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Visual Editor: often unable to select text through to the end of para when there are citations or templates in the selected material
Open, Needs TriagePublicBUG REPORT

Description

Steps to Reproduce:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kowanyama,_Queensland&oldid=1008399948&veaction=edit

Look for the para commencing "The Mitchell River enters the locality ...". Now try to select part of the para through to end of the para. My experience is this. I click the mouse in front of "As the river approaches the gulf" and then drag down to just beyond the end of the last line of para with the 4 citations and see that where my mouse is and where the highlighted (selected) text is do not coincide. The highlighted selection starts with "As the river" as expected but where it ends seems to be in one of 3 places:

  • It ends just before one of the coordinate templates (usually the second one with latitude 15.1986 S)
  • It ends somewhere in the middle of the citations at the end (usually missing the last one [8])
  • It ends somewhere in the first line of the subsequent para (vertically below the position of my mouse)

So I wiggle my mouse around (as you automatically do) to try to get the selecctionright, and what's highlighted changes but not generally what I want (flips between the options above). Occasionally if I do it long enough I just seem to get lucky and the correct thing is highlighted but I usually I give up and do some workaround.

Now obviously there could be a difference between what is highlighted and what is actually selected. But if you do a copy and paste, it becomes apparent that the highlighted material is indeed the selected material (and not what you wanted).

The problem does not seem to be caused by the presence of templates. It happens on paras that don't have templates (but the presence of templates seem to make the outcome more random). It doesn't happen on paras that don't end with citations.

I have two laptops where I do my editing, one Windows 8 (Lenovo Yoga Pro 3) and one Windows 10 (Acer Swift ). I am seeing the problem on both. I use the latest version of Chrome on both - Version 88.0.4324.182 (Official Build) (64-bit) on the Windows 10 laptop where I did the tests to report above.

This bug has been like this for at least a couple of weeks now. I assumed it was some temporary side-effect of some other change which would be fixed by the normal testing processes. Because I've been pretty busy, I've solved my problem by switching to text editor as a work-around.

What pushed me to report this is beause I do VE training/events and International Women's Day is coming up. While I am not running any event personally, others are and a lot of those folks are not on-wiki every day as I am and may not know about this bug. If this bug affects most users, then those events are going to be a negative experience for new/occasional contributors.

Actual Results:

Expected Results:

Event Timeline

ppelberg moved this task from To Triage to Triaged on the VisualEditor board.
ppelberg moved this task from Incoming to Upcoming on the Editing-team (Kanban Board) board.
Aklapper added a subscriber: dchan.

@dchan: Per emails from Sep18 and Oct20 and https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Assignee_cleanup , I am resetting the assignee of this task because there has not been progress lately (please correct me if I am wrong!). Resetting the assignee avoids the impression that somebody is already working on this task. It also allows others to potentially work towards fixing this task. Please claim this task again when you plan to work on it (via Add Action...Assign / Claim in the dropdown menu) - it would be welcome. Thanks for your understanding!