Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Archive/Add a visual editor to the talk page

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Add a visual editor to the talk page

NoN Proposes existing feature / out of scope

  • Problem: There isn't a visual editor for the talk page
  • Who would benefit: Everyone who uses talk pages and the visual editor
  • Proposed solution: Add a visual editor
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Tokerjoker5000 (talk) 17:21, 17 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • @Tokerjoker5000: Have you seen the new Discussion Tools feature? It's not on English Wikipedia yet but it should before too long, I believe. You can try it out here on Meta at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures. After enabling, you should see a [reply] link to every comment which allows you to use the VisualEditor. MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 17:34, 17 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • The question is, how long it'll survive. There have been several attempts to deploy special software to discussion pages, but most of them have failed or haven't survived. The question also is, whether it's not confusing to have a different editor for the main page and a different editor for talk pages for newbies. Juandev (talk) 20:05, 21 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      I assume Discussion Tools will have some longevity given the heavy involvement with the community during the planning process, and the multi-year, incremental improvements which are still underway. I personally think it's a major step forward for newbies; VE on content pages shouldn't act the same as interacting in discussions. Discussion Tools tries to answer that need without overdoing it. My opinion, of course :) At any rate, I'm fairly certain VE as you know it will not be enabled on talk pages. This is based on mw:Help:VisualEditor/FAQ and phab:T151854 (there are other tasks too, I'm sure). MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 22:20, 21 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Tokerjoker5000: This is kind of implemented with the reply-link.js script that Enterprisey wrote. It doesn't have keyboard shortcut support that Discussion Tools has, but it (for the most part) works well on talk pages and usually avoids edit conflicts. It's not an immediate WYSIWYG editor, but it comes with a preview button so that editors can see what their comments look like when properly rendered. Tenryuu (talk) 04:13, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Tokerjoker5000: Since we haven't heard back from you, I'm going to archive this proposal for the time being. See above comments for more; VE will not be enabled on talk pages, unfortunately. However Discussion Tools will be coming to all wikis (I'm not sure when), and it allows you to use VisualEditor when replying to comments. Thanks for participating in the survey, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 20:41, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
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