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VisualEditor: Visually discourage use of "legal" but unwanted structures in sub-editors (e.g. lists in references)
Open, MediumPublicFeature

Description

In VE, click the "Reference" toolbar icon. According to the toolbar icons in the "Content" section, it is possible to insert lists, headings and images within the text of a reference.

This is a nonsensical capability. The only required formatting here is bold, italic and wikilink, if that.


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52646

Details

Reference
bz49617

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Medium.Nov 22 2014, 1:52 AM
bzimport set Reference to bz49617.

(In reply to comment #0)

lists, headings and images

Sorry, the list functionality has been correctly removed from this view. It is only headings and images that need to be hidden.

(In reply to comment #1)

(In reply to comment #0)

lists, headings and images

Sorry, the list functionality has been correctly removed from this view. It
is only headings and images that need to be hidden.

Regrettably, wikitext does actually pretty much everything inside references except other references (though some, ahem, "enterprising" users have found a way around that intentional limit). Examples:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor:TestReferenceContents

Maybe we can discourage users from doing these things in some way, but we can't just not support this, as users have to be able to edit these back into a more rational use.

(The reason that these were removed are that you're not allowed lists in image captions; we're clearly going to have to split what things the sub-editors can allow by type. Created that as bug 49657.)

(In reply to comment #2)

Maybe we can discourage users from doing these things in some way, but we
can't
just not support this, as users have to be able to edit these back into a
more
rational use.

On enwiki there is never any good reason to have headings or images in references. In the 0.000001% of cases where it is actually wanted, it can just be done using the wikitext source editor, I think.

However, I can understand that other wikis might want this functionality in VE for some reason, so I suppose enwiki could hide the relevant functionality via CSS or something like that if you think it would be better.

(In reply to comment #3)

(In reply to comment #2)

Maybe we can discourage users from doing these things in some way, but we
can't
just not support this, as users have to be able to edit these back into a
more
rational use.

On enwiki there is never any good reason to have headings or images in
references. In the 0.000001% of cases where it is actually wanted, it can
just be done using the wikitext source editor, I think.

The objective of VE is for even power users to never need to enter the wikitext editor. Fixing broken usage would be an example of a use case that we'd want to support.

However, I can understand that other wikis might want this functionality in
VE for some reason, so I suppose enwiki could hide the relevant functionality
via CSS or something like that if you think it would be better.

I was thinking of having such tools hidden under an "advanced tools" collapsed block in the toolbar, but we should properly look at this rather than just commit to the way to do it in a Bugzilla thread. :-) Ideally we'd rather not have individual wikis trying to come up with local-only "solutions" to this.

Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Feb 4 2022, 12:24 PM
Aklapper removed a subscriber: rmoen.