2016-03-13 20:49 GMT+02:00 John Erling Blad jeblad@gmail.com:

I'm not the most active bug reporter, but when I report a bug it is usually because something is broken in one of the non-english languages, and usually Norwegian. A few of the devs seems to believe that the only language that mater is English, and that their understanding of "English" is "The only One".

There are a lot of languages, and solutions that work in English more often than not does not work in other languages. Please start to handle incoming bug reports with respect, there are people out there that tries to track down bugs for you.

Thank you!

Agree, a million times. Violating this directly contradicts Wikimedia's Guiding Principles.

Then a small complaint about VisualEditor/Parsoid.

A lot of things are much simpler in VisualEditor, but a lot of stuff is harder to do or simply does not work. It doesn't matter if things look shiny if people use a lot more time doing the same task. One area is editing from the keyboard, how can we do all the same things at least equally fast - not just that we can do them?

As a general comment about this, it makes sense to me that somebody would run a rigorous numerical comparison of how much time does it take to do tasks in Visual Editor and in the source editor, and to do it with several types of editors: experienced with wiki syntax, inexperienced with wiki syntax, experienced with both wiki syntax and VE, experienced with wiki syntax but explicitly inexperienced with VE, etc. The WMF has a design research that can do such things; AFAIK it's already busy with a lot of things, but this is a thing that can be planned for some time. (And somebody else can do it, too.)

What feels slow may turn out to be fast when the time is actually measured (though the _feeling_ of slowness may still have to be addressed by better UX design).

We insert a lot of top-notices (article marks), and edit them, but how can we do it fast? Yes we can add top-notices as templates, but they are hardly fast to add that way.

Ideally, this should some day be real metadata and not templates. Using templates for this is a hack that keeps living long after it should have died.

And it should be easy and fast to edit this metadata, no matter if the editor prefers VE or wiki syntax.

This is a far-fetched ideal, but that's a how it should be.

We link and delink articles, but how can we do it fast? (And yes, the -

mumbles "shitty" - interface for linking articles is the reason why I ended up writing this email)

While I agree that it's not perfect, there are some things that it provides that wiki syntax does not. For example, title auto-completion: Without VE, the editor has to type the whole target article title, or to open the target article and copy the title. It's part of the linking process, and with VE this part becomes faster.

-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

On 2016-03-13 19:49, John Erling Blad wrote:

A lot of things are much simpler in VisualEditor, but a lot of stuff is harder to do or simply does not work. It doesn't matter if things look shiny if people use a lot more time doing the same task. One area is editing from the keyboard, how can we do all the same things at least equally fast - not just that we can do them?

At least speaking for the OOjs UI library (on top of which VisualEditor's interface is built), I can assure you that a lot of effort goes into making all actions available from keyboard only, and making our interfaces at least no worse than the "native" ones. I think the VisualEditor team shares these principles.

There are some things which take more key presses (you just have fewer "degrees of freedom" when instead of arbitrarily many buttons, you have a finite set of keyboard keys, especially after you exclude keys ordinarily used for typing text), and things which are slightly different than native ones (for example, dropdown lists are different in every OS and every browser, and we try not to do anything browser-specific, so our dropdowns are probably different yet). But we try our best.

We insert a lot of top-notices (article marks), and edit them, but how can we do it fast? Yes we can add top-notices as templates, but they are hardly fast to add that way.

This is supposed to be doable from the keyboard: 1. Type '{{' to open template insert dialog 2. Type the template name (the right field should be focused), confirm with Enter 3. Press Tab a few times until focus moves to the 'Insert' button, confirm with Enter

...but, something is definitely not right at the last step. I just tried and the focus moved through a few invisible buttons first; filed this as T129791 [1]. Another improvement would be to be able to confirm the dialog with Ctrl+Enter from any field, David actually implemented this recently [2] and it should reach Wikipedias next week.

[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T129791 [2] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/274984/

We link and delink articles, but how can we do it fast?

To remove a link from some text, select it and press Ctrl+\ (that's the backslash) or Ctrl+M. (This also removes any other formatting, like bold or italic.)

To add or edit a link, press Ctrl+K with the text selected. You can just confirm with Enter, or edit it and confirm them.

By the way, there's a list of all available keyboard shortcuts built into VisualEditor – it's under the '?' button on the toolbar, or under the Ctrl+? shortcut :)