Jump to content

Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Editing/VE makes partially linked words and adds unnecessary tags to the wikitext

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

VE makes partially linked words and adds unnecessary tags to the wikitext

  • Problem: By creating or changing links in VE (=Visual Editor), it often results unlinked word parts. It is language-dependent, but in some languages using unlinked suffix is never correct. Beside of the incorrect appearance, for example [[word]]s becomes [[word]]<nowiki/>s in the wikicode, and the unnecessary <nowiki/> tag just litter the wikitext and makes it unreadable in more complex situations.
  • Who would benefit: both readers and editors
  • Proposed solution: avoid adding <nowiki /> after links (on wikis, where this is required) (We could use a bot which frequently delete all the <nowiki/> syntax from the wikicode, but that increases the edit number (server traffic) and the length of the page histories. Why don't we just solve the problem rather than always making a mistake and then correct it in a second edit.)
  • More comments: this looks an easy to solve problem to me, but there is no real progress since 2015/16. If some language communities asks for having this behavior default, offer an option to be able to choose per wiki base. On the Hungarian Wikipedia VE has a bad reputation because of this kind of (long-time not solved) bugs and many editors think that we should not use VE at all until it generates clear mistake into the wikitext.
  • Phabricator tickets: T128060
  • Proposer: Samat (talk) 12:49, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

I see a use case of this feature, specially in languages which combines words together. For example maybe somebody would link wishlist so, that only the wish or list is linked, because there will never be an article about wishlist. Wishlist is easier, but for wishlist VE should still offer a possible way to create I believe. Samat (talk) 12:56, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Voting