Why do you think those <nowiki> tags were added by the editors?

Risker


On 23 July 2013 15:32, Robert Rohde <[email protected]> wrote:

> In the interest of gathering slightly larger statistics, I manually
> reviewed 200 VE entries on recent changes.
>
> I am classifying these as
>
> * "Good" edit
> * Test edits / newbie errors likely to happen in either editor (not VE's
> fault)
> * Obvious vandal edit (not VE's fault)
> * Damaged source that renders correctly (e.g. VE altering source
> formatting that most source editors like to maintain, mostly involving
> missing newlines)
> * Test edits / newbie errors that occur with VE but were unlikely to
> occur previously (e.g. people using lots of extra spaces / newlines to
> visually "format" the positioning of content on a page)
> * Corrupted page content that appears to be caused by the unfamiliar
> UI (e.g. <nowiki>[[Foo]]</nowiki>)
> * Corrupted page content that appears to be directly caused by VE /
> Parsoid bugs (e.g. dirty diffs)
>
> For the sake of simplicity, I'm counting any edit that is well-formed
> and not obviously of destructive intent as "good" without
> consideration of whether it satisfies Wikipedia content policies such
> as NPOV, OR, etc.  There are inevitably many edits whose content isn't
> appropriate or needs to be cleaned up, but I'm not worrying about
> those.  In the rare case that an edit might fall in multiple
> categories, I'm counting it towards the most severe of the categories
> listed above (i.e. lower on the list).  This only applied a handful of
> times.
>
> Altogether, I rated the edits as follows:
>
> * "Good": 157 (78.5%)
> * Test / newbie edits (generic): 13 (6.5%)
> * Obvious vandal: 7 (3.5%)
> * Damaged source: 7 (3.5%)
> * Test / newbie edits (VE oriented): 3 (1.5%)
> * Corrupted page due to unfamiliar UI: 11 (5.5%)
> * VE / Parsoid errors: 1 (0.5%) [This involved the editor spewing out
> extra garbage when trying to save a page that started with malformed
> table syntax.]
>
> That's better than I would have guessed before going into this
> exercise.  In particular, Subbu appears to be correct that the true
> error rate for VE / Parsoid is relatively small (though I'd prefer the
> error rate be too small to notice in a test like this).
>
> The tendency of users to add nowikis and create other corruptions due
> to the unfamiliar UI is still a concern though.  This is not at all
> helped by the fact we have dozen of help pages that teach wiki syntax
> like "[[Foo]]" which are now directly unhelpful to people using VE.
> Over time, that will diminish somewhat as experienced users learn the
> new system, though if it is truly to be useful for new users we
> probably want to look carefully at the various ways new users may
> misunderstand the new UI.  Also, I'm not thrilled by the examples of
> VE manipulating the use of newlines so that template parameters,
> categories, and other things sometimes run together in the source.
>
> If the immediate goal is to ensure that using VE is not harmful for
> people who know how to use it, then the developers are probably
> getting pretty close.  Given the nowikis and such, VE probably still
> causes higher levels of accidental harm when operated by unfamiliar
> users than I would personally be comfortable with.  And of course,
> there is still a long ways to go in terms of feature completeness and
> usability before we can really discuss Erik's dream of having VE be
> perceived as better than source editing.
>
> -Robert Rohde
>
> On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 9:06 AM, Subramanya Sastry
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Hi John and Risker,
> >
> > First off, I do want to once again clarify that my intention in the
> previous
> > post was not to claim that VE/Parsoid is perfect.  It was more that we've
> > fixed sufficient bugs at this point that the most significant "bugs"
> (bugs,
> > not missing features) that need fixing (and are being fixed) are those
> that
> > have to do with usability tweaks.  My intention in that post was also not
> > one to put some distance between us and the complaints, just to clarify
> that
> > we are fixing things as fast as we can and it can be seen in the recent
> > changes stream.
> >
> > John: specific answers to the edit diffs you highlighted in your post.  I
> > acknowledge your intention to make sure we dont make false claims about
> > VE/Parsoid's usability.   Thanks for taking the time for digging them up.
> > My answers below are made with an intention of figuring out what the
> issues
> > are so they can be fixed where they need to be.
> >
> >
> > On 07/23/2013 02:50 AM, John Vandenberg wrote:
> >>
> >> On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 4:32 PM, Subramanya Sastry
> >> <[email protected]> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> On 07/22/2013 10:44 PM, Tim Starling wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> Round-trip bugs, and bugs which cause a given wikitext input to give
> >>>> different HTML in Parsoid compared to MW, should have been detected
> >>>> during automated testing, prior to beta deployment. I don't know why
> >>>> we need users to report them.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> 500+ edits are being done per hour using Visual Editor [1] (less at
> this
> >>> time given that it is way past midnight -- I have seen about 700/hour
> at
> >>> times).  I did go and click on over 100 links and examined the diffs.
>  I
> >>> did
> >>> that twice in the last hour.  I am happy to report clean diffs on all
> >>> edits
> >>> I checked both times.
> >>>
> >>> I did run into a couple of nowiki-insertions which
> >>> is, strictly speaking not erroneous and based on user input, but is
> more
> >>> a
> >>> usability issue.
> >>
> >> What is a dirty diff?  One that inserts junk unexpectedly, unrelated
> >> to the user's input?
> >
> >
> > That is correct.  Strictly speaking, yes, any changes to the wikitext
> markup
> > that arose from what the user didn't change.
> >
> >> The broken table injection bugs are still happening.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sai_Baba_of_Shirdi&curid=144175&diff=565442800&oldid=565354286
> >>
> >> If the parser isnt going to be fixed quickly to ignore tables it
> >> doesnt understand, we need to find the templates and pages with these
> >> broken tables - preferably using SQL and heuristics and fix them.  The
> >> same needs to be done for all the other wikis, otherwise they are
> >> going to have the same problems happening randomly, causing lots of
> >> grief.
> >
> >
> > This maybe related to this:
> > https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51217  and I have a
> tentative
> > fix for it as of y'day.
> >
> > VE and Parsoid devs have put in a lot and lot of effort to recognize
> broken
> > wikitext source, fix it or isolate it, and protect it across edits, and
> > roundtrip it back in original form to prevent corruption.  I think we
> have
> > been largely successful but we still have more cases to go that are being
> > exposed here which we will fix.  But, occasionally, these kind of errors
> do
> > show up -- and we ask for your patience as we fix these.  Once again,
> this
> > is not a claim to perfection, but a claim that this is not a significant
> > source of corrupt edits.  But, yes even a 0.1% error rate does mean a big
> > number in the absolute when thousands of pages are being edited -- and we
> > will continue to pare this down.
> >
> >
> >> I presume this is also a dirty diff
> >>
> >>
> >>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dubbing_%28filmmaking%29&curid=8860&diff=565438776&oldid=565408739
> >
> >
> > Yes, this is a dirty diff where Parsoid reformatted a 2-line image
> wikitext
> > source into one by removing a line break.  Again, relative to the # of
> edits
> > being made, these are not frequent -- that was all that I claimed, which
> I
> > think is still true.  But that said, this is a relatively minor and
> harmless
> > change.
> >
> >
> >> In addition to nowikis, there are also wikilinks that are not what the
> >> user intended
> >>
> >>
> >>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ben_Tre&curid=1822927&diff=565439119&oldid=561995413
> >>
> >>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Celton_Manx&curid=28176434&diff=565439020&oldid=565436056
> >
> >
> > You are correct, but this is not a dirty diff.  I dont want to claim
> this is
> > an user error entirely  -- but a combination of user and software error.
> >
> >
> >> Here is three edits to try to add a section header and a sentence,
> >> with a wikilink in the section header.
> >> (In the process they added other junk into the page, probably
> >> unintentionally.)
> >>
> >>
> >>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Port_of_Davao&action=history&offset=2013072307&limit=4
> >
> >
> > What is the problem here exactly?  (that is a question, not a challenge).
> > The user might have entered those newlines as well.
> >
> >
> >> A leading line feed in a parameter - what the?
> >>
> >>
> >>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Sam_%26_Cat_episodes&curid=39469556&diff=565437324&oldid=565416618
> >
> >
> > This is something I'll have to investigate.
> >
> >
> >> External links which should be converted to internal links:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Krishna_%28TV_series%29&diff=565437699&oldid=564621100
> >
> >
> > This could be an enhancement to Parsoid.  Thanks for the bug report :-).
> >
> >
> >> That is all in the last hour, and I've only checked ~100 diffs.
> >>
> >> I appreciate that some of these are a result of user input, and the RC
> >> feed of non-VE edits will have similar problems exhibited by newbies,
> >> albeit different because it is the source editor.  And it is great to
> >> see so many constructive VE edits.
> >
> >
> > Thank you for acknowledging this!
> >
> >
> >> But you're not going to get much
> >> love by claiming that it is now stable and not causing broken diffs.
> >
> >
> > I did not make that specific claim, but it is possible that my tone was
> more
> > aggressive than I intended it to be.  Just so there is no confusion,
> > VE/Parsoid can still cause dirty/broken diffs, but I think the claim is
> that
> > at this time, the vast majority of ongoing edits do not corrupt wikitext
> > source and where there are diffs, we have narrowed that down to a couple
> of
> > causes (where VE/Parsoid inserts nowiki wrappers) which are being fixed.
> >
> >
> >> In addition, VE can crash a Google Chrome tab, and it can cause
> >> (unsaved changes) dataloss in most browser configurations.
> >
> >
> > Subbu.
> >
> >
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>
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