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Accidentally enabling IPA input mode is confusing and has poor usability
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Description

If you accidentally enable IPA input mode or forget to turn it off, its not immediately obvious that anything's different (as most keys are unmodified), but the colon character is replaced by U+02D0 MODIFIER LETTER TRIANGULAR COLON (ː).

This can be pretty confusing to the user, as suddenly when they type titles with namespaces, they don't work anymore (But all other keys are mostly the same). If you're not that familiar with input methods, you probably don't have a lot of hope if figuring out what's wrong on your own. This is bad from a usability perspective.

I'm not sure what would be better usability for this case, but it would be nice if we could make it more obvious what's going on

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Village_pump&oldid=174199855#Two_types_of_a_colon

Quote from commons help request:

In last days, I have a problem with a colon. When I write a colon using keyboard, it is interpreted as a different character (with triangle dots) than the standard colon (with square dots) and doesn't work as a prefix marker. As i noticed, that is not only my problem; see CategoryːEdward Donovan, CategoryːVenom, CategoryːPrague. What is that problem caused by? Formerly I had not this problem. --ŠJů (talk) 18:33, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Event Timeline

Bawolff raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.
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Of course it is possible that the user either accidentally enables (unlikely) or forgets it afterwards (more likely). Every time user types with IME enabled there is a prominent "tooltip" that displays the name "International Phonetic Alphabet". Hence I do not agree with the statement "is not immediately obvious".

Let's not go overboard with the hand-holding of the user. Just helping those users out case by case when they have the issue is in my opinion less of work than the design and development effort needed for this task.

Nikerabbit removed a project: Language-Team.