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Redlinks should open the respective editor that's set in the user or global settings
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Description

Hi, the German community decided some time ago to switch on VisualEditor for anonymous editors: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meinungsbilder/VisualEditor_für_nicht_eingeloggte_und_neu_angemeldete_Benutzer . To date, redlinks only forward to the wikitext editor which might cause confusion to new editors and prevents users with VisualEditor switched on from immediatly creating new articles with the new editor. Instead, the redlink should open the respective editor as set in the user settings or according to the global settings (which are VisualEditor for anonymous editors in German Wikipedia). As this probably also affects other language Wikipedias, a global fix should be more appropriate than a temp fix for German Wikipedia (like forwarding forward action=edit&redlink=1 to veaction=edit).

Event Timeline

(in a hurry ATM, can't tell if this is T54162 or T55441)

Hi Elitre, it's T55441, but this is only resolved for single tab wikis. de-wp and many Wikipedias are however using two tabs, so this bug here is not a duplicate.

Guys, tokens do not mean devs will look at the task earlier - although I'm glad to know you care about the problem, obviously :) I'll flag this as a possible regression and will notify the team to check with them.

Elitre renamed this task from Redlinks should open the respective editor that's set in the user or global settings to [regression?] Redlinks should open the respective editor that's set in the user or global settings.Dec 7 2016, 1:09 PM

There's no regression, we resolved T55441 with a configuration variable that allows VE to load on action=edit in some cases, depending on a bunch of factors such as user preferences.

And yeah, we don't get notifications when you add tokens.

Elitre renamed this task from [regression?] Redlinks should open the respective editor that's set in the user or global settings to Redlinks should open the respective editor that's set in the user or global settings.Dec 7 2016, 1:23 PM

I have removed the Regression tag per Alex. Cirdan, this task seems to be asking for something, but the conversation you mentioned me on at de.wiki seems to be about a different issue. It would be great to get this clarified.

The initial discussion in https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fragen_zur_Wikipedia#Visual_Editor is about a recent change to make the German version of "Create the page "$1" on this wiki!" explicitly links against veaction=edit and "only" offer an additional "Quelltext-Editor" ("Source editor" = classical wikitext) link in brackets. A workaround was requested and implemented.

This Phabricator task seem to "generally" be about respecting the 'VE vs. wikitext editor' user preference when clicking any red link (=non-existing page). As both veaction=edit and action=edit parameters exist, it's unclear to me what's the long-term way forward.

As AKlapper says, the discussion is about the change which was implemented to send new users and those not logged in to the VE from the search results. However, the underlying issue why this needed to be fixed in the first place is that red links always send users to the wikitext editor. We would like to send users to whichever editor is their default, which currently is only possible for single-edit-tab wikis. Sorry for the confusion.

As AKlapper says, the discussion is about the change which was implemented to send new users and those not logged in to the VE from the search results. However, the underlying issue why this needed to be fixed in the first place is that red links always send users to the wikitext editor. We would like to send users to whichever editor is their default, which currently is only possible for single-edit-tab wikis. Sorry for the confusion.

Agreed, which is why I did not mention the initial discussion which led me to this broader feature request, backed up by the earlier Request for Comments. For me, that's even a clear-cut case and a bug of the VisualEditor implementation on German Wikipedia where the main editor for new editors was discussed to be the VisualEditor which is not loaded when clicking on a redlink.

There is no bug here beyond T55441: VisualEditor: Where VisualEditor is the primary editor, redlinks in read mode should open VE (not wikitext editor). It is a serious issue, which is why we've put so much effort into that fix for it.

However, we have paused the roll-out of the single edit tab solution because we were not satisfied with the experience for new users. Consequently, we've been working on making the experience of the two editors much closer (T104479), but that is taking a long time (because we don't want to be unnecessarily disruptive). Once that is good enough to be rolled out everywhere, we'll resume the SET solution that fixes this for the German Wikipedia.

In the mean time, wikis can make local changes to MediaWiki configuration to point to the "correct" editor for things like the noarticletext message. However, in some situations it's not possible, as MediaWiki fundamentally isn't designed for multiple editors.

(Note that on dewiki this would be https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Noarticletext-0 for articles due to the local customisations.)

The work on SET mode and the new wikitext editor that James mentioned is kind of frozen, so I guess we're back to trying to resolve this. This is tracked here now: T223793: On non-SET wikis (two edit tabs), links to new pages (red links) should open the user's preferred editor (last used).