Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Archive/Automatic visual editing of spanned templates
Automatic visual editing of spanned templates
Outside the scope of Community Tech
- Problem: en:Template:Citation needed span and alike needs to be editable in visual mode in the same manner one inserts references. When reference is inserted, text should turn normal automatically.
- Who would benefit:
- Proposed solution:
- More comments: If one finds a reference, it is natural to copy it, then insert as is done with ⌘⇧K. However, if one opens Template:Citation needed span one need to copy the text to delete template, and there is no way to insert the requested reference.
- Phabricator tickets: phab:T52182
- Proposer: Macuser (talk) 11:52, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
Discussion
- This very difficult to do because we don't get HTML from Parsoid for template parameters. It's the same root problem as "Editing templates recursively". ESanders (WMF) (talk) 20:32, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
- I'd love such a capability for some templates. Thanks to Macuserfor raising it!
- ESanders (WMF), I understand the difficulty you're talking about. Would it perhaps be possible by a change in Wikidata, that will add some metadata to the TemplateData, telling it "this template is editable inline"? :) --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 21:00, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
- @Amire80 That would be a question for the Parsing team. The technical discussion is at T71870. It is out of scope for the CommTech team though. ESanders (WMF) (talk) 11:51, 1 December 2020 (UTC)
- ESanders (WMF) There are templates with some of this functionality, like en:Template:Interlanguage_link - it disappears from sight when an article is created, and is removed by bot. Here the template should disappear from sight when reference is supplied inside the template itself(?). Like if a parameter is empty (no reference) text is marked, but if parameter is filled with reference text is not visibly marked(?). Macuser (talk) 12:40, 1 December 2020 (UTC)
- We agree this is an issue, but it would appear the engineering challenges are beyond the scope of what Community Tech can offer. Sorry! Thank you for participating in the survey, nonetheless. MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 22:21, 1 December 2020 (UTC)