or whether they are helpful or appropriate. Important parts of the issue have been raised before here.

In Categories new users will add non-existent categories or add their user page to mainspace categories, which is deprecated per categorization guideline.

In Page settings they can:

  • Redirect the page – many will try to redirect their user page to a non-existent mainspace article or to an external website; and set the STATICREDIRECT magic word.
  • Add the FORCETOC and NOEDITSECTION magic words, including to pages with no sections.
  • Categorize the page as a Disambiguation page.

In Advanced settings they can:

  • Set the INDEX or NOINDEX magic words. Trying to control indexing like this has no effect in most namespaces (see WP:Controlling search engine indexing). In user space it overrides the default no-index setting, which most new users have no valid reason to want to do.
  • Set the NEWSECTIONLINK or NONEWSECTIONLINK magic words.
  • Add the DISPLAYTITLE magic word – this is intended to stylize the existing title, but many will input a completely different title, which is ignored by the software.

Thus many of the controls on these screens encourage new users to take actions that either have no effect, have unwanted or incorrect effects, or are against Wikipedia policy or practice. The harms of allowing easy access to these controls to inexperienced editors are debated in more detail in the earlier discussion linked above. If it is urged that VE should reproduce all facilities offered in wikitext editing, in the case of magic words there is no comparison: in contrast to VE, none of the wikitext editing controls link to magic words, and before discovering magic words most editors would formerly have acquired considerable experience and be likely to use them appropriately.

New incidences of one of the magic words are listed here. It will be noticed that nearly all new users listed there have also changed several of the other settings listed, to no benefit to themselves or Wikipedia. I urge redesign of VE page options to point users more towards a basic set of controls that are likely to be useful to most of them: Noyster (talk), 21:27, 15 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Firstly, not all VE users are new editors; I'm certainly not, so don't take away my tools. New users using the wiki-text editor break things every day too, because they don't understand wikitext syntax and so they screw up articles by trying to edit them and removing the trailing ref tag on citations or add fields to infoboxes that aren't supported by the template type or turn a table into a pile of rubble. I deal with this stuff on my watchlist every day as IPs are using wikitext (indeed, one of my main uses for the wikitext editor is to clean up wikitext syntax accidents). New editors in wikitext makes syntax errors. Because VE users can't create syntax errors (well, they can but it's much harder for them), their errors will tend to be semantic errors. The underlying problem is that new users are new; they can do damage no matter what tool is at their disposal, just the type of damage changes depending on the tool. Having said all that, with VE, we *could* restrict some of the more advanced features to new users. Maybe we could make doing an "online tutorial with quiz" a pre-requisite to enable each advanced feature (gamify it even, e.g. "Category achievement unlocked!"). With wikitext we have no ability to prevent new users from breaking anything and no real way to insert a "learning opportunity" into the process. So I think in the long run, we are actually much better off with new users in VE than in wikitext, as we do have a growth path into a supported learning framework. Kerry (talk) 06:57, 16 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
+1, this is a non-issue. Those, more advanced, options are hidden away in a menu most new users are unlikely to ever click. I've been using VE for a while now and I've never clicked it before now. Sam Walton (talk) 09:38, 16 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I feel the same as Kerry Raymond and Samwalton9 - I'm not a new editor, but have found its tools actively beneficial to my workflow (especially the options, which I only recently discovered). I have noticed that the options menu seems to pop up more frequently (e.g. if I'm creating a redirect and switch to VisualEditor), so I can certainly see that case where it brings itself to the attention of someone who may not understand the tools.
If we're looking for a scalable solution that'll keep it away from inexperienced users, how about linking its visibility to one of the autoconfirm memberships? — Sasuke Sarutobi (talk) 11:42, 20 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think that the team will agree to this. Generally speaking, if a brand-new editor (or a logged-out editor) can do something in the wikitext editor, then the team believes that the same editor should be able to do the same thing in the visual editor. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:59, 7 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I concur with the principle but I would probably then argue that we ought not to allow new contributors or IPs to do it in any editor. I would argue that we should be moving to a system of "just-in-time on-the-fly" learning so that when someone wants to use a "new-to-them" feature, we put them through a few quick slides of "how to" and "key policy considerations" with a couple of multiple-choice questions to pass and then they are "licensed to use it". This is what the VE already does with its little popups of "Ooh, that's a link, do you want me to tell you about links". Like a drivers license, it could come with a probationary period (expressed in terms of # of non-reverted edits) during which it could be subject to more scrutiny and then less scrutiny once they are passed that time. Basically, take our existing idea of a confirmed user and explode it in a virgin/novice/confirmed user status around a range of actions. We could tie this into watchlists by flagging edits as being virgin/notice/activities for the changes undertaken. I don't think we should think in terms of "how do we reduce the VE to the lowest common denominator of the source editor" but "how do we make the VE so beneficial to both its users and in relation to the impact to the surrounding community that people will start to think that this is the better tool and the default entrypoint for new users". I concur with the end goal of VE being as capable of doing useful actions as the source editor but not with the VE being as capable as damaging the encyclopedia as the source editor is. So I think the principle is right but it needs to be framed towards a more positive end goal. Kerry (talk) 08:34, 8 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • One of the big reasons I use the source editor is to deal with miscellaneous templates that would be better handled as page options on the property sheet. Stuff like:
  • Italicize title
  • MDY
  • English dialect (from list)
  • TOClimit
  • Merge (into)
  • References columns (#)
  • Common tags (refimprove, orphan, no footnotes, underlinked, pov, coi, rought translation, copyedit, ...) handle multiple issue grouping/ungrouping appropriately
Lfstevens (talk) 22:52, 4 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Lfstevens, there's been some talk about creating a meta-data page that includes some of this information. The idea is probably years away, but you might like it when it gets here.
Also, you might be interested in mw:Editing/Projects/Columns for references, which handles reference columns automagically (no more need to guess a reasonable number of columns based on how it looks on your own device). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:59, 7 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. Lfstevens (talk) 07:26, 9 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Setting redirect in options populates after templates when contributed together

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T167348
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36

Setting a page as a redirect in the VisualEditor options will populate the redirect line after any content added in the editing pane. This includes redirect templates (such as {{r from plural}}).

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Service_workers&redirect=no&veaction=edit

Sasuke Sarutobi (talk) 11:36, 20 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, to clarify - if the redirect is not the first item on the page, it will not be read as a redirect, so will not work. Please let me know if I need to file this as a bug report. Thank you. — Sasuke Sarutobi (talk) 08:49, 22 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for this report; I've filed the bug at phab:T167348. I think this will be relatively simple to fix, so I hope that it will be working correctly before the end of the month. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:03, 7 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

navboxes not rendering after insertion using VE

Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: add the navbox {{Lockyer Valley Region}} to Ropeley, Queensland
Steps to Reproduce: I opened the article in VE. I scrolled to the bottom of the article. I clicked to get a cursor which was immediately after the last words "Immanuel Lutheran Church". I pressed Enter. A bullet appeared (because the previous line was a bulleted list. I don't want a bullet so I clicked on the Toolbar for bullet lists and then the dropdown bullet list to remove the bullet. Cursor is now at the start of line below the line ending in "Immanuel Lutheran Church" (it is on th hard left, more left than the line above (correct as it is not a list). I click on Insert > Template in the toolbar and select the Lockyer Valley Region template > Add Template > Insert. I see the expanded navbox on the screen just where I expect it to do. Beautiful! Then I save with an edit summary. And then I see the result ... what a mess! The template is not rendering correctly. It's reproducible (indeed, it's been happening to me in various articles all morning, initially I think maybe I am doing something wrong, but eventually on Ropeley, I decide it really isn't me or anything else I am doing.)
Results: The template renders wrongly because it has been added without a newline in the emitted source text. But I *did* add a newline in the VE.
Expectations: If I added the template on the next line, it would be emitted on the next line and not at the end of the previous line.
Page where the issue occurs https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ropeley%2C_Queensland&type=revision&diff=783079091&oldid=651518175
Web browser Chrome
Operating system Windows 8.1
Skin
Notes: If there was an easy way to upload a screenshot, I would.
Workaround or suggested solution Go into the source editor and add the newline.

Kerry (talk) 01:07, 31 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Interestingly the same thing just happened on Upper Flagstone, Queensland (see this diff) in that no newline was added in the emitted source text, even though I clicked on Insert Paragraph to do the Insert > Template, but this time it renders OK. So it may be part of the problem lies with the template itself? I dunno, it's just a standard use of Navbox, nothing out of the ordinary going on. Kerry (talk) 01:16, 31 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
This is a Parsoid bug. Parsoid should have known that the transclusion is outside the list and should have added a newline break. We'll fix this. Thanks for the bug report. SSastry (WMF) (talk) 15:47, 31 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/356415/ has the fix. It needs to be reviewed. If all goes well, it might be deployed tomorrow / Monday. SSastry (WMF) (talk) 16:17, 31 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
User:Kerry Raymond, This was deployed earlier today. Please let me know if this is still a problem. SSastry (WMF) (talk) 23:23, 5 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Centralise text in cells

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T103276

It is hard to put | style="text-align: center;" | in every cell of the table, and impossible to centralise the text when editing via VisualEditor. Can something please be done about this? Or is there a way to centralise them via VE? --Kailash29792 (talk) 04:35, 3 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Kerry Raymond, do you have a solution to this? --Kailash29792 (talk) 03:40, 7 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
This has been requested, but has not been done yet. I've linked the request for you. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:11, 7 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Can't type because it switches characters

Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: I was trying to edit the article List of predecessors of sovereign states in North America, but when I went on to save the changes, the characters of what I wrote would get switched and mixed in weird ways.
Steps to Reproduce:
Results: The characters of what is written get mixed up after saving the changes
Expectations: That what I wrote on the table space remained in the way I wrote it.
Page where the issue occurs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predecessors_of_sovereign_states_in_North_America, in the line about Grenada
Web browser Safari
Operating system macOS Sierra v. 10.12.2 (16C68)
Skin
Notes:
Workaround or suggested solution

181.54.210.96 (talk) 16:00, 3 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Reported at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T167009 . TYVM, Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:23, 5 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Adding templates to redirect page breaks the redirect

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T167348
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0

When editing a redirect page and adding redirect category templates, VisualEditor puts the templates above the #REDIRECT line, which means MediaWiki no longer treats it as a redirect.

Page content on redirect pages should be placed below the #REDIRECT.

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Write_through_cache&redirect=no&veaction=edit

-- intgr [talk] 17:37, 5 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Allow VE users to contribute to this feedback page using VE

It is as dumb as toast (to quote Dilbert) that VE users can't contribute to this page using the VE. I note that Wikipedia:VisualEditor says "VisualEditor will allow people to edit all pages without having to learn wikitext markup and will hopefully encourage more readers to become editors." (my emphasis). I suggest doing the following 2 things. The first can be done today (easy, I have already done it for a page in the Wikipedia namespace). The second needs some code (but I hope not too difficult).

  • Enable the VE on this page by REDIRECTING this page into one on User space. That is, create a User account (suitably named, perhaps with Visual Editor Feedback as all/part of its name). Since User space is enabled for VE, this page becomes instantly accessible to the VE user.
  • Enable "Insert > Signature" (may require some code behind it, although I am guessing the code is probably there) but I see this as desirable but not essential. People can sign their User names by typing it in or we can see who they are from the history. We can live without it if it is too hard.

Kerry (talk) 23:27, 6 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Or of course you could just use it like this. My first VE edit on this page. Yeah! And signing does work. Kerry (talk) 23:50, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

Does https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback&veaction=edit work? Kerry (talk) 23:57, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

So if we put a big button saying "VE users - click here to provide feedback, we have the ability to use the VE to report VE feedback. No need for the User page solution. I like this very much. Kerry (talk) 00:04, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

I have just made my user talk page VE-friendly! Kerry (talk) 00:57, 7 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I have knocked up a little template Template:VEFriendly which could be added to the top of any page that we wanted to make accessible to VE users (like, say, this one). Of course, I am no expert on template writing or creating sexy graphics, so feel free to improve this template or come up with some alternative. But, if we cannot get other namespaces open up to the VE, we can make individual pages VE-Friendly. I presume there is no reason why any of us should not make our own User Talk page VE-Friendly. I presume there is no problem with other pages being made VE-friendly by consensus of the usual community that co-exists around that page. I certainly think we should include it onto the User Talk pages of VE users, so they can write on their own talk page in the only editor they know! Kerry (talk) 02:18, 7 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
With some help from User:Evad37, the template is now much better. Can we put it on this page please. Kerry (talk) 07:03, 7 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

HotCat problem

When I use HotCat after a VE edit, it grabs the previous revision of the article not the current revision. This was a problem months/years ago but seemed to have been fixed. Suddenly it's back. I don't know if the problem lies in VE or HotCat. Kerry (talk) 23:33, 6 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

If it persists, I suggest reaching out to HotCat devs. Gadget/tool/script maintainers are the ones in charge of their creations, although the team is of course available for clarifications to help fix stuff :) Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:58, 22 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

"Review your changes" shows wrong diff after switching to source editing

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:54.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/54.0

When I made some changes to a citation template in VisualEditor, then switched to source editing and changed the citation further, then the "Review your changes" button doesn't show my latest source changes -- it only shows VisualEditor changes.

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Post-quantum_cryptography&veaction=editsource

-- intgr [talk] 09:23, 7 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting, intgr. Is this still happening? Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:56, 22 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Elitre (WMF): Yes, see screen recording: youtu.be/nX9_hKCrj_Y (cannot add direct link because it's blacklisted) -- intgr [talk] 11:13, 22 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Perfect. This is now https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T168618. (The "related" videos on YouTube were... crazy.) Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:29, 22 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

heading contains a coord template

Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: A user in one of my QWikiClub sessions was adding an "External links" heading followed by an external link in article that already contained a coord template in that same area
Steps to Reproduce: I cannot say exactly what steps were taken as I wasn't present but as the coord template does not show as a "puzzle piece", I am guessing the words "External links" were typed after its position in the document and then the Heading format applied to the whole thing
Results: the coord template which was already in the document got mangled into the External links heading (see diff for the result)
Expectations: the coords would not end up inside the heading syntax
Page where the issue occurs https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kokoda_Barracks&type=revision&diff=783863392&oldid=759615725
Web browser Firefox, version unknown
Operating system Windows, version unknown
Skin default
Notes: I presume part of the problem is that coord templates don't show as "puzzle pieces" so the user did not know that the coord template was within the text being formatted as a Heading. I observe that while it is not necessary for a user to select the whole text of a paragraph to be formatted (as simply clicking anywhere within it will do), it is nonetheless what I observe these users do. I suspect that the text of "External links" was being selected and the invisible coords template caught up in it, then the paragraph format was applied.
Workaround or suggested solution I think making the coord visible as puzzle piece would reduce the likelihood of the problem, but there may still be an issue with the lack of a newline between the coord template and the heading (possibly similar to the problem I reported previously about navboxes).

Kerry (talk) 01:02, 8 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I just did it myself ([https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kanyaka_Station&type=revision&diff=785586124&oldid=778067144 diff) Kerry (talk) 10:32, 14 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
It's the kind of issue I could run into myself, as I also make headings in that way. Put it here, although I should add that given how frequent that template is, if this was an epidemic, we'd probably know. TY, Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:51, 22 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Cannot add table columns

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_mobile_virtual_network_operators?veaction=edit&section=1

Whenever you try to add columns in the first table, your browser says the script has frozen.

This is 100% reproducible in Google Chrome 59 and Firefox 53 without any add-ons.

I'm experiencing the same problem whenever I use both Chrome and Firefox. Perhaps VE is going through a major re-work, and this is a glitch? --Kailash29792 (talk) 09:31, 8 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]


Me too, I am also experiencing that problem. Please, fix it! 24.50.204.123 (talk) 00:57, 9 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Seems to be fixed. Artem-S-Tashkinov (talk) 08:56, 9 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Table insert row or column not working for all users

Please, all users cannot insert any tables to any page due to something. Any browser is affected. Updating my browser (Google Chrome) does not fix the problem. Please!!!! 24.50.204.123 (talk) 00:55, 9 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]


It's working again! 24.50.204.123 (talk) 00:59, 9 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Being able to paste \{\{Yes\}\} and \{\{No\}\} into the cells of a table

Please make it possible at least to copy/paste them. Artem-S-Tashkinov (talk) 08:56, 10 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yes
No
No!style="background:#9EFF9E;vertical-align:middle;text-align:center;" class="table-yes"|Yes!style="background:#9EFF9E;vertical-align:middle;text-align:center;" class="table-yes"|Yes

While within the VE, it certainly doesn't look like you can Template:Yes and Template:No as it displays a whole load of style rubbish in the cell. But as my test above illustrates, it does actually work. And yes you can copy-and-paste them with the VE, but it is tricky to work out if you are copying the whole cell or the cell contents. In summary, you can do it in the VE but not entirely easily. But while the result of the copy and result looks like it worked in VE as the last row of the table shows, it failed to work after SAVE. Kerry (talk) 07:29, 13 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

"It does actually work" - what's your web browser? What exactly do you do to make it possible? Ctrl+C/V don't work, Ctrl+Insert/Shift+Insert don't work, mouse right click -> Copy -> Paste also don't work for me. Artem-S-Tashkinov (talk) 11:06, 21 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Artem-S-Tashkinov, it works for me in 2 ways: one is clicking on the cell (just so that the table menu and the arrows appear) and then using CTRL+C/V, but this only seems to work in some cases (like, when from the first cell of the row I paste into the first cell of the other row). Adding Yes and No via the Insert menu instead does lead to code being exposed, but it saves and shows up correctly from what I can see. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:04, 22 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Clicking on link in the edit-link box is broken?

Previously, within the VE, if you clicked on an existing link, the edit-link box popped up and if you clicked on the link, it launched that page. This was very handy for resolving disambiguations, or checking what content was at the other end of the link. Now when you do it, it launches /w/LINKNAME which launches a new tab in my browser but it contains not the article expected but Wikimedia Foundation logo and

Page not found /w/Brent_Cockbain

We could not find the above page on our servers.

Did you mean: /wiki/Brent_Cockbain

Alternatively, you can visit the Main Page or read more information about this type of error.

I was editing Innisfail, Queensland#Notable residents in this case with the link to Brent Cockbain but it seems to be happening all over. Kerry (talk) 04:20, 11 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Possibly a transient, already fixed thing? I don't seem to be able to reproduce. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:44, 22 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Switch around the unsaved-edit-confirmation dialogue box buttons

I'd like to make the suggestion that the buttons "Continue editing" and "Discard edits" on the dialogue box that pops up when a user tries to leave the page with unsaved edits should be switched around. Due to the standard on Windows machines and most popular software being that the button which cancels or exits an operation is on the left-hand side of the dialogue box, I often find myself automatically pointing to that side when I want to click "Discard edits", before remembering that on VisualEditor the buttons are switched, and vice versa for when I want to click "Continue editing", which is particularly risky as unsaved edits could be lost if I click the button. Thank you. SpikeballUnion (talk) 19:38, 11 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I couldn't really remember if and where this was discussed before, so I added it to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T168611 . TY. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:43, 22 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Template highlighting gets stuck when template is shifted

Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: To select a template
Steps to Reproduce: To reproduce:
  1. First click anywhere in the text of a page above a template to place the editor cursor
  2. Then hover the mouse over any template below where you placed the cursor
  3. Finally enter new lines. You can then double-click to open the template from the ghost highlighting.
Results: The template and page contents move down the page as normal, but the selection highlighting for the template stays in the same place.
The selection highlighting will return to the template's location if you stop hovering over the frozen highlighting.
Expectations: The template highlighting should follow the template wherever it goes on the page.
Page where the issue occurs Any
Web browser Chrome Version 58.0.3029.110 (64-bit)
Operating system Windows 7
Skin Vector
Notes: http://prntscr.com/filjra, http://prntscr.com/filmip, http://prntscr.com/filn5q, http://prntscr.com/filnmb (screenshots of the ghost highlighting in action)
Workaround or suggested solution None

SpikeballUnion (talk) 20:18, 11 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Same remark I made below. It's weird the highlighting gets stuck for you. If you confirm it still happens, we can throw this all in Phab. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:38, 22 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

VisualEditor occasionally opens a link within a template instead of the template's settings when clicked

Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: Click on a template to select it.
Steps to Reproduce: It is difficult to reproduce as this bug occurs at a somewhat occasional frequency, but:
  1. First hover the mouse over any link in any template in a page
  2. Click the link.
Results: 90% of the time, the template will be selected, as normal. ~10% of the time, the link inside the template will instead be clicked and you will be either taken to the page (if you've made no edits to the article yet) or, in Chrome, shown a dialogue message saying "Do you want to leave this site? Changes that you made may not be saved.", giving you an option to "Leave" or "Stay".
Expectations: Any template, when clicked in editor mode, should not open any links within it.
Page where the issue occurs Any
Web browser Chrome Version 58.0.3029.110 (64-bit)
Operating system Windows 7
Skin Vector
Notes: http://prntscr.com/filu1b (screenshot of the bug in action; I clicked the Other uses template in editor mode, but VisualEditor is trying to navigate me to a link within the template instead of opening the template's settings.)
Workaround or suggested solution None

SpikeballUnion (talk) 20:44, 11 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

SpikeballUnion, thanks for your note. Is this still happening today? Because I can't reproduce (Chrome/Vector, but Win10): as soon as I hover over the template, the line/box becomes blue. (I also wonder if this is a matter of reaching the link before the page has fully loaded.) Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:34, 22 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. This has happened on occasion since I started using VisualEditor over a year ago. I don't know how to consistently reproduce it, but it does have a much higher chance of happening the first time one hovers over a template, compared to later times. It can happen when the page is fully loaded, though. SpikeballUnion (talk) 12:16, 22 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I put together an annotated video showing the glitch in action. SpikeballUnion (talk) 13:22, 22 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Lack of a Quit button

Something that comes up during some of my VE sessions is the lack of a Quit button to exit the VE without Saving (either because you did nothing OR you did something and decided it was the wrong thing). It's peeved me initially, but I just use the browser BACK to solve the problem, but this doesn't seem to occur to the people who "can't make it go away". On shorter articles, an easy way out is just to click the Article tab (although this appears not to be an intuitive action). And in any case it's not a general solution as with larger articles the VE is scrolling with just the toolbar visible at the top of their browser window. The only way is to scroll all the way up the article and then click on Article. Now I will agree that the source editor doesn't have a Quit button either but it does have the ability to use SAVE to exit without the need to have actually changed anything, so the source editor is scoring 1 out of 2 but the VE is scoring 0 out of 2. Kerry (talk) 07:29, 13 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Source editor has Cancel as a non-buttoned option at the end of the line of action buttons, so scores more like 1.9 out of 2 • • • Peter (Southwood) (talk): 07:39, 19 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Or you can hit ESC on your keyboard. Works for every OS. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:28, 22 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikilinks being copied as URLs

What on earth is happening? I just copied some text from one article open in VE into another one and all the wikilinks came across as URLs to the Wikipedia article instead of internal links? Kerry (talk) 23:22, 13 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

See this diff Kerry (talk)|
I don't manage to reproduce this though. Is it gone? I have tried in both reading and editing mode FWIW. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:27, 22 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

"Manage TemplateData" does not open on Template:Multiple_issues/doc

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T168521
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:54.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/54.0

The built-in button for managing TemplateData does not open ont his page. When I manually clean it out (leave <templatedata>{}</templatedata>) then it opens, but then saving fails.

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Multiple_issues/doc&action=edit

-- intgr [talk] 12:51, 16 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The doc page in question has invalid JSON on the page, and it seems the error handling of the Manage TemplateData that is supposed to catch that problem has become broken itself. I filed a ticket. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:53, 21 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

ta.110032

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.102 Safari/537.36

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sakshi_Shivanand&action=edit&editintro=Template%3ABLP_editintro

175.168.195.84 (talk) 06:32, 19 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Cursor is not where it's shown on screen

Bug report VisualEditor
Mito.money Please app{}
Intention: I was creating a new article based on a CC-BY source. My intention was to copy the attribution statement from Maryborough Boys Grammar School Building to History of Queensland place naming and then modify it to attribute a different CC-BY source (new title, new URL, new access date, new archive URL, new archive date)
Steps to Reproduce: I selected the text to be changed or linked and made the changes. It looked OK but then suddenly it looked not OK. I "undid" and repeated. Same problem. Everything I did went into the wrong position. So, to demonstrate this, I did all my replacements and you can see the result here
Results: It was if I had selected the wrong text time and time again. Yet, my text selection was in every case correct. The VE seemed to have a different view of where the cursor was on the screen to where it was in the text.
Expectations:
Page where the issue occurs
Web browser Chrome Version 59.0.3071.109 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Operating system Windows 8.1
Skin default, Vector?
Notes:
Workaround or suggested solution

I don't know what is going on here, but as you can see from the bug reports, I am submitting, the VE is almost unusable at the moment. So many things are broken. I had to stop adding navboxes and commons categories with it because of the bug where it jumps to display the top of article when I am working at the bottom of the article. I did a lot of my work today in source editor because the VE is just manifesting so many weird bugs. Stuff that used to work has stopped working. Yes, I have rebooted, yes I have ensured I am using the most up-to-date OS and browser, yes I have cleared my cache. I cannot run VE training classes with this sort of thing not being fixed. I am seeing no response to my bug reports. Kerry (talk) 07:44, 22 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

ping Elitre and Whatamidoing —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:22, 22 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I'll take a look ASAP, thanks. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:43, 22 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I have made a comment here - in any case, luckily I'll meet the PM later today, so I get a chance of flagging this more appropriately. Thanks. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:14, 22 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
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