Re: [Wikitech-l] non-obvious uses of <nowiki> in your language

‫בתאריך יום ו׳, 5 באוק׳ 2018 ב-16:59 מאת ‪Dan Garry‬‏ &lt;‪dgarry(a)wikimedia.org ‬‏>:‬ are in This is very frequent. I know that in the Hebrew Wikipedia it happens up to 20 times a day (I actually counted this for many months), and this is never intentional or desirable. Never, ever. 100% of cases. The same must be true for many other languages, but probably not for all. In wikis bigger than the Hebrew Wikipedia it probably happens much more often than 20 times a day. It is possibly the most frequent reason for automatic insertion of <nowiki> tags (although this may be different by language). How does it happen? Several ways: * People add a word ending to an existing link. English has very few word endings (-s, -ing, -ed, -able, and not much more), but many other languages have more. * People highlight only a part of a word when they add a link, even though they should have highlighted the whole word. * In particular, people highlight the part of the word without an ending. For example, "Dogs" is written, and people highlight "Dog". * People sometimes actually want to write two separate words and forget to write a space. (This may sound silly, but I saw this happening very often.) * People write a compound word and link a part of the word. Sometimes it's intentional, although as we can see in other emails in this thread not everybody agrees about the desirability of this. This works very differently in different languages. German has a lot of them, English has much less, Hebrew has almost zero. It's worth running proper user testing I know this, and I like how it works, but the fact is that there are many other users who don't know this. Simply searching wikitext for "]]<nowiki/>" will show how often does this happen. One possibility is to not add <nowiki/> after a link. I proposed it, but it was declined: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T141689 . The declining comment links to T128060, which you mentioned in your email, and it's still not resolved. Other than fully stopping to do it, I cannot think of many other possibilities. Maybe we could show a warning, although I suspect that many users will ignore it or find it unnecessarily intrusive. I'm not a real designer, and it's possible that a real designer can come with something better. Another thing we could consider is to link the whole word *by default*, and to add another function that separates a link from the trail. I'd further suggest the separation be done internally not by "<nowiki/>", but by some other syntax that looks more semantic, for example "{{#sep}}" (this should be a magic word and not a template!). My educated guess is that separating the word from the link is much less frequent than wanting to link the whole word. Part of my motivation for starting this thread was to understand how does this work in different languages.