Author: matthew.britton
Description:
comparison of old and new toolbars
Several buttons on the edit toolbar insert placeholder text when clicked. This placeholder text is often left in the articles.
On en.wikipedia, one can search for "Bold text", "File:Example.jpg" and other such strings and find instances where this has happened. Many are clearly vandalism, but others appear to be legitimate edits save for this unwanted string.
The conclusion is that users are clicking the toolbar buttons by accident, and not realizing that the placeholder text has been added to the page.
Since the toolbar is flush with the top of the edit form, a slight misclick when trying to select text at the top of the form can click a toolbar button instead. When I first recognized this issue on en.wikipedia, I asked for the local CSS to be changed to add a gap between the toolbar itself and the edit form, to reduce the likelihood of accidentally clicking the buttons, which may have helped somewhat.
When the new toolbar was introduced this change was lost. I suggest the same thing is done with the new toolbar, and it might as well be done by default in the extension itself rather than as customization on en.wikipedia only.
I have attached screenshots of the old and new toolbars as displayed on en.wikipedia; note the gap below the old toolbar.
Version: unspecified
Severity: minor
Attached: