The Visual Editor is a huge failure

[EricBarbour]

AHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHA
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... sualEditor

VE is still deployed on other Wiki projects besides en.wiki. The reports of its demise are premature. Liz Read! Talk! 16:27, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Indeed. VE is moving forward as always.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:04, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Then I guess the other discussions have VE covered well enough, and we can just continue fixing the articles for the prior VE glitches. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:15, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

[ALH]

The WMF follows the agile programming philosophy, which you may not be familiar with. It is based on the idea that there must be many, small, incomplete, "too early" releases to gain feedback. It is not popular with many end users precisely because they start interacting with a product when it is half-finished, but the theory is that the end result is more likely to be what the user wants.

Then why wasn't the "fact" that they were using "agile programming" emphasized from the start? (Or was it, and I just wasn't paying enough attention?)

Anyways, please tell me I'm not the only one that's reminded of how Windows Vista was released. (In my very non-techy opinion) neither the VE or Vista were ready to be released when they were, and both were rather over-hyped. Of course, Vista was eventually improved, although I don't think it was ever able to get rid of the view that it was terrible (this is the path I see the VE potentially taking). And I also don't remember Microsoft's PR people being so nasty to their customers.

[dogbiscuit]

The WMF follows the agile programming philosophy, which you may not be familiar with. It is based on the idea that there must be many, small, incomplete, "too early" releases to gain feedback. It is not popular with many end users precisely because they start interacting with a product when it is half-finished, but the theory is that the end result is more likely to be what the user wants.

Then why wasn't the "fact" that they were using "agile programming" emphasized from the start? (Or was it, and I just wasn't paying enough attention?)

Anyways, please tell me I'm not the only one that's reminded of how Windows Vista was released. (In my very non-techy opinion) neither the VE or Vista were ready to be released when they were, and both were rather over-hyped. Of course, Vista was eventually improved, although I don't think it was ever able to get rid of the view that it was terrible (this is the path I see the VE potentially taking). And I also don't remember Microsoft's PR people being so nasty to their customers.

You weren't paying enough attention. There were where'll condescending pets room the WMF staff pointing out how VE was going to be brilliant because of the black magic of agile programming -and lots of responses that they were going to be sadly mistaken.

[thekohser]

...were where'll condescending pets room the WMF staff...

What's Doggie smokin' today?

[Mason]

Anyways, please tell me I'm not the only one that's reminded of how Windows Vista was released.

Vista wasn't nearly this much of a trainwreck. VE is more like Microsoft Bob (T-H-L), both in intent and execution. The idea being to make things more user friendly without actually addressing the things that the users found most unfriendly (blue screens of death in Bob's case, impenetrable template and table syntax in VE's.)

[dogbiscuit]

...were where'll condescending pets room the WMF staff...

What's Doggie smokin' today?

Argh! I confess. Dropped of daughter at airport at 4:30am. I nearly couldn't make sense of that myself (teach me for using the phone)

At a guess!!!...

"There were several condescending posts from the WMF staff"

[Vigilant]

It gets better!!! no it doesn't
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... e_improved

Hi Pam,
I know it's frustrating to have some of these things linger on, especially when they're interfering in your (and my) everyday work, rather than just cropping up occasionally.

No you don't. You're not a hard core editor. You're a teat-milking, slop-slurping, hanger-on who wants to get paid to be a shithead to wikipedia editors who have problems with this expensive boondoggle. Own that shit, Sherry!

VisualEditor is a multi-year project.

Not intentionally. You guys just suck ass at engineering.

You can see at mw:VisualEditor/status that a lot of work has been done based on reports from you and other people. None of your reports are being "wasted".

'Ignored' is a better word for it then?

James F, who is VisaulEditor's product manager, reads every bug report and uses that information to set priorities for the developers.

His tears are full of delicious, buttery goodness.

The current work involves copying and pasting, improving the references dialog, dealing with images, switching into wikitext mode (I think you will appreciate that one), and simplifying the toolbar, plus a lot of language-related work that doesn't affect most pages here at the English Wikipedia.

You know, the shit that real engineering teams do BEFORE THEY RELEASE THE FUCKING EDITOR!

Some of the ones you list here are in the works for sooner rather than later.

Please don't hold your breath waiting. Hypoxic brain injury is bad for your IQ.

Others will be done later, and some may not be done (changing the appearance of an open page doesn't seem to be a popular idea).

You don't know us! We do what we want!

I think that this project is a bigger one than most people believed it would be.

We are really, really, really shitty at scoping work.

They've been working on this full-speed all year

They are also slow readers.

, and I don't think that will change until some next year—or maybe even in 2015; it's a little hard to predict huge projects like this. This is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, engineering project that the WMF has ever undertaken.

Don't you think you should have known this before you started? Morons.

I'd like to thank you personally for your work,

Back to work, replaceable minion!

and also for being one of the most pleasant people on this page.

Damning with faint praise!

I'm always happy to find your name in my watchlist. Please keep reporting problems or oddities whenever you see them. Thank you, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:17, 22 October 2013 (UTC)

AHAHAHHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAH!!!!!!!

P.S. All of those bugs are from May and June...That's months waiting for basic fixes...

Edit: Just dropping this here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... imitations

[Zoloft]

I would like to propose to the Wikimedia Foundation the way out of this mess.

Hire these folks: The CKSource Team

They have the resources, the experience, and a product they can roll out in a short period of time. They are capable and sane.

CKEditor is the world's most successful and extensible browser-based WYSIWG editor. You can even specify that the end product is released with the license of your choice.

Get it done, by professionals devoted to the Open Source movement as much as you are.

[lilburne]

You forget that wiki-markup is unparsable.

[dogbiscuit]

You forget that wiki-markup is unparsable.

...to which there are two solutions:
1) Fix the markup language issues.
2) Use the irritatingly named parsoid (rather appropriately meaning resembling a parser, as opposed to suggesting it actually is a working parser) and apply whatever conversion rules to resolve the issues.

The parsoid solution becomes appropriate when mixing with hand-crafted edits in that you will always have to validate the input anyhow.

To suit the WMF's aims, they should have no issue with Wikipedia declaring a subset of the markup to be supported and also they should be proposing fixes.

I don't think getting an external contractor would work though because you would still be working for a dysfunctional client and I don't think you'd ever get a sound contractual agreement - and then you still have the community to deal with. However, I don't think the WMF have grasped that if VE worked (including supporting a couple of features like references in a user-friendly manner), it wouldn't have been rejected - there would have been change-averse moans, but it wouldn't have been rejected, and WMF wouldn't have been compelled to concede defeat.

Talking about a couple of years to fix just shows how out of control the project is. I wonder how Erik reconciles that with his "Fuck you, we are agile" pronouncements.

[lilburne]

Talking about a couple of years to fix just shows how out of control the project is. I wonder how Erik reconciles that with his "Fuck you, we are agile" pronouncements.

He's probably complaining that the WMF need a better quality clients/users and the current lot ought to be sacked.

[dogbiscuit]

Talking about a couple of years to fix just shows how out of control the project is. I wonder how Erik reconciles that with his "Fuck you, we are agile" pronouncements.

He's probably complaining that the WMF need a better quality clients/users and the current lot ought to be sacked.

That was already Plan A.

[The Joy]

Talking about a couple of years to fix just shows how out of control the project is. I wonder how Erik reconciles that with his "Fuck you, we are agile" pronouncements.

He's probably complaining that the WMF need a better quality clients/users and the current lot ought to be sacked.

A moose must have bit Erik's sister.

[lilburne]

Talking about a couple of years to fix just shows how out of control the project is. I wonder how Erik reconciles that with his "Fuck you, we are agile" pronouncements.

He's probably complaining that the WMF need a better quality clients/users and the current lot ought to be sacked.

That was already Plan A.

Why change a winning strategy?

[Hex]

Regression tests? Fie on them!

I was trying to convert bad material into a comment in the article on Gerald Celente. When I came to the end of the comment and tried to close it (using html in lieu of any idea what else to use), I got what looks like a chess pawn when I previewed it: ♙. Kdammers (talk) 05:28, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

I have no idea what kind of internal conditions it would require to generate turning your output into a Unicode character, but this "pawn" bug appears not to have been resolved at its fundamental origin at all since it first appeared weeks ago.

[lilburne]

Well if you are Agilating regression tests are your first line defence, and your last line too.

[The Joy]

I tried to explain the whole VE and Flow rigamarole to my father, a retired COBOL programmer. He found it... odd, at best.

He also says programmers should never, ever give even an estimated date of completion to your boss even if "you will not be held to it." Bosses are damn liars. I would feel bad for the WMF programmers if they didn't keep on the party line. If they just said nothing and let the complaints go to Erik Moeller and James Forrestor, I would be on their side. Instead, the programmers yell at their user base and claim everything is perfect. I have no sympathy for them and their bosses now.

[Hex]

Kdammers (T-C-L), who's been editing for nearly 10 years, is having some problems (diff only):

At the National English Ability Test (T-H-L), I am trying to clean up a minor point and correct an error, both in the references. One (footnote 5) has an extra set of parentheses and a changed font: (in (Korean)). The other (footnote 3) incorrectly indicates that the reference is in Korean. When I try to use VE to edit, I get the section pale-blued. When I click any-where in this, I get a stronger blue with a white rectangle in the upper right-hand corner with what is supposed to be a books icon. Nothing can be changed in the blue screen. when I click on the icon, I get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_ ... ction=edit, which is a blank white screen with the same icon followed by "Reference list," a cog icon followed by "Options," and "Use this group" above an entry box. There is also a big X in the upper right-hand corner and a "Apply changes in the bottom right-hand corner.

The only operative part of this screen is (other than the X and, presumably, the "Apply changes" is the entry box. What in the world does this have to do with editing the text? what "groups" are being referred to? What am I supposed to type into the box -- some sort of group name?? In other words, using VE I have no idea at all how to make the two simple changes I mentioned at the start. (I recall having encountered the blue screen before, but I can't remember what the explanation was. In any case, if we are trying to make editing easier for people thinking in terms of WSIWYG word processing, this is not the way to do it.) Kdammers (talk) 07:40, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Truly we're moving into a bold new era for the project with technology as well-designed as this.

[Randy from Boise]

You forget that wiki-markup is unparsable.

...to which there are two solutions:
1) Fix the markup language issues.
2) Use the irritatingly named parsoid (rather appropriately meaning resembling a parser, as opposed to suggesting it actually is a working parser) and apply whatever conversion rules to resolve the issues.

The parsoid solution becomes appropriate when mixing with hand-crafted edits in that you will always have to validate the input anyhow.

To suit the WMF's aims, they should have no issue with Wikipedia declaring a subset of the markup to be supported and also they should be proposing fixes.

I don't think getting an external contractor would work though because you would still be working for a dysfunctional client and I don't think you'd ever get a sound contractual agreement - and then you still have the community to deal with. However, I don't think the WMF have grasped that if VE worked (including supporting a couple of features like references in a user-friendly manner), it wouldn't have been rejected - there would have been change-averse moans, but it wouldn't have been rejected, and WMF wouldn't have been compelled to concede defeat.

Talking about a couple of years to fix just shows how out of control the project is. I wonder how Erik reconciles that with his "Fuck you, we are agile" pronouncements.

WMF are not "conceding defeat" until that motherfucker is consigned to the fires of Mt. Doom by a short 30-something with hairy feet. They've got too many huge egos that have gone "all in" on this Rubegoldbergware...

RfB

[dogbiscuit]

WMF are not "conceding defeat" until that motherfucker is consigned to the fires of Mt. Doom by a short 30-something with hairy feet. They've got too many huge egos that have gone "all in" on this Rubegoldbergware...

RfB

They can't really concede defeat until they put someone in place who knows what they are doing. Until then, they are surfing along on a belief that they will get there soonish, with lots of "Can this be fixed" "of course" conversations which are not based in a proper understanding of the product.

For example, it seems to me that there is a major problem to address, and that is that VE only ever tackles the whole article so they have a big contention issue and a big performance issue - the exponential edit time effect. I've not heard anything that says that they understand how to solve the performance issue on large edits - it is clearly something like the way that the editor stores its tokens where they have the wrong container or have chosen the wrong container model so eventually the insert time gets bigger and bigger. They are not looking for 10% or 20% performance improvements, but orders of magnitude and it requires someone technical who really understands what the code does, not simply making stuff up or copying out of a book or guessing what library function might do. They don't seem to have a model for editing sections rather than the whole article (which really means editing a section and the references and other bits section at the same time). It's probably a good thing at this stage as it will focus their minds on performance rather than evading the issue.

If that logjam in the editor is at the server end, then I'd assume that we'd have seen the servers collapsing, so presumably it is a client-side problem.

[Hex]

HELP !!!!! PLEASE STOP VE ON FRWIKI, Articles are completely trashed by VE every minute.

[dogbiscuit]

HELP !!!!! PLEASE STOP VE ON FRWIKI, Articles are completely trashed by VE every minute.

Summary, VE trashes anything with accents in.

Response, it's not VE it's Parsoid. (So that's alright then).

Somewhat Anglo-centric approach to testing. Though one wonders what you have to do in coding to screw up accents seeing as we are not in the days of 127 character ASCII any more.

[Hex]

Somewhat Anglo-centric approach to testing. Though one wonders what you have to do in coding to screw up accents seeing as we are not in the days of 127 character ASCII any more.

To quote someone I saw on Twitter, 'Some developers still don’t know you should paste “Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn” everywhere while testing.'

[Vigilant]

It's so bad, it's hard to find examples of other projects failing so utterly and so publicly.

Perhaps the Hubble fiasco...

[Zoloft]

It's so bad, it's hard to find examples of other projects failing so utterly and so publicly.

Perhaps the Hubble fiasco...

Oh there is a quite apropos example:
The 1988-2000 IRS Tax Systems Modernization (TSM) project failed miserably and cost upwards of four billion dollars.

Some reasons:

The IRS Tax Systems Modernization (TSM) project failed because the IRS did not have a consistent long-term strategic vision to guide the project. The IRS modernization deficiencies, as documented by GAO and the National Research Council (NRC), show both a lack of business technology integration and a failure to use best practices:

• The IRS did not possess the technical management resources necessary to manage a program as complex as TSM. Senior technical leaders were noticeably absent.
• The systems architecture within the IRS, including its functions, data, and technology building blocks, was insufficient.
• Enterprise wide technical security had not been developed.
• The IRS lacked a cost effective strategy for reducing paper tax return submissions.
• The process for selecting, prioritizing, controlling, and evaluating the progress and performance of major information systems investments was ineffective.
• The IRS failed to develop fully and put in place the requisite management, software development and technical infrastructures necessary to implement successfully an ambitious world class modernization effort.
• The IRS had inconsistent and poorly controlled software development processes.
• Organizational structure with the accountability and authority needed to manage modernization efforts was lacking below the Commissioner's office.

[Hex]

It's not quite at the $4bn mark yet, but over here our government has been trying to implement a complete reform of the welfare system, called "universal credit". Under it people will end up receiving one single integrated payment that covers all the benefits that they're eligible for.

Work on the system started in 2010 and it's still nowhere near finished. In fact, it's in such a chaotic state that they may have to restart development, and write off all three years and £119m ($191m) of work at an additional £96m ($154m) cost; or fix the existing system for another £226m ($362m). (Full news article.)

Government IT projects eh? Just brilliant.

[SB_Johnny]

It's so bad, it's hard to find examples of other projects failing so utterly and so publicly.

Perhaps the Hubble fiasco...

Well, "healthcare.gov" comes to mind...

[Poetlister]

It's so bad, it's hard to find examples of other projects failing so utterly and so publicly.

Perhaps the Hubble fiasco...

The Hubble telescope was fixed fairly quickly, and it's been a spectacular success ever since. A better example might be the Mars probe that failed due to a mix-up between American and metric measures of length and mass.

[lilburne]

It's so bad, it's hard to find examples of other projects failing so utterly and so publicly.

Perhaps the Hubble fiasco...

It hasn't failed in my book. On the contrary it has been a resounding success.

Hats off to all concerned, and give our compliments to the chief architect chef.

[dogbiscuit]

It's so bad, it's hard to find examples of other projects failing so utterly and so publicly.

Perhaps the Hubble fiasco...

It hasn't failed in my book. On the contrary it has been a resounding success.

Hats off to all concerned, and give our compliments to the chief architect chef.

The essential architecture was fine, including designing in maintainability. There was an error in manufacturing the main mirror - not sure what it was that led to the problem, whether it was failing to compensate for gravity or some other error, but the mirror itself was high quality, just the wrong focal length which they managed to fix. Hubble has indeed been a spectacular success due to the competence of the team from design through to implementation.

If the VE team had been doing Hubble, it would have crashed out of orbit a few times, and eventually produced some distorted pictures no better than a toy telescope used on a cloudy day from central London. People complaining about the quality of the pictures would be told to fuck off because the pictures were perfectly adequate for what the project team were interested in.

Wikia Search would be a better comparison.

[Vigilant]

Yes, yes, fine, fine.

I was rushed for time.

*sigh*

[Jim]

If the VE team had been doing Hubble, it would have crashed out of orbit a few times, and eventually produced some distorted pictures no better than a toy telescope used on a cloudy day from central London. People complaining about the quality of the pictures would be told to fuck off because the pictures were perfectly adequate for what the project team were interested in.

You think it would have got pictures?

Other than that, great analogy - I lol'ed.

[TungstenCarbide]

The essential architecture was fine, including designing in maintainability. There was an error in manufacturing the main mirror - not sure what it was that led to the problem, whether it was failing to compensate for gravity or some other error, but the mirror itself was high quality, just the wrong focal length which they managed to fix. Hubble has indeed been a spectacular success due to the competence of the team from design through to implementation.

As I recall, the mirror was ground to the wrong shape, but perfectly so, allowing a corrector to be installed in the optical path that fully restored the telescope. The focal length wasn't off but the conic strength.

Telescope mirrors are usually a parabolic or hyperbolic shape, differing from a perfect sphere by just millionths of an inch; the shape can't be measured directly. Instead, at the time, they were measured using themselves and a few extra optical parts to create light wave interference patterns, which can then reveal the mirror's shape to a fraction of a wavelength of light. The mirror is repeatedly measured on the optical bench and returned to polishing, where it gets its final shape.

In Hubble's case, they had some type of ross null correcter on the optical bench that wasn't located properly, leading to the wrong conic being polished into the mirror's final shape. The interesting thing is that there are a bunch of other simple quick tests that could have quickly identified this flaw, but the manufacturer didn't double check.

[Vigilant]

*sigh*

How many months has the largest development team at WMF been working on this problem?

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... inspace.29

Main missing or poorly working aspects (mainspace)

So, what do you consider the main remaining missing or poorly working aspects of VE? I'll list a few I think of right now, feel free to add your own (I'm bound to froget some very common ones). It may give an indication of where the most urgent problems are situated and which things shouldn't be forgotten... Fram (talk) 15:34, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Galleries can't be used
Tables can hardly be used
Copy-paste removes all markup
Redirects
File handling (location, replacing, sizing, ...)
Scrolling (with arrows, or after copy-paste of text)
Wiki-markup isn't supported
...but Wiki-markup is necessary in templates
Citation templates
Performance, obviously
Different look in VE than in view mode (whitespace between templates and so on, compare e.g. Internet Archive standard and in VE mode)
Reference numbering in VE mode restarts in text when there are refs in the infobox
PLus many more minor bugs (minor in the sense of less often occuring, not necessarily of having less serious consequences, e.g. the problems on moving navboxes)

Some more:

Hidden comments <!-- ... --> aren't shown
Special characters (no way to insert them, no way to know if existing spaces are ordinary spaces or non-breaking spaces)
Redlinks are not red
Transclusion editing interface: It is horribly inefficient for editing, showing only one parameter value at a time, and requiring scrolling/looking through the list, and then clicking on each parameter you want to edit. A design that is more like the interface reftoolbar uses for the cite templates - ie, being able to see and edit many parameters AND their values all at once - would be a huge improvement. Also, if many templates are used consecutively, such as {{jctint}} and related templates (which build a table row-by-row), it is impossible to edit just one of these templates - the transclusion editing interfaces groups everything together on the left-hand scroll list, making it difficult to find the spot you want to edit - especially if the same template with the same parameters is used repeatedly (maybe 20+ times) in the group of templates.

- Evad37 (talk) 16:56, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

This tool by tools is AT LEAST a year from working at all.

[dogbiscuit]

*sigh*

How many months has the largest development team at WMF been working on this problem?
...
This tool by tools is AT LEAST a year from working at all.

I guess you are making an assumption that the entire project team has been sacked and replaced to come up with that estimate.

[Vigilant]

*sigh*

How many months has the largest development team at WMF been working on this problem?
...
This tool by tools is AT LEAST a year from working at all.

I guess you are making an assumption that the entire project team has been sacked and replaced to come up with that estimate.

I doubt they can fix the performance issues.
That's a fundamental architectural issue that they lack the internal expertise to solve.

They can't even get their own homebrew pages and dialogue boxes to work right.

They can't seem to write tests that catch common, obvious bugs leaving the poor editors wondering what's the next thing these dipshits are going to break AGAIN?

They have no visible deployment schedule which leaves the poor editors wondering when the problems they've reported are going to be addressed, if ever.


Such a head shaking disaster.

It would have been so comically easy to avoid this tar baby if ANYONE in their organization had the first clue about software management.

The WMF devs are a case study on the dangers of cronyism (T-H-L).

[Vigilant]

It's been a while since I updated the most egregious VisualEdsel bugs.
Let's all go take a look, shall we?

Sure, I knew you could...

Moving a navbox deletes it

Space between ":" and characters count increase

Strange result

Here, something went wrong. Note the editor succeeded in introducing wiki-markup into the VE text

citation needed

Here, at "humor effect", you get a citation needed with a reason. In VE mode, you get a "span title =" which shouldn't be there... Fram (talk) 14:05, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

I tested this, and I guess it depends on the inverted commas. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:54, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

Main missing or poorly working aspects (mainspace)

So, what do you consider the main remaining missing or poorly working aspects of VE? I'll list a few I think of right now, feel free to add your own (I'm bound to froget some very common ones). It may give an indication of where the most urgent problems are situated and which things shouldn't be forgotten... Fram (talk) 15:34, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Galleries can't be used
Tables can hardly be used
Copy-paste removes all markup
Redirects
File handling (location, replacing, sizing, ...)
Scrolling (with arrows, or after copy-paste of text)
Wiki-markup isn't supported
...but Wiki-markup is necessary in templates
Citation templates
Performance, obviously
Different look in VE than in view mode (whitespace between templates and so on, compare e.g. Internet Archive standard and in VE mode)
Reference numbering in VE mode restarts in text when there are refs in the infobox
PLus many more minor bugs (minor in the sense of less often occuring, not necessarily of having less serious consequences, e.g. the problems on moving navboxes)

Some more:

Hidden comments <!-- ... --> aren't shown
Special characters (no way to insert them, no way to know if existing spaces are ordinary spaces or non-breaking spaces)
Redlinks are not red
Transclusion editing interface: It is horribly inefficient for editing, showing only one parameter value at a time, and requiring scrolling/looking through the list, and then clicking on each parameter you want to edit. A design that is more like the interface reftoolbar uses for the cite templates - ie, being able to see and edit many parameters AND their values all at once - would be a huge improvement. Also, if many templates are used consecutively, such as {{jctint}} and related templates (which build a table row-by-row), it is impossible to edit just one of these templates - the transclusion editing interfaces groups everything together on the left-hand scroll list, making it difficult to find the spot you want to edit - especially if the same template with the same parameters is used repeatedly (maybe 20+ times) in the group of templates.

- Evad37 (talk) 16:56, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

How do I insert a picture?

I want to copy an image from one site (characters in the t.v. show "Bones") to another site, (List of fictional anthropologists). I got the picture to copy (using the source file) onto the media page (though there was no explanation of what to do), but then I was stumped. There was no "paste," "apply," "do" or any other similar button (to say nothing of there being no explanation there or at the guide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... User_guide) page. All I saw was a big X. Suffice it to say that I didn't succeed in getting the picture onto the page. Kdammers (talk) 01:39, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

As far as I know, you can't. Someday in the distant future probably... Fram (talk) 09:35, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

(After) feedback

I just worked on a page and had a problem (reported above). So, I used the feedback option. I have two issues with that option. First, it is not clear that the feedback will be posted with-out (at least as far as I can see) any indication of what site the editor is on when s/he fills out the form. I had assumed that that information would be included automatically ( like in some discussion articles on requests for deletion etc.). Since /If it isn't, the editor fling the feedback should be given a heads up, since viewing the specific site is often needed for others to understand the problem, and the editor might not come back for a while or might have edited a lot of sites and not remember which one had the problem. Second, after completing the feedback and sending it, I was still on the VE page, but I cannot save the page (the button is light green and inactive). It seems the only way to exit is to cancel, losing any changes I might have made (actually, after writing the feedback, I don't remember if any of my changes were made in that session, so it's possible, there are no changes to be lost, but still....)Kdammers (talk) 02:13, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

New categories not rendered

Messages should reference ability to switch to source editor

Both the notice on first opening VE ("You can keep using the wikitext editor by clicking the "Edit source" tab instead – unsaved changes will be lost.") and the wikitext warning ("Click "Edit source" to edit the page in wikitext mode – unsaved changes will be lost.") need to be changed to reference the newly added ability to switch to the source editor without losing unsaved changes:Jay8g [V•T•E] 05:09, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

As soon as that one works properly at least. Tested in on User:Fram/sandbox, but doesn't work. Tested it on File:!!! - !!! album cover.jpg, doesn't work either. Tested it on Category:Texas A&M University, doesn't work either. Tested it with or without making changes to the page before attempting the switch, no difference. Firefox 25, Windows 7... Fram (talk) 09:28, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Toc Toc. Who's there?

When using VE, the TOC disappears (tested in Flags of counties of the United States and Auto racing). I don't think this happened already before the weekend, I think I would have noticed it... FF25, Windows 7. Fram (talk) 14:56, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

Refs in galeries create errors
Tracked in Bugzilla
Bug 57216

I think this was noted a few months ago, but bringing it back to make sure won't hurt. In Flags of counties of the United States, there are references inside galleries (which isn't uncommon). In VE, you get big red "Cite error" notices for these. Fram (talk) 14:58, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

Disappearing and reappearing text
Tracked in Bugzilla
Bug 57217

Can anyone confirm this for me?

Open a page with pre-existing content.
Type or change some of the text (I was adding a new first line).
Select and cut (⌘ Command+x) some pre-existing text (I cut mine from the third line).
Notice that what you typed on the first line has been undone.
Paste what you cut (in my case, at the end of the first line).
Notice that what you typed on the first line has been redone.

I ran into this over at office.wikimedia, but office is also running MediaWiki version 1.23wmf3 (2ac963d), so it should behave the same here. I particularly want to know whether this is a Mac/Safari/Vector issue, or if it also happens elsewhere. Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:21, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Disappearing templates
Tracked in Bugzilla
Bug 56923

I noted some weeks ago that some navboxes disappear when you try to move them in VE. I can add now that the "authority control" template has the same problem (disappears after moving, "save button" freezes after you have reviewed that change). Tested on David B. Feinberg. Fram (talk) 10:04, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Oh, and stub templates as well apparently! Tested on Tessie Santiago.

And succession boxes. Tested on Gennady Golovkin. Fram (talk) 13:18, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Bitching about testing

I have been told by some that I shouldn't blame WMF (devs, systems, whatever) for the shortcomings of VE, but seriously, sometimes it can't be helped. If it tunrs out that my reason for this post is based on flawed information, then please let me know. Otherwise:

The switch between VE and wikitext editing has been active now for a few weeks, and was announced at e.g. mw:VisualEditor/status#2013-10-monthly as one of the major new features of the month in VE.

As far as I can tell, this has never worked in Firefox (see Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback#Messages should reference ability to switch to source editor. If correct, this means that a major new feature has not been tested on one of the two or three main browsers for VE. Coupled with the serious failure of early November with accents, which revealed that new VE releases were (until then) not tested on non-enwiki versions, makes it obvious that the criticisms which were raised multiple times and which led in part to the RfC fiasco here, have not changed anything at WMF (or whichever part of WMF is responsible for this) concerning this.

Why should we believe anything the WMF tells us wrt to testing, feedback, learned lessons, and so on if it looks as if in reality all we get is a big "fuck you, we don't do testing, you are still the guinea pigs" anyway? Why would we believe that the approach to e.g. Flow will be any better? Fram (talk) 14:10, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Problems with French communes

Articles like Sainte-Croix-sur-Mer take very, very long to open in VE (although, probably due to caching, it goes a lot faster on a second try), and have troubles displaying their contents correctly in VE.

In the infobox, the red dots that show where the subject is located on the maps, are totally off.

It is also rather annoying that some templates take up much more "blue" (selected) space than actual space. This is most obvious with the (invisible!) "clear-left" template (beneath the "historical populations" template)

This made me also realise another problem with VE. Imagine that you find the population figures for 1932, and want to add them to the hist pop template. In wikitext, this is very easy. In VE, this is extremely laborious in comparison. Not user friendly at all. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fram (talk • contribs) 2013-11-15T14:28:57
"I'm not sure that it's entirely reasonable for VisualEditor to process that code, though." The template "infobox settlement" is transcluded more than 400,000 times, i.e. this is used on ca 1 in 10 of our articles, as a major visual aspect of it. The template football kit (below), which may have the same or a very similar issue, is used on an additional 25,000 pages. Template chembox, used on nearly 10,000 additional pages, same problem. Not enough? Template taxobox, used on yet another distinct group of 234,000 pages, has the same problem as well... I think it is entirely reasonable to expect a VisualEditor to process our most often used, very prominent templates correctly on an essential visual aspect of them. If that means redesigning the templates, the some VE devs can come over and fix it as far as I am concerned. But simply accepting that these templates will not be rendered correctly in VE is (once again) throwing the arms up in defeat and admitting that VE will never deliver what it set out to do. Fram (talk) 08:27, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

And while we're at it, you may add the 45,000 transclusions of Template:Infobox NRHP as well. Fram (talk) 10:55, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

If I'm double counting somehow, please correct me, but otherwise you may add to the above another 146,000 instances of Template:Location map... I think personally that it is entrely reasonable to expect a VisualEditor to correctly precess visual elements used on 1/5th of the Wikipedia articles if it wants to be taken seriously, but YMMV. Fram (talk) 12:55, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Football kits: template used on 25,000 pages, doesn't work properly on VE

Pages like Bethesda Athletic F.C. don't look so good in VE. The infobox gets mangled. The same happens to more well-known clubs like Manchester United F.C., so I assume that every single club page has the same problem. The template football kit is used on nearly 25,000 pages... Fram (talk) 15:10, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Can't save a new page!!!

I tried to create a new article TWICE but I wasn't able to save it!! The first time I clicked "Preview your changes" to take a look of it (I always do that) but the page kept loading and loading with no result! When I took the decision that nothing was going to happen, I said to give it one more try and start all over again. The second time around I skipped the "preview your changes" and I went straight to the "save"! Again the same thing happened! I left it like that for 20min hoping that it will be saved but nothing! It kept loading and loading! I faced the same issue with the previous article I created but the second time that one was saved and I thought that I just spent to much time to finish it because I left it open for a while and then came back to finish! But this time it was not the case! I am not willing to spend another 1-2hours to try for a third time! If this is a bug please fix it! I lost my work twice and till this gets solved I am not willing to take any risks again to create a page with VE and that makes me really sad because even though I can use the source to create a page with VE is so much easier! I am using Firefox 25, Windows 8. TeamGale 09:05, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Error:Unknown error

When editing KLM, when I hit save page I got Error:Unknown error below the edit summary box and a greyed out save page button. However, the edit still saved without any indication that it did so. I actually went to save the page again, not thinking that it had done anything, but luckily checked the history and canceled before it could save (Monobook, Firefox 25, Windows 7):Jay8g [V•T•E] 19:40, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Can't see existing references

I looked the feedback page and I can't find if someone mentioned that. I don't know if it was mentioned before and it was archived but I think it's new. When I try to add a reference that already exists I can't see the list of them. I mean, when I was clicking to "choose an existing reference" in the past, I could read the whole references content. Now when I do that, I can only see the numbers of the references and not their content. To find which reference I need, I have to get out of the window, find it on the main text and see its number so I can choose it. I don't know if it has to do anything with it but, I feel like after the last VE update few days ago (last Thursday), some things got messed up TeamGale 23:03, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Quick! Hide in the middle of the text!

The handling of hidden elements (some templates like italictitle, persondata, ...; and of course categories) in VE really messes up the wikitext layout of pages. See e.g. here, where a whole lot of text is added after the persondata and categories, but before the stub tag. While this happens in wikitext editing as well, in VE it is much easier and can be done by editors not wanting to do this but getting this result anyway. Luckily, the editor noticed this and corrected it in the wikitext editor[6], which again makes one wonder what the added value of VE is. Fram (talk) 08:56, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Stuck in a pop-up

I went to make a simple edit (addition of one word before a blue link) in Osteon, using VE (Firefox/ME7). I wanted to check if the blue-link article (I believe it is 'cortical bone') also needed the edit. After I moused over the blue-link and got a pop-up, I could not do any-thing after that. I couldn't close the pop-up; I couldn't type in the article text; I couldn't save; I couldn't exit. The only way out was to close with-out saving. Kdammers (talk) 06:54, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Page notice too small

Opening Cat in VE (FF25, W7) opens the edit notice. Due to the very small box, I can not see the whole edit notice though, and it is apparently impossible to scroll down in it or to it. Furthermore, the functionality it had in wikitext editing (click "show" to display the long text) doesn't work in VE, it is automatically shown and no show-hide button is available. The two big red lines of text also partially overlap, again due to the small window of the page notice (WMF devs seems to like small windows, see also Flow...). Fram (talk) 08:41, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Pages that go wrong in VE

List of top 100 Major League Baseball strikeout pitchers (table, and reference) and all similar pages like List of Major League Baseball players with 2,500 games played or List of top 300 Major League Baseball home run hitters Fram (talk) 10:15, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
Arc de Triomphe: the "Arc de Triopmhe through history" section, and some sections below. Note, apart from the bungled layout, how in the galleries (through template gallery, not the gallery function), the captions are displayed twice in VE. Fram (talk) 12:58, 19 November 2013 (UTC) Note that Template:Gallery is used on nearly 10,000 pages, which all have the same problems (see e.g. Dessert)
List of Luther episodes, 24 (season 1), The Young Ones (TV series); apparently every article that uses Template:Episode list, or another 5000 pages with a template that isn't supported properly in VE. Fram (talk) 13:35, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
JDS Kongō (DDG-173), JDS Myōkō (DDG-175), HMS Victory, RMS Titanic, Bungsberg (ship), German submarine U-571, ... Yep, every article that uses Template:Infobox ship begin (or one of the subsequent infobox ship templates), which is only transcluded a measly 27,000 times. Perhaps I should have started a section "pages that don't go wrong in VE", to avoid TLDR problems. Fram (talk) 14:20, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
Noticing that ships go wrong made me check planes. Good news! The infobox (Template:Infobox aircraft begin and following) isn't shown incorrectly on these pages. Hurrah! The bad news is that the infobox isn't shown at all on Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit, Curtiss P-40 Warhawk, or any of the other 10,000 pages with this infobox. Fram (talk) 14:26, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

These are the reported bugs for the less than a calendar month on the flagship WMF development project.
This is with a hand picked, built from scratch, largest engineering group in the history of the WMF.
This is after more then two years of continuous development.

Which makes this next item all the more amusing and frightening.

December office hours for VE

If you missed Maggie Dennis' announcement on wikimedia-l, please see my message here. See you there, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:29, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Just to expand: The next set of office hours for VisualEditor:

Monday, December 2, 1900 UTC
Tuesday, December 3, 0100 UTC.

(No harm reproducing date/time in multiple venues - much better than forcing the clicking of a link.) Risker (talk) 15:50, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Enjoy those office hours, round boy.

[Zoloft]

Using the Jimbo's talk page to celebrate good news - Good Idea!



Using the Jimbo's home page to display the latest VE pratfall - Bad Idea!

A new form parsing library for language characters in Parsoid caused the corruption of pages containing diacritics for about an hour two weeks ago. Relatively few pages at the English Wikipedia were affected, but this created immediate problems at some other Wikipedias, sometimes affecting several dozen pages. The development teams for Parsoid and VisualEditor apologize for the serious disruption and thank the people who reported this emergency at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback and on the public IRC channel, #mediawiki-visualeditor.

[Vigilant]

Support for modern browsers!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... With_IE_11

With IE 11

Just installed IE11 and decided to check out Visual Editor (according to Wikipedia:VisualEditor, "Internet Explorer 11 users are currently able to use VE", though the message when you actually try to use it "You are using a browser which is not officially supported by VisualEditor" gives a slightly different impression).

Most pages do not load at all, at least within my patience span. The "progress bar" keeps churning around but nothing happens. I managed to get the edit screen up for a three-line article, but when I typed a character and then hit backspace the whole paragraph disappeared and was irretrievable with "Undo". The same happened with "Delete": the whole paragraph is irretrievably deleted. Then I put the cursor on the end of a line and hit "Enter" to create a new paragraph but nothing happened.

Then I highlighted some text and clicked the "bold" button and again the paragraph disappeared. Same with "italic". Sometimes, instead of the paragraph disappearing, nothing happened.

So, basically, the first most trivially simple editing tasks that I tried all failed spectacularly. I assume that either the message "Internet Explorer 11 users are currently able to use VE" has been put up in error, or there is some local configuration issue or other local problem with my setup. 86.129.17.245 (talk) 23:51, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Too funny for words...
These WMF devs/clowns are pure comedy gold.

[Vigilant]

Oh good, office hours logs!!!
Early Christmas for Vigilant!!

I'm going to edit for clarity.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_offi ... 2013-12-02

[2013-12-02 14:11:12] <Maggie_Dennis> Question from Dragonfly6-7, James_F: "will VE resume being the default. Yes no."
[2013-12-02 14:12:11] <James_F> So, "will VisualEditor become the default editor on enwiki?" Yes. "When?" Not planned.
[2013-12-02 14:12:35] <Dragonfly6-7> Thank you. Will this be implemented before VE is made to not suck, or after?
[2013-12-02 14:12:36] <James_F> Certainly, not today. :-)

Uh huh. Hell freezing over?

[2013-12-02 14:14:37] <James_F> Finnegan: Looks like enwiki is bumping along at 10-15 VE edits an hour.

*snicker*
How many dollars per edit per hour is that, James?

Want mobile editing support? Go fuck yourselves!

[2013-12-02 14:46:27] <Elitre> just a few things, then.
[2013-12-02 14:46:51] <Elitre> The first, is a confirmation that VE won't support other skins but Vector and MonoBook.
[2013-12-02 14:47:52] <geniice> so no mobile editing
[2013-12-02 14:48:10] <Elitre> The second, if you could, in just a few words, explain our French friends why snowmen appear in VE articles
[2013-12-02 14:48:40] <Elitre> (I think I understood why but you're better than me at explaining that!)
[2013-12-02 14:48:41] <James_F> VisualEditor currently doesn't work in desktop skins on the Wikimedia servers other than Vector and Monobook; it's possible for a volunteer to add support for other skins, but we won't be doing it from the Foundation, and won't support it if they get it working when things change later.

AHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHA
There's another dead justification for VE.
Keep going James, you can kill them all by 12/31/13!!

No wait! We'll get to it!!

2013-12-02 14:53:27] <James_F> geniice: Mobile editing should be coming soon-ish as an alpha for tablets.
[2013-12-02 14:53:36] <James_F> Finnegan: It would be useful, yes.
[2013-12-02 14:53:59] <geniice> James_F given the record so fay don't you think it would be safer to call it pre-alpha?
[2013-12-02 14:54:22] <James_F> geniice: … no? You do know about Mobile's alpha and beta channels, right? :-)
[2013-12-02 14:54:46] <James_F> geniice: This is a judgement for the Mobile product team to make, however - we're here to support them, not tell them how to do it.
[2013-12-02 14:55:08] <James_F> geniice: For phones will take more time, as we need to jiggle a few of the dialogs to work in smaller screens.

Jaded wikipedia editors think otherwise.

And that's the end of a mostly content free, why-should-I-give-a-fuck-it's-broken-anyways office hours.


Round 2 of the stupid
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_offi ... 2013-12-03

[01:05:08] <AnnaKoval> James_F, lacking specific questions, why don't you talk more about the switch flipping today?
[01:06:00] <James_F> Err.
[01:06:03] <James_F> Well, not much to say.
[01:06:13] <James_F> For those wikis involved, of course it's a big change.
[01:06:31] <James_F> The largest of them (by far) was Portuguese, but there were 101 others.

So, Portuguese wikipedia and 14 other total editors...

[01:12:47] <James_F> So, status-wise.
[01:12:53] <AnnaKoval> Really? No questions?
[01:13:03] <James_F> Right now VisualEditor is in the middle of a period of fixing bugs and improving performance.

Shouldn't that have happened during the ALPHA!??!! and not years down the road?!

01:14:54] <werdna> I'd much rather type [[User:Werdna|that asshole]] than click through the link dialogs.
[01:15:12] <werdna> but maybe that's a power user thing that you're not targetting, I dunno.
[01:15:47] <James_F> werdna: So we've discussed that at length, and we've essentially decided that a mark-up based system (even one which magically converts it to HTML) is MediaWiki's job, and is not the right fit for a rich editor.

Regardless of how many times the customer base demands it...Morons.

[01:16:47] <werdna> for me, in Flow, I actually switched off VE because there was too much mousework involved in doing basic stuff that you have to do in every post.

Another satisfied customer.

[01:17:02] <James_F> werdna: No mouse is needed…
[01:17:05] <legoktm> werdna: there are keyboard shortcuts iirc...
[01:17:10] <werdna> well, I haven't figured out the keyboard shortcuts yet
[01:17:25] <werdna> you could do smart hints like I had in LQT (yes, I am using LQT as a *positive* example )
[01:17:27] <James_F> werdna: Hover over the buttons. The shortcuts display themselves in the tooltips. :-P

Do it our new fangled way, you fools!

[01:24:33] <AnnaKoval> James_F, werdna asked: what is your game plan wrt enwp?
[01:24:51] <James_F> Yeah.
[01:24:55] <James_F> So, enwiki.
[01:25:09] <James_F> We don't have a particular "game plan" for the English Wikipedia.
[01:25:33] <James_F> Right now we're busy fixing and improving VisualEditor, and rolling it out to additional wikis.
[01:26:08] <James_F> Obviously at some point soon we should start discussing the grounds for re-enabling it by default on the English Wikipedia, as that's an important wiki to us, but it's far from our only concern.
[01:26:27] <James_F> There's also German and Dutch Wikipedias, of course. Let's not focus only on English.

Three major wikis told you to go shove it... Nice.

[01:27:09] <Risker> James_F,. before you even consider enabling by default in any of these wikis, you need to have it good enough that it can be equally prominent as wikitext editor
[01:27:15] <Risker> and it's not close yet.

Ruh roh, bitch slap incoming from an insider!

The tears of a clown.

[01:27:27] <James_F> Risker: That's, of course, a subjective judgement, however.
[01:28:10] <James_F> Risker: There's no magic device that will go "ping" when VisualEditor is "good enough".

*sob*

Getting toasty

[01:28:12] <Risker> well, until tables and references are as easy on VE as they are on Vector
[01:28:17] <Risker> you're not there yet
[01:28:25] <James_F> Risker: On Vector?
[01:28:35] <Eloquence> Risker, work on citations is underway -- and very high priority
[01:28:40] <Risker> Vector using wikitext.....the references are tons easier to do
[01:29:04] <James_F> Risker: You mean the toolbar gadget that enwiki wrote and didn't share with other wikis? :-) Yeah, as you know well we've been working on that for a while.
[01:29:28] <Eloquence> It's a cool gadget, shared or not.
[01:29:30] <Risker> you mean the toolbar gadget that nobody else bothered to borrow?
[01:29:38] <Eloquence> And sets a high bar of usability to follow.
[01:29:45] <Eloquence> We're nowhere close yet, and it's important to acknowledge that.
[01:30:00] <James_F> There is a lot left to do, indeed.
[01:30:44] <AnnaKoval> Just wanted to post a link to the log to today's earlier office hours
[01:30:46] <AnnaKoval> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_off ... 2013-12-02
[01:30:58] <Risker> I am still extremely confused about how the team is defining its target user group.
[01:31:22] <James_F> Risker: The target user group is everyone, still. Why?
[01:31:52] <Risker> well, that contradicts above, where people who want lots of shortcuts and technical tweaks aren't the target
[01:32:02] <James_F> I didn't say they weren't the target.
[01:32:18] * James_F is lost.
[01:32:31] <Risker> "everyone" is not a target group.
[01:32:48] <James_F> And yet it's the exact same target group that the wikitext editor targets.
[01:32:52] <Risker> what editor group was VE desiged to accommodate at first blush
[01:33:02] <Risker> *designed
[01:33:04] <James_F> I'm not sure meaningless product groups are a worthwhile focus.

BAAAAAAAH. BAAAAAAH. BAAAAAAAAH. I CAN'T HEAR YOU!! BAAAAAAH.

[01:35:01] <Risker> James_F, I'm really sorry that I'm having a hard time making myself understood here.
[01:35:21] <AnnaKoval> And I'm sorry I interrupted you, Risker.
[01:35:36] <Eloquence> Risker, you can contrast VE with something like Google Docs -- Google Docs doesn't target "new users" or "experienced authors"; its limitations are primarily technical in nature (documents of certain lengths, certain features missing) which somewhat constrain the use cases to which it can be put.
[01:35:53] <Risker> well, that's why I don't use google docs. They're crap.
[01:36:05] <Eloquence> In authoring Wikipedia content, there's a very long tail of features that we ultimately must support, and in prioritizing, we obviously ought to focus on the most widely used and most important ones.
[01:36:08] <Eloquence> heh, Risker. I disagree :-)
[01:36:17] <Risker> everytime someone from the WMF sends me one, I give them a hard time
[01:36:23] <Eloquence> I think Google Docs is an awesome product, if proprietary. But that's a matter of opinion.
[01:36:29] <James_F> Indeed.
[01:36:30] <Risker> they're the only people who use it
[01:36:36] <Eloquence> lol, that's ridiculous

And then Risker mysteriously gets disconnected...

All in all, very few questions from very few people.
No positive comments from non WMF employees .
Active hostility from most quarters.
Willful ignorance from the WMF devs.

[Zoloft]

[01:28:10] <James_F> Risker: There's no magic device that will go "ping" when VisualEditor is "good enough".

There is, Mr. Forrester, and you're reading it right now. It won't go 'ping' for a long while, yet... and perhaps ... never.

[Randy from Boise]

[01:28:10] <James_F> Risker: There's no magic device that will go "ping" when VisualEditor is "good enough".

There is, Mr. Forrester, and you're reading it right now. It won't go 'ping' for a long while, yet... and perhaps ... never.

I'm sure WMF is already hard at work on the machine that goes "ping"....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arCITMfxvEc


RfB

[Vigilant]

[01:28:10] <James_F> Risker: There's no magic device that will go "ping" when VisualEditor is "good enough".

There is, Mr. Forrester, and you're reading it right now. It won't go 'ping' for a long while, yet... and perhaps ... never.

I'm sure WMF is already hard at work on the machine that goes "ping"....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arCITMfxvEc


RfB

20 man years and $4MUSD later and they'd have a fart soundboard that can't make a fart noise.

[Thracia]

[01:17:02] <James_F> werdna: No mouse is needed…
[01:17:05] <legoktm> werdna: there are keyboard shortcuts iirc...
[01:17:10] <werdna> well, I haven't figured out the keyboard shortcuts yet
[01:17:25] <werdna> you could do smart hints like I had in LQT (yes, I am using LQT as a *positive* example )
[01:17:27] <James_F> werdna: Hover over the buttons. The shortcuts display themselves in the tooltips. :-P

Do it our new fangled way, you fools!

Just hover over the buttons with that mouse you don't need...

[EricBarbour]

[01:17:02] <James_F> werdna: No mouse is needed…
[01:17:05] <legoktm> werdna: there are keyboard shortcuts iirc...
[01:17:10] <werdna> well, I haven't figured out the keyboard shortcuts yet
[01:17:25] <werdna> you could do smart hints like I had in LQT (yes, I am using LQT as a *positive* example )
[01:17:27] <James_F> werdna: Hover over the buttons. The shortcuts display themselves in the tooltips. :-P

Do it our new fangled way, you fools!

Just hover over the buttons with that mouse you don't need...

And add these sounds to it!

[Poetlister]

Just hover over the buttons with that mouse you don't need...

It's very easy to hover your cursor without a mouse. I just did so.

[Vigilant]

Just hover over the buttons with that mouse you don't need...

It's very easy to hover your cursor without a mouse. I just did so.

Totally got us using your TRACKBALL!!! TOTALLY NOT A MOUSE!!
Or was it your mouse clit or your trackpad, etc, etc.
Dude. We never saw it coming.

Don't be a moron.
Ferreteer is trying to say you can do everything with the keyboard. That's patently not true and he contradicts himself in mid thought.

He's like Brandon Harris in that he's a pretty crappy engineer who should never be allowed to speak to the customer again.

[Vigilant]

Nice. non-deterministic behavior on the interface.
Nothing inspires confidence ina product like apparently random behavior.

Strange things in the "add parameter" box

When I edit Keith Murray (rapper) in VE, open the infobox, and look at the parameters on the right side, I notice strange boxes to the right of the parameter names, sometimes light gray, sometimes dark gray, without any possibility to select them, without any explanation, and without any apparent logic. Sometime sthe dark gray box is the same as the parameter name (Landscape), sometimes it is something different (Image caption), and sometimes it is missing completely (native name). Sometimes there are two of them (Website).

When I start typing parameter names, I get strange results (e.g. typing "Website" gives a different result from selecting Website, even though they look the same in the parameters list) I presume the boxes indicate acceptable parameter names, but this is not clear at all, and I am still struggling to see any difference between what's in the white and gray boxes. Fram (talk) 10:33, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
Unexpected changes

VE sometimes changes things unrelated to your actual edit. Perhaps there is a good reason for this, I don't know, but it is rather surprising and not always beneficial.

I noticed the addition of "nowikis" here? The initial problem is not VE related, in an earlier edit someone removed the first curly bracket from the Persondata template. But when testing this, I noticed that VEacts strange here: if you start at the same version as the linked edit above (i.e. here), then without making any changes, you see that "review changes" displays again the | instead of the nowikis. Now, if you change anything in the article (e.g. adding a comma after "2010"), and you again use "review changes", you'll note that the | in the persondata template are no longer shown. This means that whatever you change in the article, the "|" gets removed (not just included in nowikis, but completely removed). This seems to be unwanted behaviour. Fram (talk) 11:11, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Morons.

[SB_Johnny]

The funny thing is that Fram, who was so annoyed at being used as a guinea pig, seems to spend most of his wiki-time these days being a guinea pig. Perhaps this was Moeller's plan all along.

[Mason]

The funny thing is that Fram, who was so annoyed at being used as a guinea pig, seems to spend most of his wiki-time these days being a guinea pig. Perhaps this was Moeller's plan all along.

It's actually kinda refreshing seeing him lock onto the "professionals" as a target for his one-man QA department rather than hapless bot-writing clods like Rich Farmbrough or Kumioko. The guy is thorough, you've got to give him that. If I ever needed a QA guy, I'd hire him.

Hmm... maybe he's trying to get the WMF to hire him as a QA engineer? Won't work, though; they've made it clear they have no use for people who tell them uncomfortable truths.