[SPIKE] Investigate whether tools are posting to the edit page
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	ppelberg
	Nov 12 2025, 5:33 PM

Description

As part of the hCaptcha Editing Trial, people who are editing without JS enabled will not be able publish edits.

As part of this hCaptcha Editing Trial, we will be logging when people attempt to edit without JS. As we identified during the 12 November 2025 meeting between Editing and the Product Safety & Integrity Team, some of the people existing instrumentation logs as "people attempting to edit without JS" could include people executing edits via 3rd party tools, thereby inflating this count.

This task involves the work of investigating the assumption that 3rd party tools are, in fact, posting to the edit page.

Learning objective(s)

1. Are 3rd party tools posting to the edit page? And if so, does the instrumentation that is currently in place count these edit sessions as those made by actors/people who do NOT have JS enabled?

Findings

Related Objects

Mentioned Here: T409779: [SPIKE] Review hCaptcha measurement plan

Event Timeline

ppelberg created this task.Nov 12 2025, 5:33 PM

Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald TranscriptNov 12 2025, 5:33 PM

DLynch added a comment.Nov 12 2025, 5:40 PM

This comment was removed by DLynch.

ppelberg moved this task from Inbox to Ready to Be Worked On on the Editing-team (Kanban Board) board.Nov 12 2025, 7:45 PM

ppelberg updated the task description. (Show Details)Nov 12 2025, 7:51 PM

ppelberg added a subscriber: EMill-WMF.

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/WikiEditor/+/1204669 for T409779 was merged-and-backported yesterday, removing some duplication of saveSuccess/saveFailure events (with their interface incorrectly set to wikitext) and inapplicable source-no-js events when people were editing with non-WikiEditor editors. This has greatly reduced our current number of edits that could potentially be posting to the edit form, down to ~0.7% of successful edits on enwiki today.

As such, this isn't anywhere near as high-priority as we thought, and we can check back later to see if it has actually caused issues for anyone.

ppelberg edited projects, added Editing-team, VisualEditor; removed Goal, OKR-Work, Editing-team (Kanban Board).Nov 15 2025, 3:38 AM

[SPIKE] Investigate whether tools are posting to the edit pageOpen, Needs TriagePublicActions