list of affected pages

Change 932341 had a related patch set uploaded (by Gergő Tisza; author: Gergő Tisza):

[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] Section images: Placeholder should serialize to empty string

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/932341

We should probably do a safety check in the VE presave handler to make sure the wikitext is unchanged on rejection.

In T340170#8957597, @Tgr wrote:

We should probably do a safety check in the VE presave handler to make sure the wikitext is unchanged on rejection.

Yeah I think we need to do this. The patch fixes the issue, but I noticed that I still had contents to the article saved after clicking "No":

Change 932341 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] Section images: Placeholder should serialize to empty string

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/932341

Change 932280 had a related patch set uploaded (by Urbanecm; author: Gergő Tisza):

[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@wmf/1.41.0-wmf.13] Section images: Placeholder should serialize to empty string

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/932280

In T340170#8957913, @kostajh wrote:

I noticed that I still had contents to the article saved after clicking "No"

I can think of three underlying causes:

1. This is a Parsoid roundtripping bug (either within Parsoid proper, or a side effect of the RESTBase deprecation - AIUI RESTBase played some role in Parsoid being able to roundtrip slightly syntactically incorrect wikitext without changing it). That means it will affect all structured task types, and both accepts and rejections (and probably normal VE edits too). There isn't any great option to deal with it - we can use VisualEditorApiVisualEditorEditPreSave to emit an error and block the save, but that's a poor user experience. It's probably something for another team (API? Content Transform? Editing?) to look into.
2. We are doing something wrong in our VisualEditor integration that breaks Parsoid's roundtripping. (Maybe we are losing some supplemental information, or maybe VE would detect via its transaction history that there aren't any changes and avoid doing a proper save, and we are breaking that.) Could be something that didn't matter before the RESTBase deprecation. Might or might not be limited to section images. Fixable if we figure out what's happening.
3. The image placeholder is somehow perturbing wikitext roundtripping. Either dmRecommendedImagePlaceholderNode is doing something wrong, or it's just unavoidable. If there is no easier fix, we can always just remove the image placeholder in AddSectionImageArticleTarget.saveWithoutShowingDialog.

Change 932280 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@wmf/1.41.0-wmf.13] Section images: Placeholder should serialize to empty string

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/932280

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2023-06-23T14:20:48Z] <urbanecm@deploy1002> Started scap: Backport for [[gerrit:932280|Section images: Placeholder should serialize to empty string (T340170)]]

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2023-06-23T14:27:44Z] <urbanecm@deploy1002> Finished scap: Backport for [[gerrit:932280|Section images: Placeholder should serialize to empty string (T340170)]] (duration: 06m 56s)