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VisualEditor: No easy way to add content before a template at the start of a line
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Description

PamD at the English Wikipedia reports that there is no easy way to add new content between a reflist and a template that follows it before you save the page.

This is a problem if your workflow is to add the stub template before adding the external links, which is entirely reasonable.

Steps to reproduce (option 1):

  1. create page with references and a reflist.
  2. add a template (e.g. a stub template) after the reflist
  3. add content between the references list and the template (e.g. an external links section).

Steps to reproduce (option 2):

  1. Go to a page with no content between a reflist block and a template (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tyson_R._Roberts&oldid=565739822&veaction=edit )
  2. Delete all content after the reflist:
  3. Add a template (e.g. a stub template)
  4. Add content between the references list and the template (e.g. an external links section).

There is a workaround: select the reflist, press the right cursor key once, press enter. This gets you a blank line with which to work from.

Desired behaviour:
There should be somewhere to click between the reflist and the stub template, just as there is after the page has been saved and reopened in VE.


Version: unspecified
Severity: normal
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52620

Details

Reference
bz52032

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.Nov 22 2014, 1:47 AM
bzimport set Reference to bz52032.

Whatamidoing comments that the issue is that there is no way easy to select a line starting with a template:

So someone added a book to a ==Further reading== section. Book #1 used a citation template. Book #2 did not. Neither had bullet list formatting.

Selecting them was hard. I ended up selecting the header, the template, and the plain-text citation. Then I clicked the 'list' button. Then I went back and repaired the formatting for the section heading. This isn't necessary, but it was easier than trying to figure out the exact stop to place the cursor.

[...]

[The] problem is that it's hard to select just the line that contains the template. You have to find the magic spot in the middle of "==Heading==<nowiki>{{template}}</nowiki>" to select the template without picking up the entire section heading. I managed it later in testing, but only if I'm selecting text with arrow keys. With the trackpad, it's still beyond me.

This is caused by bug 49784; if we knew that the template you'd just added was a block, we would insert a slug above the template (which exists precisely for this reason). Merging.

  • This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 49784 ***