Wikipedia talk:VisualEditor

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Traylblazor

Recording artist and songwriter Traylblazor Music (talk) 06:39, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Courtesy link: Draft:Traylblazor

Please review the following: Wikipedia:Autobiography, Wikipedia:Notability (music), Wikipedia:Plain and simple conflict of interest guide. Folly Mox (talk) 08:53, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

consistently creates referencing errors

I notice that edits credited to Visual Editor often cause referencing errors. There's an observable pattern: some reference named "fooey" ends up being moved, or edits happen nearby, and it gets renamed to "fooey2". Of course, "fooey2" is not defined. Why does this happen? It's pretty frequent. -- mikeblas (talk) 01:35, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Can you please link to a couple of diffs to show these edits happening? It would be even better if you could reproduce it to confirm that people are not manually messing up these refs and just happen to be using VE. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:44, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, I'm not a Visual Editor user, so I'm not able to provide steps to reproduce the issue. My ~~completely blind guess~~ sense is that the problem happens when text (with reference tags) is moved within the article. Maybe moved in one operation, paybe cut and pasted -- dunno. Maybe asking these users what they did would be a way to get the answer you want.

Here are five observations. Some of them contain more than one reference anchor renamed in the pattern that I've identified.

This last one is a bit different because it spans a add-remove-restore editing pattern:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jack_Schlossberg&diff=1246531722&oldid=1246515638

Hope that helps. -- mikeblas (talk) 15:06, 20 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This looks like phab:T125034, which @ESanders (WMF) declared (then) to be a symptom of phab:T134228. @Trizek (WMF), I don't know if there is bug report already open on this, but I'm sure that the Editing team would appreciate one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:51, 20 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, WhatamIdoing. This looks similar to the first bug, and I have been admonished not to reopen old bugs, so T375306 it is. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:10, 20 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Six years ago? Great memory! Thanks for looking into it. I'm hopeful for a fix, since this is a common source of undefined reference names. -- mikeblas (talk) 22:50, 20 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The human brain is pretty good at remembering irritating things. ;-) WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:53, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

A commenter on that phab ticket and I are unable to replicate this bug. Does anyone here know how to make it happen? – Jonesey95 (talk) 02:10, 23 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Everything I ever knew about it is in Phab. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:27, 23 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Frequently dumps reference definition after {{references}} tag

Here's another. It seems like Visual Edtior can be tricked into dumping a footnote after the {{reflist}} tag. It'll generate an undefined reference error, since the {{reflist}} invocation clears the references name table.

Again, not a Visual Editor user so I can't

One more, note that there's a pre-existing condition here:

[6]

Maybe this one can be fixed, too? -- mikeblas (talk) 16:25, 30 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Mikeblas, these are all new editors. They're probably clicking at the end of the ref list in the hope that the new ref will get added to the end of the list. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:56, 2 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Could be, but aren't new editors exactly the editors that Visual Editor is meant to help? -- mikeblas (talk) 09:08, 2 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Since they're adding refs at all, it probably is helping them. My main point, though, is that "the software put the ref exactly where I told it to" does not sound like a software bug. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:55, 2 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]