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Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Larger suggestions/Add support for making some templates directly "visually editable" in VisualEditor

< Community Wishlist Survey 2022‎ | Larger suggestions

Add support for making some templates directly "visually editable" in VisualEditor

  • Problem: In VisualEditor, editing templates such as an infoboxes or an episode table of a series, etc., can be more tedious than it appears. In order to change the values of the template, you have to first open the template editing dialog. It would be easier if the infobox was directly editable visually, without the need for a dialog.
  • Proposed solution: Add support for making some templates directly "visually editable" as if they were tables
  • Who would benefit: Editors who use VisualEditor
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets: task T52182
  • Proposer: Mohammad ebz (talk) 15:09, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • @Mohammad ebz: Could you link to some example templates you believe are not supported? I highly suspect all that's missing is the TemplateData. This is what instructs VE and TemplateWizard what fields are available and what kinds of values they accept. Only the community can implement this. It's pretty easy though; just go to the documentation page for the template and hit edit, then you should see a "Manage TemplateData" button at the top-left. MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 20:03, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    @MusikAnimal (WMF): I mean, do not open another page and edit it in the same way as regular text that is edited in Visual Editor mode. In fact, the idea is to edit the text and template information directly and visually, without the need to enter information in the window that opens. Mohammad ebz (talk) 04:42, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    @Mohammad ebz Okay, I think I may be on to you now: You're saying some templates are transcluded on a page, and you have to go to that template page to edit it, when you'd rather be able to edit it directly from the article. Is that right? It would be still be helpful if you could give an example. Link to a specific article with this problem, and let us know which template you're unable to edit. (or whatever the issue is, if I'm still misunderstanding you :) MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 04:46, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    @MusikAnimal (WMF): You still do not understand what I mean, let me give you an example: Suppose you want to modify an actor's infobox on his Wikipedia page. To do this, click on the word "edit" at the top of the article, then select Visual Editor mode and then click the actor's infobox, Now a floating page opens, I mean this page; If the last step is removed and the template contents are edited completely Visual like the original text of the article, the editing speed will be much faster. Mohammad ebz (talk) 05:08, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes! That explains it perfectly, thank you :) I might recommend using what you just wrote as the problem statement. Your proposal says …has the problem of opening additional pages and is the same as a source editor which made it sound like you meant opening new pages in a separate tab. This "page" is what we would call a dialog or modal window.
    Anyway, I'm afraid what you're after may not feasible. Without having done any sort of technical investigation, a few issues that come to mind:
    • Templates can have logic in them that make them appear differently based on values you give them. This would offer a very weird experience, say if the value of one field is supposed to make other fields disappear. That would be confusing if this happened in real time. This is the same reason you may notice sometimes that after applying your changes to a template, there's a brief time where it's still "loading" (in the processing of applying them). This is the parser doing its thing.

      You did mention specifically "commonly" used templates, which are generally more predictable, but there's still no guarantee their behaviour won't ever change in a way we could reliably predict in VisualEditor.

    • What if you want to add or remove parameter to the template?
    • What about templates that pull their data from Wikidata?
    Honestly, I think our upcoming Real Time Preview for Wikitext feature might help you in this situation. Yes, it's for wikitext (not VisualEditor), but it solves your problem of having to edit both visually and in wikitext. With Real Time Preview, you see what you're going to get when you save (just like VisualEditor). If you're like me and love VisualEditor, the current template editing dialog that is shown may be what you have to get used to. I personally find it better because it also allows the parameters to be documented and ensure the editor knows what each field is intended for, etc. (what they call TempalteData).
    You also mentioned tables. Some tables are built using a template, but any raw wikitext table such as in this example should be editable directly with VisualEditor.
    That's my opinion, and at the very least I would say this is out of scope for Community Tech. Let's see what others have to say. MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 05:47, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    @Mohammad ebz Our team has concluded this wish is out of scope for us. However we're happy to promote it in the Larger suggestions category, which is intended to promote ideas to other WMF teams and the broader Foundation, rather than it being buried in our archives of rejected proposals.
    However I think the proposal could be reworded better to describe what you're after. Now I understand what you're after, would you mind if I reword your proposal some? Then after you approve, I will move it to Larger suggestions. Thanks, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 04:08, 18 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    In my opinion, no problem, do your best to get a better result, my only suggestion was to improve the editing on Wikipedia; In any case, thank you for your attention Mohammad ebz (talk) 07:23, 18 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Okay, thanks for clarifying! I will move this to Larger suggestions. I have also tweaked the wording to make the proposal more clear. Hope this okay! Thanks, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 23:10, 20 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • By Community Tech scale, it would be too much to do so in one year. This is a very big proposal, which means it could change all the items and how VisualEditor works. But I think it would make VE more friendly. Thingofme (talk) 13:13, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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