Thanks. Can you please give some particular examples? בתאריך יום ה׳, 4 באוק׳ 2018, 17:41, מאת Bináris ‏<wikiposta(a)gmail.com>om>: sentence|date=October same _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

https://hu.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grafikus_matroid&diff=prev&a… illustrates another use: separating - and { in the unusual case where this string is wanted and you *don't* want language converter markup. ie `-<nowiki/>{foo}-` is different from `-{foo}-`. You don't usually notice this because languageconversion is disabled in many wikis, but it can cause problems if unbalanced syntax is used inside a template argument, like: `{{foo|-{bar}}`. Here you need to use `{{foo|-<nowiki/>{bar}}`, even if LanguageConverter is not enabled. Amir -- in german, shouldn't they be tweaking the "linktrail" setting on dewiki, instead of using `<nowiki/>`? What are cases where they *do* want the link to include the entire word? Can they be automatically distinguished? --scott On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 11:17 AM Bináris &lt;wikiposta(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: https://hu.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Speci%C3%A1lis:Szerkeszt%C5%91_k… the linking the decided -- (http://cscott.net) _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

I’m not an expert on dewiki, but I assume they still want word-ending links for simple stuff like [[Gesetz]]e (plural), [[Finger]]s (genitive). I would guess these cases are still more common than the long compound words where the <nowiki/> trick is used.

Hey! The syntax "[[Schnee]]<nowiki />reichtum" is quite common in the German community. There are not many other ways to achieve the same: <span /> or &shy; can be used instead.[1] The later is often the better alternative, but an auto-replacement is not possible. For example, "[[Bund]]<nowiki />estag" must become "[[Bund]]es&shy;tag". Not long ago <b/> was often used. This became a problem with the recent parser updates. All <b/> got replaced with <nowiki />, as far as I'm aware of. instead of using `<nowiki/>`? What are cases where they *do* want the link to include the entire word? The software feature exists because of English [[word ending]]s. The same exists in German ("viele [[Wiki]]s, viele [[Tisch]]e, viele [[Arbeit]]en"), but is overshadowed by the fact that German is a language with many composites. From my experience, the fact that all linktrails, no matter how long, become part of the link is almost always a problem. It enlarges the click region, which is good, but surprises the reader when he ends at an unexpected article. I guess it would actually be a net-gain when the feature gets turned off or tuned down in German wikis. For example, we could limit the length of the linktrail to 2 characters. Is somebody interested in creating usage statistics for these linktrails in the German Wikipedia main namespace? Best Thiemo [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verlinken#Verlinkung_von_Teilw%C3%B… _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

The syntax "[[Schnee]]<nowiki />reichtum" is quite common in the German community. There are not many other ways to achieve the same: <span /> or &shy; can be used instead.[1] The later is often the better alternative, but an auto-replacement is not possible. For example, "[[Bund]]<nowiki />estag" must become "[[Bund]]es&shy;tag".

Or how about {{}} for "this is a syntactic element, but it does nothing"?

I'm personally a fan of <!>. I came across it years ago--it's a null comment. Can't find the reference at the moment though. -Chad On Thu, Oct 4, 2018, 2:25 PM Daniel Kinzler &lt;dkinzler(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:

Am 04.10.2018 um 18:58 schrieb Thiemo Kreuz: We could introduce new syntax for this, such as &nope; or even &nowiki;. Or how about {{}} for "this is a syntactic element, but it does nothing"? But if that is mixed in with template expansion, it won't work if it expands to nothing, since template expansion happens before link parsing, right? For better or worse... -- Daniel Kinzler Principal Software Engineer, MediaWiki Platform Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Alas, no longer valid in XML or HTML5. (Although HTML5 will still parse it as an empty comment, but with a "incorrectly-opened-comment" error. -- Brian On Sat, Oct 6, 2018 at 6:57 AM Chad &lt;innocentkiller(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: reference &nowiki;. nothing"? to For wrote: &nowiki;. nothing"? to For _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

From an article messed up by VE (yes it does mess up articles sometimes!)

Hey! The syntax "[[Schnee]]<nowiki />reichtum" is quite common in the German community. There are not many other ways to achieve the same: <span /> or &shy; can be used instead.[1] The later is often the better alternative, but an auto-replacement is not possible. For example, "[[Bund]]<nowiki />estag" must become "[[Bund]]es&shy;tag". Not long ago <b/> was often used. This became a problem with the recent parser updates. All <b/> got replaced with <nowiki />, as far as I'm aware of. instead of using `<nowiki/>`? What are cases where they *do* want the link to include the entire word? The software feature exists because of English [[word ending]]s. The same exists in German ("viele [[Wiki]]s, viele [[Tisch]]e, viele [[Arbeit]]en"), but is overshadowed by the fact that German is a language with many composites. From my experience, the fact that all linktrails, no matter how long, become part of the link is almost always a problem. It enlarges the click region, which is good, but surprises the reader when he ends at an unexpected article. I guess it would actually be a net-gain when the feature gets turned off or tuned down in German wikis. For example, we could limit the length of the linktrail to 2 characters. Is somebody interested in creating usage statistics for these linktrails in the German Wikipedia main namespace? Best Thiemo [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verlinken#Verlinkung_von_Teilw%C3%B… _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Interesting, today this was topic in the German main forum: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fragen_zur_Wikipedia#Anwendung_von_… Today there are also more than one user indefinite blocked, which only removed <nowiki/> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Entgr%C3%A4ten40 Am Fr., 5. Okt. 2018 um 00:29 Uhr schrieb John Erling Blad < jeblad(a)gmail.com almost cases I in https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verlinken#Verlinkung_von_Teilw%C3%B… _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

On Thu, 4 Oct 2018 at 23:29, John Erling Blad &lt;jeblad(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > Usually it comes from user errors while using VE. This kind of errors

> quite common, and I asked (several years ago) whether it could be fixed

I'd really appreciate it if you could give me more information on this.

Here's how the linking feature works right now for adding links to words which presently have no links: - If you put your cursor inside a word without highlighting anything, and add a link, the link is added to the entire word. - If you highlight some text, and add a link, the link is added to the highlighted text.

How would you propose this feature be changed?

Links using the pipe-form should not have the link target inflected. This is important, as this is the natural escape route if inflection gives wrong target for whatever reason.

‫בתאריך יום ו׳, 5 באוק׳ 2018 ב-16:59 מאת ‪Dan Garry‬‏ <‪ 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. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

MZMcBrider wrote: I'm not sure I understand. I would expect a link trail with "[[Examples|Example]]s" since there is a link trail with "[[Example]]s". I'm not sure why anyone would associate link trail behavior with the presence or lack of a pipe character. The defining characteristic of link trails is text being adjacent to "]]", as far as I know.

Is the particular case you mention common? It seems like it would be much more common for a user to simply write "[[Examples]]" currently to achieve the same output.

I'm not sure how much impact it would have on existing link specifications to make the change, but I think MGChecker has a good solution. The "[[target|linktext]]extra" format allows you to specify exactly what part of the text should have a link, while "[[target]]extra" would be understood as a shortcut to "[[target|targetextra]]". This solves the linktrails problem without introducing any extra tags or using nowiki in weird ways.

Are their any other linktrails setting other than off and on? We'd want to make sure any changes didn't do weird things to Chinese or other spaceless languages.

On Thu, 4 Oct 2018 at 23:29, John Erling Blad &lt;jeblad(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: in I'd really appreciate it if you could give me more information on this. Could you link to the task for this request? There is T128060 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T128060> from early 2016 ("VisualEditor makes it easy to create partially linked words, when the user expects a fully linked one") but I don't see you on there, and I want to make sure I understand your request. Here's how the linking feature works right now for adding links to words which presently have no links: - If you put your cursor inside a word without highlighting anything, and add a link, the link is added to the entire word. - If you highlight some text, and add a link, the link is added to the highlighted text. How would you propose this feature be changed? Thanks, Dan -- Dan Garry Lead Product Manager, Editing Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l