Last modified: 2014-04-22 16:51:28 UTC
There are many pages for which VisualEditor is broken. In some cases, the page syntax can be changed to avoid the problem. In other cases (such as nlwp's largethumb, dewp dab pages, enwp episode lists), the design affects many pages, and the only feasible solution is to fix the parser. While we wait for fixes, the VE should be disabled on those pages known to be affected. The set of pages to be VE-disabled could be a category, if you trust the villagers..:-) Or a title blacklist in MediaWiki: namespace so it is admin only Or a regex blacklist in MediaWiki: namespace so it is easier to blacklist all pages which include a certain element.
A temporary solution is being developed: {{Disable VE top}} and {{Disable VE bottom}} https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Disable_VE_top
If WMF has spare compute power, Parsoid could flag which pages it _may_ break, and tell the VE extension to not enable itself on those pages.
*** Bug 52489 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
It would indeed be helpful to be able to selectively disable VisualEditor (we should indicate to a user who'd otherwise see VisualEditor that it is disabled, to reduce confusion). A hidden blacklist category could be included in a page or template to achieve the desired effect, and could be used by developers to prioritize roundtripping issues.
I don't like the idea presented in bug 52489 (a blacklist category). VisualEditor simply shouldn't break pages ever. Users shouldn't be required to shield articles from it; that's a bit insane.
Obviously VE/Parsoid shouldn't cause breakage - the goal would be to keep membership of that category close to zero at any given time. But if and when things do break, it'd be good to have an official mechanism to deal with it, rather than just template hacks.
(In reply to comment #6) > Obviously VE/Parsoid shouldn't cause breakage - the goal would be to keep > membership of that category close to zero at any given time. But if and when > things do break, it'd be good to have an official mechanism to deal with it, > rather than just template hacks. Bugzilla is the official mechanism for dealing with breakages. While it's easy to say that the goal would be to keep the category membership near zero, it sounds like (from reading comment 0) that this category would quickly include tens of thousands of pages.
An interesting solution is to add a wikitext magic word __NOVISUALEDITOR__ to disable it in contexts it might otherwise be enabled. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Thread:Extension_talk:VisualEditor/Behavior_switch_NOVISUALEDITOR
