Talk:WMDE Technical Wishes/Removing a template from a page using the VisualEditor

Alternative definition

Could something be solved, in addition, in regards to the fact that it is sometimes too easy to remove large templates without any confirmation? This is a frequent problem in Russian Wikipedia, for example, where the new users would delete the filled infobox template, for example, and not notice that they’ve done this because the shortcuts for template deletion are extremely common in VE. stjn^[ru] 19:36, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, stjn! That is interesting. Can you tell me which shortcut this concerns? -- Best, Johanna Strodt (WMDE) (talk) 07:44, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

My uneducated guess would be that the newcomers editing the lead section press Backspace, since infoboxes are placed before the article text, and do not notice that a large template was just removed by them, and then (usually) get reverted. It’s a common problem for any non-inline template (meaning templates that use block-level HTML elements, not "format": "block" in TD), with editors also inadvertently deleting navboxes etc., but I’m not sure how to formalise the generic solution for it other than ‘stop deletion of big templates without a confirmation’.

Some edits that might illustrate that: 1, 2, 3. stjn^[ru] 16:00, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks again, stjn. Right now this is not something we plan to implement, but I will take this question to discuss with the rest of the team. -- Best, Johanna Strodt (WMDE) (talk) 07:49, 16 April 2021 (UTC)