VisualEditor/Feedback

Post your feedback about using the visual editor.

If you have never provided feedback before, you can learn how to do it effectively. If you are reporting a problem directly on this page, please include your web browser, computer operating system, and wiki skin (usually Vector, sometimes Monobook). The feedback tool within the visual editor will include your user agent details instead.

You can use this page to tell the Wikimedia developers your ideas and issues about using the visual editor: this is the only feedback page actively monitored by WMF staff. The Contributors team welcomes your feedback and ideas, especially on user interface decisions and the priorities for adding new features. All comments are read, in any language, but personal replies are not guaranteed: the team will try and go through reports here at least once a week. Need more attention? Report directly in Phabricator. Please note that the Wikimedia Foundation does not provide support for installing VisualEditor on third-party wikis. Please report bugs involving Parsoid at Talk:Parsoid instead.

You may also want to read a guide to optimize the visual editor's experience on your site, which details work necessary on the community side (such as translating or setting up citation systems).

View open developer tasks – Report a new bug in Phabricator – Join the IRC channel – Test the visual editor! (no account required)

Previous page history was archived for backup purposes at VisualEditor/Feedback/LQT Archive 1 on 2015-07-30.

The edit tab on the top of the page has disappeared a few days ago. How to restore it there? I checked the Editing, Gadgets and Beta features tabs in the Settings, but thre's no reference to VisualEditor. According to guide it should be under Beta features tab, however in my case it's not there.

A few days ago I did reset on my account settings (restore all default settings). I'm using the default Vector skin and the language is en-GB/id.

Thanks for the note. Is there a "More" menu, which has an arrow that points down, sort of like a v ?

Which wiki are you editing at?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T265798

EVERY SINGLE TIME I open a new topic that hasn't been made before I get that little pop up telling me that I'm making a new page. I know ! It's like Navi from Zelda. Yeesh!

Can I turn it off?

These are likely editnotices, which are specifically added by the community of editors to show up every single time when editing a page or a namespace. Talk to your local community if there are notices that you think should not be shown.

@TheDJ I'm learning development and decided to start my own personal self hosted mediawiki wiki so I am the guy in charge of that, but I don't know how to do that, and I'm having trouble finding documentation on how to turn them off. Any pointers?

Perhaps removing the message or blanking it will turn it off?

Manual:Interface/Edit notice

@Thedonquixotic, did you get this sorted out yet?

@Whatamidoing (WMF) sadly no.

@Thedonquixotic Could you post a screenshot of the issue you are describing?

I think he's seeing (the local version of) MediaWiki:Newarticletext.

There doesn't appear to be a config option to disable those messages, but if you set that message to be the empty string on your local wiki (by editing the [[MediaWiki:Newarticletext]] page) then VE should automatically detect that the message is empty and no render the popup, I think.

@ESanders (WMF), no, unfortunately not, after clearing MediaWiki:Newarticletext I then get an empty popup with just the message "1 notice".

Filed as T265798

Thanks. So the only way to achieve this is hack the VE code?

If you are using a specific version of MediaWiki, you will need to apply the patch attached to the above task. Once merged it will be available in the master branch and the next version of MediaWiki.

@ESanders (WMF), oh, now I see, I thought it was a existing task, but you added in response to my comment. Thanks.

Användaragent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/85.0.4183.121 Safari/537.36

URL: https://sv.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kvarteret_Gamlebo&action=edit&redlink=1

Det ser ut som att du både har gjort en ny artikel och sparat: https://sv.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kvarteret_Gamlebo&action=history

Gick problemet över?

@Ainali, can you help this new editor?

I have encountered already twice a problem where I have created a page of text and then when I'm saving, someone has made an edit (e.g. added a photo). The editor then prompts that there's conflict and would I like to solve it in text mode. Then it loses ALL content that has been input so far. This is frustrating...

On Finnish Wikipedia, e.g. article :fi:Visuaalinen muokkain the 2nd edit override my original

Mur, does this happen only in the Timeless skin? It sounds very frustrating, especially if you've done more than a tiny bit of work.

Thanks, it is very frustrating. I changed to default skin, but I think the problem might occur with other skins as well.

1. you edit article
2. then someone has saved new version meanwhile
3. you publish changes
4. dialog pops up warning "resolve conflict in wikitext" . if you press X nothing happens, and you return to editor
5. if you click "resolve conflict" the editor throws you to wikicode page how it looked like before either one had edited the page. So the version you started editing. It doesn't have the edits added by another user.
6. All edits are lost and cannot be brought back.
7. If you switch to the wikicode mode after seeing the dialog, it also does the same thing and removes all your edits reverting back to where you started before writing anything. So it's not possible to switch to "edit wikicode" mode and copy your edits. It reverts to version before either user had edited like with the "resolve conflict" button.

It should show multiple boxes, with the other editors' work and your own in separate boxes. See w:en:Help:Edit conflict.

This situation is very confusing arrangement for someone who has been using visual editor to edit the page and now they are forced to understand the wiki code. For me it is not a problem but I think it might be for anyone for haven't used it. Especially that default option is to discard all changes. I think it should be the otherwise around, so that the new save overrides anything edited in between and the conflict may be resolved after that by other editors, so text is not lost from less experienced editors?

@Max Klemm (WMDE), do you think that the new tools for edit conflicts would help here?

When the permisson $wgGroupPermissions['*']['read'] = false; is set in the localSettings.php the VisualEditor cant load an existing page to edit.

Which sadly make the extension unuseable in closed Wikis. :( Is there a way to force VisualEditor to use a certain useraccount?

To bump this up: I noticed the same bug. Fresh set up with new server and everything. When open the VE works, when closed then the same error message appears.

Huh. I use it on a closed wiki myself, so it can be done. Unfortunately, I don't know anything about the setup. Maybe ask at the Project:Support desk?

Also, please look at Topic:Vv0owe0jhsjjonhb and Topic:Vv2djm1uxb06pj78.

The feedback option (from the ? button) of both VE and (2017) New Wikitext Editor leads to "Visual Editor feedback". Is this intended? I gather the same team looks after both. If so, should the description for this board be modified slightly to reflect that?

E.g. “Post your feedback about using the visual editor, including the 2017 wikitext editor.”

Sorry about the delay in actually posting a response. Yes, you're correct that the Editing team is responsible for both the visual and wikitext (and also mobile) modes in Extension:VisualEditor; but no, the team is not watching the page. Feedback is dumped there because the decision to "physically uninstall" Flow from enwiki means that feedback can't be delivered here (i.e., to any Flow page, including this one). In practice, the team watches a few Flow pages here at mw.org for feedback, plus Phab tasks. I check WP:VEF every few months, and I trust that you and the other regulars will head to WP:VPT or ping me personally in case of emergency, but the situation with getting feedback from enwiki is pretty broken right now.

Sure, but I was talking about the description for this Structured Discussions board not w:en:WP:VEF.

I just tried editing it myself by got told "A brief description of the abuse rule which your action matched is: Block editing board descriptions for project and help pages".

There's another page, at 2017 wikitext editor/Feedback, which is linked in a different place.

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T245199

Please see discussion at en:Wikipedia talk:VisualEditor/User guide#Ref names and discuss there.

See m:Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Citations/VisualEditor: Allow references to be named.

I get a HTTP 415 error while saving an edit in visualeditor, MediaWiki 1.35.0

Log entry:

415 POST /rest.php/mywiki.mydomain/v3/transform/html/to/wikitext/Hauptseite/16 HTTP/1.1

Thank you for reporting this @Dueni.f – are you able to share the URL of the page where you experienced this issue?

kitawiki.hassberge.de

Exact the same error ist mentioned here: Topic:Vv0owe0jhsjjonhb

I can confirm: http works, https not

Also confirming: reinstall solves the problem

I used the plesk web based filemanager to extract the tar.gz in the first install and tar from command line in the second. Maybe plesk ist affected by https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T257102

Not a bug, just a comment.

I was working on Linouse Desravine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linouse_Desravine). If you look at the page, there are several categories (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linouse_Desravine_page.png). When you open it up in Visual Editor, there is only one (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linouse_Desravine_visual_editor.png). There's no problem adding categories, I added the birthplace one, but it's just odd.

The oddness of seeing just the one cat might be due to the page not following w:en:MOS:ORDER. When I put the page in MOS:ORDER (stub templates go last, so all the cats are together), then none of them are visible.

It's possible that this is phab:T251398, but it might be a different problem.

The problem was caused by a missing {{s-end}} template, which resulted in unbalanced HTML, which in turn resulted in everything on the page following the {{s-start}} template to be treated as part of a template transclusion and not being editable – including categories. I fixed it in this edit: .

Thanks. I suspected that whatever it was wasn't anything serious, but I wasn't sure what it could be.

I just updated to MediaWiki 1.35.0 yesterday.

Whenever I try to edit a page using the visual editor a progress bar starts to load and near the middle of the process the progress bar stops to fill itself and I get the message:

"Error contacting the Parsoid/RESTBase server (HTTP 404)"

I'm on shared hosting and I'm not running a RESTBase server, but from what I get it's not mandatory (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:VisualEditor#Switching_between_Wikitext_Editing_and_VisualEditor). I have set $wgVisualEditorAllowLossySwitching=false, by the way.

The wiki also has $wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false.

Any ideas?

The documentation of VisualEditor sadly is still lacking. I am having the same problem, but there are no hints on how to fix this.

There is a relative bug report in Phabricator: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T263928

You can subscribe if you wish.

There is also https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T261921, which might also be related. I’m using mediawiki via the bitnami docker image and have opened https://github.com/bitnami/bitnami-docker-mediawiki/issues/84 hoping to get a fix upstream.

I always get a 404 error. Not only in pages with special characters. The relative bug report on Phabricator is available here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T263928

I am having the same issue.

Check and if you wish contribute to: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T263928