Instead of the normal editing possibilities, on talk pages we are restricted to either only use the wikitext editor, or to this Flow environment, with its massive restrictions on next to everything. Why is the VE not enabled anywhere on talk pages?
Topic on Talk:VisualEditor/Flow
Hi there. This question comes up a bunch, and has been answered at length a few times before, but I can't find any of those right now, sorry.
The short answer is that VE is a content editor, and is designed to make writing (long-form) content. In dozens of ways, we've optimised it around writing articles for Wikipedia, Wikivoyage and other wikis. The use cases of a semi-free-form-but-with-odd-rules discussion box are fundamentally incompatible. Providing VE for talk pages would mean making massive compromises both on being a good content editor and on being a good discussion editor. It's an anti-pattern, and it's not going to happen.
I know you have a personal animus with Flow, and that's unfortunate, but it's the option available if you think talk pages don't work well (with which I would agree).
It's just about an editor, the difference between a plain text editor and a wysiwyg editor. There shouldn't be any big difference between editing a text on either the front or the back side of any page. A talk page is as well nothing much different to any other content page, only the content is a bit different.
It's like the difference between old fashioned WordPerfect and the wysiwyg version of the same program. Some prefer the classic mode, some the ve, but the resulting page is just the same.
Why was this definitely not solved question closed? Your answer was just a straw man, not a real one. It's everything but closed.
Sorry, I didn't see a question in your response, just implicit accusations of bad faith and incompetence. :-) If you could re-write one that'd be great, otherwise there's nothing more to say.
Why isn't the VE running on talk pages?
VE is a text editor, and thus should be fully capable of editing on any page, at least simple talk pages.
VE is a text editor,
As I explained, this is not true.
To just quote the first sentence from the other side:
The VisualEditor project aims to create a reliable rich-text editor for MediaWiki.
So why do I have the impression, that either the other side is plain wrong or your "argument" is just a straw man?
The visual editor cannot (abuse HTML definition list formatting to) fake the indentation of paragraphs. Therefore, you are likely to find using it in a talk-page discussion to be frustrating at this time.
...yet. An editor that's capable of editing tables, using templates, setting references etc.pp. is incapable of abusing colons for indentation? Should I really believe this?
Why do I think of a nice idea to push the software pet project that's not as much liked by the community as by the WMFers?
I think you may have to wait until phab:T6521 is resolved.
BTW, there are a few wikis that have the visual editor enabled in the Project: namespace, and which also have some discussions in that namespace (e.g., https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat ), and we hear complaints about problems on those pages. I don't think that it would be a good idea to expand the use of the visual editor on such pages at this time.
You insist without any real merit, that a wikipage is not the same as a wikipage. In principle all wikipages behave in absolutely the same manner, they were edited with exactly the same editor up to some time ago, when you a) tried to get so-called structured discussions, first with Liquid Threads, something that failed, now with a bit different layout system Flow, something that as well is stuck in limbo. But if you discount these, the article page uses the same syntax as the talk page, the user page uses exactly the same syntax as the talk page, with one of two available editors the can be edited in exactly the same way as everything else in the wikiverse. With the other one, the VE, you claim that these exactly same pages are magically somehow different, and one of them can't be edited in a wysiwyg-way.
BTW: Using colons to indent, instead of some software hack created by those many devs paid by content creators and talk page users, is frustrating as well, but you choose to ignore this for quite some time and preferred to create shiny new bling instead of boring maintenance. That's at the core of this, not the proclaimed, but not existing, differences between those pages. And the phab is just a strawman as well, if you mange to get templates programmed somehow, the indentation problem should be non-existing. Unles you deliberately choose not to do something about it, to keep this strawman alive.
Hmmm. Does "support VisualEditor on talk pages" have an associated Phabricator Maniphest task?
I tend to agree with Sänger, though I'd perhaps phrase it this way: VisualEditor should work with all regular (non-Special) wiki pages. This includes user pages, talk pages, portal pages, pages in the MediaWiki namespace, etc. It's an extensible editor that we've already installed and committed to supporting. We've seen time and again that the arbitrary distinction put up between VisualEditor support by namespace is confusing and annoying to users.
I think there are talks about unifying the wikitext and VisualEditor editors. Eliminating or masking the difference between the two or more editors that we have may somewhat neatly resolve this issue.
To see the result of these "talks", go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures and enable the "new wikitext mode" beta feature.
NB that it's not really about "unifying the [old] wikitext and VisualEditor editors". This will not merge the code for EditPage.php or Extension:WikiEditor with Extension:VisualEditor. The only thing that's being unified is the user experience, i.e., the user gets VisualEditor's black-and-white toolbar and VisualEditor's built-in tools (such as pasting a URL to a Wikipedia page and getting an internal wikilink instead of an external link) everywhere. There will still not be any visual mode on the talk pages.
And there is still no believable reason given, why a wikipage is not a wikipage. It's just futile justification lyricism for not wanting to do anything against Flow.
Short update:
In the current Community Tech survey the VE is used in discussions, so the whole "argument" with the non-suitability was proven as a straw-man by the WMF on one of its own pages, yet they still insist that a wikipage is not a wikipage.
See this archived proposal as an example (and as another attempt to stifle any discussion about VE on talkpages for pure political reasons). Grüße vom Sänger ♫(Reden) 12:26, 3 December 2017 (UTC)
This seems like something that really should be reopened now that previous proposals for a complete talk page overhall have been left behind. Talk pages are wikitext, it seems silly to arbitrarily disable the visualeditor, when so many users use it successfully to edit pages. It's actually more difficult to edit talk pages than the articles themeselves now, because on in articlespace you have a pretty functional and usable WYSIWYG editor for any and all purposes, whereas on the talk pages you either have to use the "reply tool", which is a kind of crippled visualeditor that works well-enough-ish most of the time to post new comments (but you're screwed if you want to edit or fix a mistake/formatting once you've posted your reply), or edit the wikitext directly. The pages are literally wiki pages! It seems bizarre not to let users interact with them the same way as any other page on the wiki...
the link mr Sänger posted above is dead now, a bit of rooting around and I found it, here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2017/Archive#Release_VE_on_Talk_pages
All this drama about talk pages is all a bit before my time being a regular contributor to wikipedia so has somewhat gone past me, but looking at it in retrospect, copying and pasting from the structured discussion FAQ here, I think I have figured out the reason this was never done:
- Instead or in parallel of Structured Discussions, will VisualEditor be enabled on talk pages?
- No. This question comes up quite often.
- VisualEditor (VE) is designed to edit content, plain pages of text.
- Talk pages aren't encyclopedic content. Many of the tools and design patterns that make VE nice to use to edit content make it poor to use for discussions.
- To make it usable for discussions, we would have to remove or break many of those patterns in VE.
- Traditional talk page discussions often appear fairly well-structured through the use of section headers, indentation and the like. However, this kind of structure cannot be parsed by software to determine with certainty who has replied to whom.
- In Structured Discussions, each post is independent with a unique ID, linked to other posts and to a Topic (also with a unique ID), with a specific history, and all posts can be targeted precisely. It would be possible in the future to have conversations at multiple places, to move topics or replies, and to create sub-discussions with Structured Discussions. Classical talk pages, using VE or not, do not currently have that feature, and adding it might prove cumbersome.
- VisualEditor (VE) is designed to edit content, plain pages of text.
That is to say, it was deemed counter to the goal of implementing the real reform they wanted to implement, to move away from wikitext pages altogether (because wikitext pages cannot be "parsed" properly as discussion threads)
and, of course, that may all be true, but... this project was essentially abandoned in the end right? And they decided to stick with wikitext talk pages? So, not weighing in on whether that was a good or bad decision (I personally couldn't care less lol), with the decision to stick with essentially "normal wiki pages" as the format talk pages are written in having been decided, surely there's no longer any reason not to just enable the (already perfectly adequate) WYSIWYG editor on talk pages? It seems all of the animus behind not doing so has long since evaporated now, no? After all, there is no plan to replace the wikitext talk pages with a format that meets the requirements cited as the reason for not enabling visualeditor anymore...