Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive 2013 4

London Underground article

Good work on the progress, but there are number of problems rendering the London Underground article:

1. Reference numbers start from 411?
2. Where do the image sizes come from?
3. The table in the Railway section (London Underground lines table) The format is strange and the footnote breaks through on the Circle line entry.
4. Links to images (e.g. File:Metropolitan Railway, Praed Street Junction.jpg) show the image

Thanks Edgepedia (talk) 09:03, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

You know, it would really useful to be about to switch into 'edit source' mode half way through an edit, when you realise that the changes you've made aren't working. Edgepedia (talk) 17:02, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

BTW, there's a problem editing an article that ends in a wikilink. Just try something like

• Space

and adding text after the link.

Edgepedia (talk) 17:11, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

Template info boxes look bad

Loading a page with a reasonably long technical infobox covers my screen in a huge, crossed-out green blob. Can it be smaller? wing gundam 12:42, 28 February 2013 (UTC)

@Wing gundam: The template should look near-identical to how it appears in the "Read" tab, and the green flashing should only occur when you hover your mouse over it. Could you say what template you were looking at, and with what browser, so we can investigate and fix? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:40, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Can't edit most things

It seems like the most complicated elements cannot be edited in this mode. Adding references seems like the biggest challenge for new editors, but that's impossible in this mode. Also not being able to modify visual content seems limiting. Lenacardell (talk) 09:05, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

@Lenacardell: Yes, that's correct; adding references, templates, categories and images are what we're currently working on. When you say "not being able to modify visual content", did you mean images or something else? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:42, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

improvement

wen will the updated visual editor be ready? it has been almost 4 months since its launch, and nothing seems to have been fixed! Kailash29792 (talk) 02:32, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

@Kailash: VisualEditor is being updated on the English Wikipedia every two weeks - you can track our progress on our regular status updates on MediaWiki.org which are also posted on the technical Village Pump and the Wikimedia blog (in the monthly reports).

However, you're right that most of the work we have done since December has been 'under the hood' as we prepare to let users edit references, templates, categories and images, and there has been little user-facing progress. Sorry for the frustration. We hope a 'beta' of the VisualEditor (with all four of those areas open for editing) will be rolled-out in July. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:49, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Editing feedback

Two issues:

1. On User:Ganeshk/sandbox, I am not able to move the first line after the sandbox template down (by pressing Enter before "Another line"). It looks like a bug.
2. On the edit summary box, Visual Editor did not validate if I had entered an edit summary. I have enabled the validation in my preferences.

— Ganeshk (talk) 04:40, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

@Ganeshk: On your first issue, I think we've now fixed this (though in testing behaviour was a little odd in Firefox compared to Chrome) - can you confirm? The second one is a known bug which we need to fix - T49752. Thanks! Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:19, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Allow switching between regular editor and Visual Editor.

Weitzhandler (talk) 11:55, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

@Weitzhandler: Do you mean, switching between the editors without having saved? We're looking at doing that - T49779 - but we were thinking that it's lower priority than some other issues, and so likely to be worked on after we release the 'beta' for everyone. Does this make sense? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:29, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Formatting

I dont know how to add upper case like in "15th" century. Juandev (talk) 08:48, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

I think you mean superscript, not upper case. — Timwi (talk) 17:18, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

And according to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Typography, these shouldn't be superscripted. Edgepedia (talk) 17:08, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

@Juandev, Timwi, and Edgepedia: I've created a bug for adding superscript (and various other text style "annotations") - T49780 - but we're not likely to work on these until after wider deployment (at least). Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:38, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Image

No way to add image? I dont see a button to insert image:-( Juandev (talk) 08:50, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

@Juandev: Not yet, no - we've made good progress on adding support for inserting/editing/deleting images, but this isn't enabled yet. Coming soon! Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:39, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

undock formatting toolbar, enable copy/paste

If possible:

Undock the toolbar that contains the Paragraph dropdown menu and the other formatting buttons - that would make editing large articles way more convenient

Implement copy and paste (right now it works but all formatting is lost when pasting)

great work so far! Derhinniger (talk) 14:33, 24 March 2013 (UTC)

@Derhinniger: Thanks! When you say "undock" do you mean have it appear floating above the edit area however far down the page? That's what should be happening already (so that when editing large articles it's always available) - does it not work for you? If so, what browser are you using? On the copy-and-paste work, we've been working on allowing (restricted) formatting from external sources, so you'd be able to copy content from a Pages/Writer/Word document or similar - see T43193. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:53, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Pressing "Save page" always hangs!

I use Visual Editor in Chrome, stable release. I've tried it in Firefox and Safari too. Every time I go to submit changes, the "Save page" button hangs indefinitely. The changes are actually committed, as reloading the page demonstrates (although a dialog box mentions a server error). —wing gundam 00:11, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

@Wing gundam: Can you still reproduce this? Is it on every page or just on one or two? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:42, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Needs a way to insert images

Preferably via drag & drop from the desktop, like on Facebook. Timwi (talk) 17:16, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

@Timwi: This is in our backlog of things to do - T40030 for upload wizard, T40031 for drag-and-drop and T39932 for copy-and-paste - but we're not likely to get to them before the 'beta' is released for everyone to use. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:55, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Missing Nearly All Basic Information about Visual Editor

I was told on the following page that I can provide feedback here [1]. I'm doing that, and I hope that it will be taken seriously. I just added the date for development on that page. I have no idea why that wouldn't be among the first things you would say about a project. They've been talking about this for months and years now, and it's really irritating for a user that they can't easily know if this is even being taken seriously and what is being done and how and when... perhaps there is more involved, but it's hard to find any information about it without wading through really long conversations. There's a great resource for learning about these things... it's called Wikipedia. If you want to actually engage users like the whole point of this thing is intended, the following information is among the minimal, basic information needed in order to do that, both at that site above and here on the mediawiki project page:

• What is going to be deployed
• When it is expected to be deployed
• The history of development - when it began and why
• Any issues around deployment; I've heard that for example the reason this is taking forever is that it had to be tested slowly because it could be overrun by users and spam. I'm not sure if that's true, because again, it would take me forever to find out.

NittyG (talk) 16:20, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

I am by no means an official spokesperson as far as VisualEditor is concerned, but I think I can answer some of your questions. Firstly, you should take a look at this and this, both of which are linked at the bottom of WP:VE. Rather than having the developers spending valuable coding time writing up duplicate information, a link was added to an offsite page already containing the relevant information.

As for "issues around deployment", it is taking so long because it is an incredibly complex piece of software. The version deployed here at the moment is still rife with bugs, not because the developers are doing a bad job, but because the VisualEditor software is so complex and has to handle such an immense range of possible scenarios.

Also, as far as I can tell, it is being taken very seriously. Try out VE for yourself and you'll see that it looks pretty serious, even if not fully-functional yet.

Hopefully that answers some of your questions. — This, that and the other (talk) 06:56, 28 April 2013 (UTC)