Community Wishlist Survey 2020/Archive/Visual entry form

Random proposal ►◄ Archive  The survey has concluded. Here are the results!

Visual entry form

N Outside the scope of Community Tech

• Problem: Wiktionary pages tend to be very template-heavy, meaning that the learning curve is very steep, and not only for new users —editors coming from other projects are easily overwhelmed by the sheer amount of templates (with their respective parameters) that need to be memorised in order to create a decent entry.
• Who would benefit: Absolutely all Wikitionary editors, both current and potential.
• Proposed solution: A way to easily use inputboxes and preloaded content with the visual editor, so that a page that is 100% made with templates is easily manageable using the Visual Editor. Each community should be able to define what will appear in the preloaded content, and there should be an option to highlight the different parts so that the user can know where to click to write them (since many templates are invisible when not filled). Ideally, the editor should be able to directly write on the page without the typical template pop-up.
• More comments:
• Phabricator tickets:
• Proposer: Unapersona (talk) 10:53, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

Discussion

• Good point. It could be related to another proposal "Adapt visual editor to wiktionaries but you include as well code colorization, and that's something interesting too. Noé (talk) 11:00, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

  @Noé: to clarify, with "highlighted" I didn't mean syntax highlighting. When you are editing a page full of empty templates using the Visual editor (not the new source one), the templates are often invisible unless you know where to click. There should be a pointer that tells the user "click here to add etymology", "click here to add translations", etc. --Unapersona (talk) 11:47, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

• We have discussed this as a team and believe it would better be addressed with structured Wiktionary Wikiquote (phab:T71753, see also 2020 wish), which is out of scope for our small team. Without this underlying structured data, what we build will be quite fragile and difficult to make configurable for each wiki. We apologize for any disappointment, and thank you for your participation in the survey! MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 00:52, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

  @MusikAnimal (WMF): have you not mixed the topic? This is a Wiktionary proposal and you talk about Wikiquote. Pamputt (talk) 06:24, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

  @Pamputt: My apologies! I did have it mixed up. But the same problem persists... similar to the "Adapt visual editor to wiktionaries" proposal. We have been made aware of Dbnary which does offer structured data, but I don't think this will help us with VisualEditor, which is meant to be wiki-agnostic. Basically we'd need to hard code VE to work on each wiki, individually, which doesn't scale (and probably wouldn't pass code review, either). We can however make a gadget or something that is specific to your wiki, if you'd like? I'm sorry we're running out of time... voting starts in 45 minutes! We can unarchive after voting starts but we do need to narrow the scope of this, and take out the VisualEditor part. We definitely recognize the desire for better VE support, and will make sure the Editing team is aware of it. MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 17:19, 20 November 2019 (UTC)