The syntax highlighting icon (not shown in the images at the top of the task) and the switch-to-visual-editing icon look very similar. When we tell people to "click the pencil icon", they're going to get confused

@Kaartic reports useful details at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Ubm9jae6k4hza762 including the browser console error:

This happens sometimes when you're just typing. For @NH, "too fast" sometimes seems to be more than one character per three seconds, which sounds incredibly annoying. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Uabedjl98qqt3gw1 for a description.

No, I don't think this is necessary (signal:noise considerations).

@Capt_Swing, I wonder if editors are really confused about what it means. The feedback I've seen in recent months mostly amounts to new people (e.g., students) saying that they want to save the page privately or semi-privately, and that they don't actually want to be publishing it (where the whole world can see it). They seem to grasp that "Publish page" means that the whole world will be able to see it.

Anomie, I don't feel like the goalposts have moved at all. I thought I had explained them pretty clearly in the second paragraph, which begins "My goal is:". In particular, "I want to be able to see which edits were not made through the traditional methods of a human clicking an edit button, typing something, and saving the changes" is what I'm calling a "manual" edit, and anything that doesn't use that method is what I'm calling a "script-based" edit.

Wiktionary isn't a software product, so it doesn't have a product manager. VisualEditor, on the other hand, is a product and it does have a product manager.

I have never been under the impression that projects were run along democratic lines. Is this a common belief at the French Wiktionary? That idea is explicitly contradicted at my home wiki, of course, as well as in pages such as https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Founding_principles

Hello, Jack, Noe, and Pueblo.

@Anomie, is there a better/more practical way to differentiate manual and script-based edits?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Whatamidoing_(WMF)/sandbox&diff=834058158&oldid=834058082&diffmode=source for a simpler use case

This is just a guess, but it sounds to me like you might want to spend a little time with https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Locating_broken_scripts You might want to start with the &safemode=1 test.

Those screenshots are exactly what I want. Could you upload them to Commons? (I could do it for you, if you prefer.)

Have you settled on the text for the first question?

In terms of those user agents, does the (pasted) list mean that there were hundreds of edits made by bot, a few dozen by the app, but nobody (in that list) using the regular editing windows?

In VisualEditor's 2017 wikitext mode, these shortcuts add formatting (e.g., Command-B on a Mac produces '''Bold''').

Posting notices about two weeks before the start date seems to be the sweet spot. Two weeks is early enough that we can change plans if there are unexpected complications (e.g., "Not then! That's when ____ happens, too!"), but not so early that everyone will have forgotten about it by the time it finally starts.

More precisely, updating that scary template is something that I think a technically competent person, e.g., @Jc86035 @MaxSem @TheDJ or @JJMC89, should look into. :-)

I think so. How soon do you think this could be ready to start? (No need to talk to people in March, if the study will happen in August...)

It happened again, this time at kuwiki:

All of the relevant messages were posted as planned today.

That is plausible.

It works this morning. Maybe a temporary server problem? (All I recall about the error messages is that they took a very long time to appear and that the information in them amounted to "didn't work".)

I was having this problem in Safari. I didn't grab a screenshot, so I can't tell you which error message it was. @Elitre, how are things working for you on office.wiki this week?

Visual diffs is currently showing me nothing instead of either the signature or the tildes on office.wiki.

Volker, have you been thinking about a general solution to the wrapped-toolbars problem? I know it's not in scope for this task, of course, but it's a really big problem for some users (and for me, whenever I need to make high-resolution screenshots).

We've also talked about adding it to one of the existing menus, e.g., in the Help menu next to "Read the user guide" and "Leave feedback about this software".

Is this going to change the width of the toolbar's buttons? If so, then some users will find that the toolbar wraps at their preferred/needed zoom, and that it didn't do this beforehand.

In T127354#3949054, @Ivi104 wrote:

In T127354#3922034, @Whatamidoing-WMF wrote:

Thanks for your question, @Ivi104. Realistically, the citoid service can't change the dates to match each wiki's preferences. However, the templates themselves can easily re-format citoid's dates to display whatever you would like. The English Wikipedia has the code (look for their df parameter.)

Thank you, @Whatamidoing-WMF ! If you could perhaps elaborate a bit on where to find the df parameter, and how to format it to match hr.wiki styling? Thank you!

Categories are shown in preview, but only if they are added directly ([[Category:Use British English]]) and not if they're added by transclusion ({{Use British English}}).

For anyone writing documentation or trying to find out what it looks like, the system message in Prefs can be seen at [[MediaWiki:Visualeditor-preference-newwikitexteditor-enable]] ("Use the wikitext mode inside the visual editor, instead of a different wikitext editor." in English).

That's fine, Neil. I'll be interested in seeing your (cleaned-up, vetted, and representative) data when you get it.

Codename Lisa reports that non-existent categories are previewing in blue. I verified this at the English Wikipedia. Only one of these cats should be blue:

This happened again, at https://mr.wikipedia.org/wiki/१_ली_लोकसभा_सदस्य_३?action=edit

At enwiki's VPT, Anon126 says that refreshing the page works around the problem, unless two edit tabs are enabled in preferences. I haven't tried to reproduce this. @Ryasmeen, could you please take a look at it, if you have a few minutes?

In T188433#4018855, @Anomie wrote:

In T188433#4018516, @Whatamidoing-WMF wrote:

We don't need a tag to tell us that millions of edits happen via the API. We already know that...

That's the problem: You know this. I know this. Normal editors do not know this.

True. Although I'm not sure spamming a tag is a good way to tell them. Getting Analytics to put together useful stats and presenting them in a blog post that you then publicize (to mailing lists, on Facebook, in the Tech News, and/or in pages like enwiki's Signpost or dewiki's Kurier) might work better.

I remember the HHVM thing, and I remember it being rather – small potatoes. A couple of people wondered where it came from, were told, and were satisfied. One or two wanted better (i.e., intelligible to non-technical people) documentation. And that was about it.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Whatamidoing_(WMF)/sandbox&diff=828305955&oldid=828305855&diffmode=source

The messages can be found in the archives now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)/Archive_58#Compact_Language_Links_update

What's the maximum number of wikis you want to consider?

@Tkarcher, could you please re-test this with Syntax Highlighting disabled? The bug might be in CodeMirror...

I believe that your next step will be copying the TemplateData for cite news, cite web, cite journal, and cite book. That's the only part of the /doc page that is truly needed for citoid (everything else is for humans). Then do a null edit on each template (NB: Not the /doc pages!) to make sure that the software has noticed the addition of the TemplateData.

This is on wiki at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Newsletter/2018/February and has been delivered to enwiki already. The multi-lingual version will go out during the next couple of work days.

Gilles, I think this is possible. Do you have any requirements for the wikis? For example, do they both need to be Wikipdias? Do you want the two wikis to be on different continents or noticeably different cultures?

How is an "API" tag, that would be present on a huge proportion of all edits, a useful answer to that? What the community probably actually wants to know, assuming they care in the first place, is what script is being used rather than just "OMGAPI!".

In relation to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Contributors/Projects/Editing_performance I'm looking at some numbers that indicate that in some larger Wikipedias, more than half of the edits aren't using any of the regular editing environments. There is no "speed for opening the wikitext editing window" in Twinkle, so we have to drop those edits. But experienced editors have no way to see, for themselves, just how many edits are being made without using scripts like this. They shouldn't have to rely on someone with database access to find out how edits at their wikis are being made. They also need to know just how heavily their communities depend on those tools.

@Legoktm, if you think that tagging "non-traditional" edits would tag too many edits, then why don't we turn this around and tag the "normal" ones? Both modes of VisualEditor are already being tagged, so it wouldn't be that much of an expansion. The two modes of VisualEditor (the visual mode and the 2017 wikitext mode) appear to account for more than half of non-automated, non-script-based mainspace edits on most of the larger Wikipedias.

This is still a problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Whatamidoing_(WMF)/sandbox&diff=827797900&oldid=827694267&diffmode=source

It's possible that something useful could be done here, and the VisualEditor team has considered something similar. I understand that they also consider it to be much too complex for a short-term project like GSoC.

What web browser did you use for this test?

Also, if a microsurvey appears as soon as the page is displayed, it might be annoying for someone who's just trying to check a quick fact. I believe that we'll usually get higher response rates from people who have done something other than just clicked a link to a Wikipedia article.

It also needs to be possible to specify pages where a microsurvey *doesn't* display. For example, unless the question is specifically about the Main Page (perhaps in response to a recent re-design of that page), then that's probably the worst page in terms of both response rate and getting useful/actionable information from the respondent.

This bug means that when you read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breast_cancer_awareness#Notes you see 93 entries, but when you edit that page, you see only one in that list, because 92 of them are generated by {{sfn}}, which the visual editor has never supported.

This might be related to T72603: Please warn if user adds caption for a pic but then chooses an image type that won't display it.

Theoretically, you should be able to transclude TemplateData from any namespace.

In T163302#3960868, @Mvolz wrote:

Report from Facebook: some new users (in education programs) are reporting the "publish changes" button wording is "scary" and there's a request that it be changed to "save" in the Sandbox:

Note: Legal did not object to the button saying "Save and publish page" when I asked. The length of these words varies significantly by language, so I suspect that people with product/user experience considerations would not encourage the change.

If you are going to tell the new editor "Your contribution has been live for a week", then you need to first check that the contribution is still live.

Do you suppose that it's related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Misza13#View_source_script_is_not_working ?

I don't know if or when this is going to happen.

This is here when, and if, it's ever needed, and it can stay here as long as it needs to. There is no deadline on my end.