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Issues with the mobile editor on Wikimedia Commons
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Description

Usually when I edit webpages on Wikimedia Commons I would first have to click on "Desktop", then "Edit source", and then "Mobile" to be brought to a good mobile editor, however since today this automatically redirects me to the bad mobile editor that has less features, and can't mark minor edits, I really dislike this editor however it just keeps redirecting me to this, is there a fix? Is this issue (ever) going to be addressed?

Event Timeline

Oddly enough after I click "Save edit" it immediately brings me back to the editor.

matmarex added subscribers: DLynch, Deskana, matmarex.

So, to rephrase – viewing a URL like https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Matma_Rex/sandbox?action=edit redirects to https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Matma_Rex/sandbox#/editor/0 instead of loading the desktop wikitext editor.

The old behavior was unintentional and unsupported and did not always work – for example, I just discovered that URLs like that did not load any editor at all if you had the "New wikitext mode" beta feature enabled (it got stuck on a page saying "The editor will now load. If you still see this message after a few seconds, please reload the page." but never loaded).

Looks like we changed it as a side-effect of T185729: &veaction=edit URL parameter does not work on mobile site. I don't think we're going to change it back (although it's technically not my decision).

@DonTrung I recommend just using the desktop editor (so, click on "Desktop", then "Edit source", then make your edits and save). It is a bit inconvenient on mobile, but it seems to me that it's not really more inconvenient than the desktop editor on mobile skin (which is what you used earlier). Also, some of the skins have a "secret" feature where the desktop view will actually adjust its layout a bit to me more usable on narrow devices (e.g. mobiles), for example Timeless and MonoBook.

When we say "desktop editor" here, are we referring to Visual Editor, the 2017 New Wikitext Editor, or the classic desktop wikitext editor?

There's a ticket T159971 for giving the NWE to mobile properly, which I think might address your issue? (Depending on which of the above editors you mean.)

I was assuming classic desktop wikitext editor (and testing as a logged-out user).

I was assuming classic desktop wikitext editor (and testing as a logged-out user).

You can't use the "classic desktop wikitext editor" (aka the 2006 wikitext editor) as a logged-out user, it's only available via preferences. Did you mean the "enhanced wikitext editor", aka 2010 wikitext editor, aka WikiEditor?

Well, that's a shame, is there a reason why the inferior mobile editor is preferred? It only seems to occur on Wikimedia Commons for me, and are the developers ever planning on allowing that specific editor to mark minor edits and edit full pages rather than just sections. The issue I have with using the "full" editor on mobile is that it appears really small on my phablet and when it works it sometimes glitches (zooms in and then zooms out automatically, reloads the page and deletes any changes), which happens quite a lot. Personally I would then rather see more features added to the inferior mobile editor which just seems to exist for the most basic and minor edits.

Vvjjkkii renamed this task from Issues with the mobile editor on Wikimedia Commons to zbcaaaaaaa.Jul 1 2018, 1:08 AM
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CommunityTechBot renamed this task from zbcaaaaaaa to Issues with the mobile editor on Wikimedia Commons.Jul 2 2018, 3:50 PM
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@DonTrung You might be happy to know that the Mobile Web team is working on allowing users to disable some mobile optimizations on the mobile site (T186760), and we're discussing doing the same for the mobile editor, after we solve some technical issues that make it difficult to enable/disable it conditionally (T198765).