VE inserts formatting into link description
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	Draceane
	Nov 9 2025, 8:50 PM

Description

VE inserts text formatting (bold / italics) into the link description, even in the cases where the whole link is to be formatted uniformly; so the wikicode becomes more obfuscated.

e.g. https://cs.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mimozem%C5%A1%C5%A5an%C3%A9&diff=prev&oldid=22829304

In cases, when the formatting is applied to the whole link, it would be better to apply formatting tags around wikilink.

[[Star Wars|''Star Wars'']] → ''[[Star Wars]]''

Details

Related Changes in Gerrit:

Subject	Repo	Branch	Lines +/-
Bump wikimedia/parsoid to 0.23.0-a12	mediawiki/vendor	master	+929 -492
Don't move out format tags when originating as piped	mediawiki/services/parsoid	master	+37 -3
Fix moving format tags out of wikilinks with spaces in target	mediawiki/services/parsoid	master	+32 -8

Customize query in gerrit

Related Objects

Duplicates Merged Here: T413456: Multiple-word links double the amount of wikitext when made cursive in VisualEditor

Event Timeline

Draceane created this task.Nov 9 2025, 8:50 PM

Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald TranscriptNov 9 2025, 8:50 PM

DLynch added a project: Parsoid.Nov 10 2025, 6:15 PM

We will investigate but triaging it as tracking on the Parsoid board for now.

We should investigate and figure out if this is a Parsoid bug or a Visual Editor bug. Neither @Arlolra nor I could remember if this was part of the HTML normalizations that Parsoid does (in which case this would be a Parsoid bug/missing feature) or if we just use whatever tag order VE gives us (in which case this would be a VE issue w/ how they place the <b> tags they give Parsoid.

MSantos added a project: Essential-Work.Nov 24 2025, 3:35 PM

Hmm, this looks like a normalization that Parsoid is supposed to be doing,
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/Normalizations#Move_formatting_from_link_text_to_the_entire_link_(with_some_exceptions)

And there are a bunch of parserTests, "1. Move format tags outside of WikiLink", etc

But looking at the diff, all these links have spaces in the target.

λ (master) echo '<a rel="mw:WikiLink" href="./Foot ball"><i>Foot ball</i></a>' | php bin/parse.php --html2wt
''[[Foot ball]]''

λ (master) echo '<a rel="mw:WikiLink" href="./Foot_ball"><i>Foot ball</i></a>' | php bin/parse.php --html2wt
[[Foot ball|''Foot ball'']]

It looks like the normalizer is getting tripped up on the underscore.

ABreault-WMF triaged this task as Medium priority.Jan 10 2026, 12:02 AM

ABreault-WMF moved this task from Needs Triage to Bugs & Crashers on the Parsoid board.

Change #1225684 had a related patch set uploaded (by Arlolra; author: Arlolra):

[mediawiki/services/parsoid@master] Fix moving format tags out of wikilinks with spaces in target

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1225684

gerritbot added a project: Patch-For-Review.Jan 12 2026, 9:47 PM

ABreault-WMF moved this task from In Progress to Code Review on the Content-Transform-Team (Work In Progress) board.Jan 12 2026, 9:47 PM

Change #1225684 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/services/parsoid@master] Fix moving format tags out of wikilinks with spaces in target

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1225684

ABreault-WMF moved this task from Code Review to To Deploy on the Content-Transform-Team (Work In Progress) board.Jan 13 2026, 5:41 PM