Page MenuHomePhabricator

VisualEditor: Add advanced user option to review diff post-VisualEditor edit and easily report an issue
Closed, DeclinedPublicFeature

Description

I want to be able to test and give feedback for VisualEditor, so I've opted in on the English Wikipedia.

VisualEditor has bugs, but identifying bugs caused in your own edits can be annoying.

When I make an edit using VisualEditor, I want to be able to verify the edit (double-check VisualEditor's behavior) by viewing a diff of the changes. (Unlike when I'm editing wikitext, where I'll only preview and not use "show changes" to view a diff.) Clicking "Review your edits" in VisualEditor's user interface is tedious and interrupts my workflow.

It might be nice to implement showing the diff post-save for advanced users who simply want to be able to report an issue with VisualEditor. Or perhaps we could restore the previous behavior where a diff was automatically shown. This is an advanced user option, so it could be JavaScript config or similar. It should not be a user preference or anything that's user-facing. This feature would hopefully make reporting issues easier: rather than needing to request a diff from VisualEditor or navigate to the page history to check a diff link there, you would simply be presented with a diff.

In addition, if we're implementing an advanced user auto-diff option, perhaps we can also add a "report an issue" link to more easily file a bug? (Or search for relevant bugs.)

Filing as a Sunday afternoon thought.


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz56221

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 22 2014, 2:40 AM
bzimport set Reference to bz56221.

(In reply to comment #0)

Or perhaps we
could restore the previous behavior where a diff was automatically shown.

I don't recall an core mediawiki option for post-save diffs; have I forgotten?
I would love an pref 'Show diff after page save' in core, which when combined with 'Do not show page content below diffs' would mean my browser doesn't automatically fetch a new version of the page, which could be quite large.

Or, do you mean a pre-launch VisualEditor behaviour where a diff was automatically shown? Was it pre-save or post-save?

Hey guys. The "report an issue" link has been there for a while: click on the question mark, then "Leave feedback". You can even choose if you want to file a bug here or add your request to the feedback page. HTH.

Triaging (but doing this as a gadget might make more sense, given this need is going to be short-term and our aversion to preference bloat).

Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Feb 4 2022, 11:13 AM
Aklapper removed a subscriber: TrevorParscal.
matmarex subscribed.

This is probably no longer needed now that most VisualEditor bugs messing up your edits have been fixed (and the few that haven't are known).