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Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Known problems

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For the current list of limitations, see Wikipedia:VisualEditor#Limitations

Summary

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  • Not available in talk or discussion namespaces – On the English Wikipedia, VisualEditor is not enabled for any talk pages, on the Template or Wikipedia namespaces, and on several of the namespaces that are rarely edited. The "Edit" button for VisualEditor is not available on pages where VisualEditor cannot be used. The Reply tool has a visual mode based on VisualEditor, as well as a wikitext mode with a live preview.
  • Incomplete editing functionality – The content of some complex formatting, including definition lists, will display and can be edited, but editors using VisualEditor cannot modify certain details. Multi-column lists are edited through the complex transclusion dialog, which is difficult. Table editing on Mobile doesn't work properly. Adding features in this area is one of the developers' priorities.
  • Requires JavaScript – If VisualEditor is not available in your browser, or if you have turned off Javascript, then you will see the buttons for the wikitext editor only.
  • Numeric reference names – Currently, VE automatically adds numeric ref names with a colon prefix, i.e., ":0", ":1", ":2", and so on. There has long been interest in having VE support named references.
  • Slower – Loading longer pages into VisualEditor can be significantly slower than the source editor for some users.[1]
  • Cannot edit a single section – VisualEditor loads and submits only entire pages. Clicking an edit link for a section will scroll to the appropriate section upon opening. In VisualEditor's model, editing sections would be paradoxically slower than editing the whole page. [Note: Opening an entire page for editing does not increase edit conflicts, which are (roughly) based on editing the same paragraph.]
  • Limited support for user scripts – Most user scripts do not work when using VisualEditor; it is up to the script's developer to add support for VisualEditor.
  • Cannot upload non-free images – At this time, images that are uploaded inside either the wikitext editor or VisualEditor are sent directly to the Wikimedia Commons, which does not accept non-free images. All images that fall under Wikipedia's non-free content policy must instead be stored on Wikipedia using the File Upload Wizard. Commons also runs a filter to reject many images uploaded by editors who have not made many prior edits to Commons, especially for small or low-resolution images.
  • Data in merged cells is deleted – If rows or columns are moved across them. Workaround: Unmerge the affected areas before moving, and merge them again afterwards.
  • Wikilink changes – May unnecessarily turn a simple link into a piped link when a change to the link text involves redirects.
  • Template issues
    • Parameters are wikitext, not rich text – VisualEditor lets you edit the parameters of template transclusions, but only as "wikitext" (so "[[Foo]]" or nested templates like "{{Foo|{{Bar}}}}", not "Foo" or "{{Foo|{{Bar}}}}").
    • Footnotes – Footnotes inside templates (most commonly, infoboxes and {{reflist}}) are not visible in the "reuse" dialog, causing discrepancies in the numbering of footnotes displayed at the bottom of the main VisualEditor editing window. Similarly, VisualEditor is not compatible with articles using list-defined references.
    • Unable to customize parameter order – VisualEditor does not give you the ability to customize the order in which template parameters are listed. This could cause problems with articles or sets of articles where there is an established, consistent order for templates, especially citation templates.
    • Changes template parameter and value alignment – Especially with infoboxes, VisualEditor can sometimes modify spacing done for parameter and value alignment purposes and add a space after each pipe. Note that this is a deliberate feature of TemplateData that can be managed in the documentation of a given template; see mw:Help:TemplateData#Custom formats for detailed information.
    • Table-formatting unawareness – Popular table cell templates (e.g. yes, no, tba, n/a) can cause issues. The reason is that these templates contain a pipe character to separate formatting and text, but VisualEditor isn't aware of this. As a result, table operations which change the table structure, such as merging/splitting cells or inserting/deleting/moving rows or columns, may not work properly.
    • Unbalanced code – VisualEditor struggles with templates that pass a bit of incomplete code, with markup, to another template or table. These may display oddly or may not be editable if selected in VisualEditor.

You can click "Review your changes" to review the wikitext changes before saving a page. Please report any problems you see, after first searching open VE tickets to make sure it hasn't been reported already..

Specific issues

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Topic Summary Bugs Threads
<nowiki/> tags Unwanted <nowiki/> sometimes inserted Parsoid's Nowiki project Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive_2013_7#Changing link text often results in bad code, wrong links and unmatched </nowki>s

Edit Filter 550 detects recent changes adding these

Templates All templates that use parameters need to have Wikipedia:VisualEditor/TemplateData added to allow proper (assisted) use with VE. There are 505k tempates[1], so there's work to do. T52182 problem with nested templates
Parser functions T52855 problem with parser functions seen as templates
{{Reflist}} The contents of the reflist template does not auto-update during an editing session, unlike the contents of a plain <references/> list T52769 displayed reflist not updated WP:VE/F#Reference Issues: Omnibus Edition
Other tags (extension specific, ...) Not supported: <timeline>, <poem>, <kbd>, <imagemap>, listing, wikidata, <templatedata>, <categorytree>, <inputbox>, <section> T48803 tracker bug for extension plugins, allow plain text editing of extension tags (unlikely to be fixed as depends on the Parsoid parser) WP:VisualEditor/Feedback#General editor for extension tags
TemplateData Overloaded templates like {{coord}} can't be easily documented or used. T54250 (WONTFIX)
Dialog boxes On small screens or when the display is zoomed in, the dialog boxes for transclusions and page settings hide all article content and cannot be shrunk or dragged. This makes it difficult to refer to the text when editing templates and categories (e.g., to look at the birth date when adding a category for the birth date). T51969
  1. ^ For data on VisualEditor performance, see this Grafana dashboard
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