Wikipedia talk:VisualEditor

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Recording artist and songwriter Traylblazor Music (talk) 06:39, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

 Courtesy link: Draft:Traylblazor

Please review the following: Wikipedia:Autobiography, Wikipedia:Notability (music), Wikipedia:Plain and simple conflict of interest guide. Folly Mox (talk) 08:53, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I notice that edits credited to Visual Editor often cause referencing errors. There's an observable pattern: some reference named "fooey" ends up being moved, or edits happen nearby, and it gets renamed to "fooey2". Of course, "fooey2" is not defined. Why does this happen? It's pretty frequent. -- mikeblas (talk) 01:35, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Can you please link to a couple of diffs to show these edits happening? It would be even better if you could reproduce it to confirm that people are not manually messing up these refs and just happen to be using VE. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:44, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, I'm not a Visual Editor user, so I'm not able to provide steps to reproduce the issue. My completely blind guess sense is that the problem happens when text (with reference tags) is moved within the article. Maybe moved in one operation, paybe cut and pasted -- dunno. Maybe asking these users what they did would be a way to get the answer you want.

Here are five observations. Some of them contain more than one reference anchor renamed in the pattern that I've identified.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_churches_in_the_Roman_Catholic_Archdiocese_of_Detroit&diff=1227427851&oldid=1227404878
• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Florida_Power_%26_Light&diff=1242867361&oldid=1242864630
• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Constantine&diff=1244270429&oldid=1244270143
• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Moussa_Diaby&diff=1236721771&oldid=1236651774

This last one is a bit different because it spans a add-remove-restore editing pattern:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jack_Schlossberg&diff=1246531722&oldid=1246515638

Hope that helps. -- mikeblas (talk) 15:06, 20 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This looks like phab:T125034, which @ESanders (WMF) declared (then) to be a symptom of phab:T134228. @Trizek (WMF), I don't know if there is bug report already open on this, but I'm sure that the Editing team would appreciate one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:51, 20 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, WhatamIdoing. This looks similar to the first bug, and I have been admonished not to reopen old bugs, so T375306 it is. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:10, 20 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Six years ago? Great memory! Thanks for looking into it. I'm hopeful for a fix, since this is a common source of undefined reference names. -- mikeblas (talk) 22:50, 20 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]