• This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 47790 ***

This is NOT a duplicate of 47790

This bug is about whitespace in the SOURCE, that is not editable in the VE. Where 47790 deals about whitespace in VE that is not in the source.

If you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burr–Hamilton_duel you will see that the first line is slightly below the infobox. In VE mode, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burr–Hamilton_duel?veaction=edit they look to be at the same height. The linebreaks at the top of the source seem to have been 'compressed' and are ignored in VE, while they do have effect in render mode.

Permanent link to the relevant page revision:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Burr%E2%80%93Hamilton_duel&oldid=561095260

So, to understand this bug - this is about where is some (mistaken/wrong) wikitext with an extra new line in front of a block template that gets swallowed by Parsoid into the template that follows it (but can't be removed from there as Parsoid quietly hides that)?

(Note that the second extra whitespace is a normal <br> and so shown in VisualEditor as a "↵" and can be removed in-line.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Burr%E2%80%93Hamilton_duel&oldid=561095260&veaction=edit shows the whitespace, and it also seems to be possible to delete a line there by focusing it and pressing 'delete'. Newlines that don't produce a paragraph are also preserved in HTML, but are not editable in wikitext.

See the source of http://parsoid.wmflabs.org/en/Burr%E2%80%93Hamilton_duel?oldid=561095260, in which the first paragraph after the infobox starts with "<p><br>".

Closing as worksforme. Please open a bug against VE if you have trouble with focusing or deleting the <br>.