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Editing tool use

I pulled some stats about which tools people use for editing. Here are the numbers from last month (December 2021). These are only edits from the English Wikipedia, made by non-bot accounts, in all namespaces.

This is based on Special:Tags, so tools/edits that don't add a tag aren't counted. I know that this includes some people's personal AWB copies and wikEd, but I'm not sure what else might be missing. If your favorite tool isn't in this list, it's probably because it's not tagging the edits correctly. Look at phab:T188433 and related tasks to see what needs to be done.

Number of edits by editing tool, December 2021
Tool used Number of edits Relative
WikiEditor (2010 wikitext editor) 237,695 1,000
Mobile web 123,990 522
VisualEditor 117,440 494
Twinkle 62,674 264
VisualEditor's wikitext mode (2017 wikitext editor) 31,178 131
Mobile app 21,572 91
DiscussionTools (e.g., Reply tool) 11,244 47
AWB (may be an undercount) 7,210 30
RedWarn 6,747 28
Huggle 2,139 9
ProveIt 1,410 6
PageTriage (Page curation) 1,213 5
editProtectedHelper 721 3
WikiLove 423 2
ContentTranslation 402 2
WPCleaner 358 2
MassMessage 194 1
2003 wikitext editor (no revision tags) ? ?
WikEd (no revision tags) ? ?

I pulled the numbers from this table in Superset (a modification of this query), and realistically, I don't expect to be able to re-generate it. I expect DiscussionTools to be used considerably more in the coming months, as it is ready to deploy default-on here. If you want to have these numbers for another wiki, annual updates for this wiki, etc., then you probably need to make a request from the Data Engineering team via their public mailing list, analytics@lists.wikimedia.org (subscribe, archives).

@Redrose64, can you think of any sensible place to post this (or parts of it), if you think that would be useful? It's not exactly Wikipedia:Wikipedians material, and I don't think it really needs to be on any help page. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:09, 5 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Xaosflux, we talked about this at Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive 66#Popularity of editing methods. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:26, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Wonder if this could become a monthly Wikipedia:Database reports? — xaosflux Talk 19:49, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Xaosflux, it probably could be (it's all public information), but then someone would have to set up and maintain the report, which I understand has been a challenge in the past.
One difficulty: It's very tempting to add up all the numbers, and declare that n% of non-bot edits are made with this or that. This approach should be pretty sound for determining that there are approximately two edits in the 2010WTE for every one edit made in the visual editor, but it is not useful for determining that 35% of all non-bot edits are made in the 2010WTE. Not all tools tag their edits, and Undo doesn't give you a choice of editing environments, so we don't know what the denominator should be. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:17, 14 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Not really. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:26, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Shift key behaving oddly (moving cursor to the left)

Whenever I'm editing a page, for reasons that I have been unable to discern or discover via web searches for others who have my problem, if I press either 'shift' key, the (typing) cursor will suddenly start rocketing to the right, seemingly one word at a time (for Vim or vi users, imagine rapidly pressing 'b' over and over again) when I'm in the visual editor, and will just appear at the start of the line ('0', for vi users) when in the source editor. This issue also appears to be operating system agnostic. This behavior is VERY infuriating, and I've only figured out one way to get around it, but it's finecky at best. In the source editor, if I move the mouse cursor onto a word on the line that I'm currently editing (note that this entire 'message' thing is one line), then for some reason, whatever string of characters that my mouse cursor is currently hovering over top of will appear in a box bellow and to the left of the mouse cursor. As long as that box is showing, the 'shift' key will function normally. The problem, of course, is that now, 2.5 lines of text are being covered by a useless box, and this thing 'resets' every time I move the cursor (which causes the box to disappear). How do I fix this??? LiftedStarfish (talk) 12:20, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@LiftedStarfish: this is not a help desk, it is the talk page for discussing improvements to the page Help:Editing. You might be better off asking at WP:RD/C. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:51, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Why did the source editor become so horrible?

It's still a measly text field, with no syntax highlights or any extra features. Yet when I paste long wikimedia source text it takes an obscene amount of time to do so. As well as Firefox interrupting the process with a "script is slowing down the browser" message (paraphasing). It ridiculous. It's plaintext, that's not processed in any shape or form, yet I need minutes to paste a large table for example. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dqeswn (talk • contribs) 18:03, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Dqeswn: this is the talk page for discussing improvements to the page Help:Editing. You would be better off asking at WP:VPT; but I suspect that it is something to do with m:Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Warn when linking to disambiguation pages. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:23, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Potentially. But I didn't see any, only a lot of links to internal pages and a lot of references.
And wouldn't it be simpler to show such warnings, when you try to save and it offers you to preview and add a comment (etc)?
(It was this text actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dqeswn/sandbox?veaction=editsource&section=1#Deaths ) Dqeswn (talk) 18:36, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This article no longer valid, editing cheatsheet is no longer

I now only come to Wikipedia occasionally to make a comment on talk pages, as I've become thoroughly discontent with what wikipedia has become. But even this has been made difficult. The only editing cues I now have access to on Firefox are B,I,A,link,@. There's not even a signature shortcut anymore. When I visit the French wikipedia, there's a super long useful cheatsheet. What is happening? I had to google search how to add a signature to this comment. :( ~~~~ Tallard (talk) 01:25, 27 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Where is the documentation for Source Editor

All of the links that I have tried for the Source editor take me to wikitext. I can easily find a link to Visual Editor, but where is the link to the Source Editor rather than the markup language? -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 16:03, 3 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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