Talk:VisualEditor/Suggestion Mode

Seeking Feedback: Suggestion Mode prototype

Hi. You can test the feature prototype using the user-script on the project page (VisualEditor/Suggestion_Mode#Status), and then by editing any article using Visual Editor, either on a testwiki: or on your regular projects with appropriate caution. Alternatively, there is a patchdemo instance.

If there are any Suggestions, they will appear at the side, as per the screenshots on the project page.

There's another design shown on Mobile Web, that we're still iterating on.

There are a number of bugs already identified with the current list of Suggestions (e.g. it shouldn't show the External Link warning for links to sister projects) that are being worked on. Additional bug-reports and feature-requests are very welcome. Please tag any with #vesuggestionmode.

However, we're most interested in getting feedback from you about these four questions:

  1. What information (diffs, metrics, logs, dashboards, etc) would help you determine whether a suggestion is proving helpful and/or in need of improvement?
  2. What (if anything) concerns you about showing suggestions to newcomers who are editing using the visual editor?
  3. What parts of the user experience do you appreciate? What parts of the user experience do you wonder about?
  4. What other edit suggestions do you think would be worthwhile to consider building?

We would greatly appreciate your thoughts on any of these, either below, or during the upcoming meeting (or a future meeting). Thank you! Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:07, 17 December 2025 (UTC)

  1. evolution of the edit rate per account age, revert rate per account age and absolute size of the edits per account age compared to someone without suggestions (by edit rate I mean number of edits a day/week/... I want to see the effect long term on the user growth and not on a mass of edit).
  2. I am concerned that some newcomers may become contributors that only do what they once saw as a suggestion without exploring other ways to improve Wikipedia. I have seen such case with "add a link", some users who seem to believe that wikifying an article is only about adding useful links.
  3. I appreciate the notifications showing without me needing to do anything. It did not feel like there were too much suggestions.
  4. some suggestions about basic formatting, for newcomers that want to create an article, but do not know how to add infobox, how to make section headers or that an article usually has a reference section that is not here by default.
    I believe the ultimate suggestion would be to expand/create an article, which could also be the last level of the progression system.
Escargot bleu (talk) 19:28, 18 December 2025 (UTC)
Ad. 1. I concur with Blue Snail.
Ad. 2. I'm a bit concerned that users might stop and/or be overwhelmed. Perhaps different levels of suggestions would help. For example, add references first, then show a suggestion for an image description, then one for improving style, and finally, when everything is done, suggest adding more content... But just so that there is some sense of progress add something like "Thanks for fixing X issues already. You can keep going if you want".
Ad. 3. I like that I can edit freely (not just fix suggested things). The suggestions don't get in the way too much which is good too. I'm wondering if you plan to add suggestions for things added by the user (it doesn't seem to be the case now).
Ad. 4. It would be nice if you could reliably detect old data. For example, if I edit an article about NYC and the population data is from 2020, I could get a suggestion like: "This data seems outdated. Perhaps you can improve it by checking if newer sources are available."... or something like that. Nux (talk) 19:09, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
PS: As a side note plwiki Mangos has way too many suggestions for refs. It seems that you treat "Lorem ipsum[ref]." as a missing ref. Perhaps you should allow up to 3-4 characters without a ref (i.e. "Lorem ipsum[ref]..." is fine too). Nux (talk) 19:12, 31 December 2025 (UTC)

Feedback - card wording

The list of existing suggestion-types are listed in both the Deployment_status page, and onwiki with their current wording in w:Special:EditChecks. Please share your thoughts about how we can improve the default wording for any of these (prior to requesting mass-translation). Ideally with specific suggested wording, e.g.

  • Missing caption type: Change wording to "…" - This is better for [all wikis/my wiki] because […]. ~~~~

Thank you! Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 01:25, 6 February 2026 (UTC)

Feedback - card links

We want to link each of the suggestion-types to appropriate policies/guidelines, so that newcomers can learn about the specific task, and also become more familiar with the scope of each wiki's documentation.

We need your help to identify suitable destination-links for each of these suggestion-types. To some extent we can rely upon the expert translators at translatewiki to find the appropriate link-target, but we need defaults for when the card either hasn't been translated, or on wikis that don't have any relevant local documentation.

Please share your suggestions (ideally as indented bullet-points) on where each of these suggestion-types could generically link to (in the absence of anything local). Or as longer comments below the listing, if more context is needed. Thank you! Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 01:25, 6 February 2026 (UTC)

  • Convert reference - d:Q642335 (Project:Citing sources) has 111 local links. Is there a good fallback, or anything better?
  • Disambiguation link - d:Q118521146 (Project:Disambiguation) has 117 local links. Is there a good fallback, or anything better?
  • Duplicate links - d:Q14767226 (Project:Manual of Style/Linking) has 35 local links. (Enwiki has w:MOS:REPEATLINK). Is there a good fallback, or anything better?
  • External link in body - d:Q4657623 (Project:External links) has 58 local links. Is there a good fallback, or anything better?
  • Heading level - d:Q5525713 (Project:Manual of Style/Accessibility) has 25 local links. (Enwiki has w:MOS:GOODHEAD). Is there a good fallback, or anything better?
  • Image needs caption - d:Q9137568 (Project:Captions) has 7 local links. d:Q4618557 (Help:Pictures) has 71 local links. Is there a good fallback, or anything better?
User:Quiddity (WMF) All of these look good. I would suggest having a generic "Report an issue with this tool" link would enable receiving more feedback. The vast majority of Wiki editors would have no idea how to find MediaWiki discussion pages. And especially early on, during beta-testing you will get crucial feedback this way. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Shushugah (talk • contribs) 01:17, 5 March 2026 (UTC)
Thank you for commenting!
Re: links for each type - unfortunately for technical reasons we cannot point to Wikidata (because of the fallback language system, which is normally very useful, but here it would result in some languages pointing to the documentation pages at other Wikipedias if we tried to localize the links automagically), so we've had to instead use fixed links that point to Help:Suggestion_mode -- However, those links can and should all be overridden locally. Admins (or folks making requests for admins) can use the instructions at Help:Suggestion_mode#For administrators – local customization to see how to do so.
Re: feedback links - There is a generic "report an problem" link within the feature, in the "..." menu in the bottom-corner (here's a design-overview File:VisualEditor Suggestion Mode feedback flow (desktop).png). I wonder if perhaps that needs to be made a bit more clear/obvious in design? I'll ask about options.
Thanks again, and please keep the feedback coming. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 06:16, 6 March 2026 (UTC)

Feedback - new suggestion types and feature requests

We've collected a lot of ideas for possible suggestion types, including types that could be locally created using the textmatch feature, and more complex types that would require assistance from developers (staff or volunteer) to create custom code for. You can see the existing lists at Edit check/Ideas, and some more ideas at T360489 ("Generate and present edit suggestions at scale"). Please share any ideas you have, here or in either of those locations.

Here is the list of features the team is currently working on: Adding the ability to include links within the text-match types of Suggestions (e.g. The "English variant specified" type will link to MOS:RETAIN next week) (T416511); Adding the editsuggestion-visible tag to monitor edits that are made when any Suggestions have been seen (T413419); Adding the ability to see the specific suggestions someone acted on within a given edit session (T416535); Improving the feedback flow to be more streamlined (T401739); Adding the ability to toggle the visibility of the Suggestions cards entirely (T415589). Please let us know what features you'd like to see added or tweaked? Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 01:25, 6 February 2026 (UTC)

It is already mentioned in ideas but I want to emphasize that a way to surface typos and fixing spelling mistakes would be really nice as a small thing that would be gratifying to new users, it could even enable itself only and use browser's interface even. Ladsgroup (talk) 17:47, 18 March 2026 (UTC)
Hi @Ladsgroup - I agree. And actually, those can likely be implemented using the TextMatch feature, which is configured at w:MediaWiki:Editcheck-config.json. For example, hewiki has already implemented some rules similar to those you're describing. We're encouraging the community to add to/adjust their wiki's respective TextMatch rules however they feel is appropriate.
If you have a chance to look at the documentation or write a rule yourself, please do share if you think of any additional TextMatch capabilities you think could help with the use cases you're describing. Thank you! CMedelius-WMF (talk) 03:49, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

General feedback

I think this feature might be a problem the way it’s implemented now.

When I click on “Edit”, I usually already have something specific in mind that I want to edit and am not looking for suggestions. I assume most users click “Edit” not out of idle curiosity, but for a specific reason. In this case, the suggestions aren’t directly relevant to me.

Furthermore, this could prompt me to apply the changes anyways, which groups together multiple most likely unrelated changes into one. It would be better to add citations in a separate edit than e.g. fixing a typo; we don’t want edit summaries like Various changes or Fixed typo and added 3 citations and removed dead link and adjusted grammar in lead section.

A possible remedy might be a dedicated button for suggested edits, or a prompt after editing to fix some minor things as well.

Another possibility is to internally separate any user edits from the suggested edits and produce multiple edit actions once the user saves their edit. This would probably require substantial changes to the editor, though. Theanswertolifetheuniverseandeverything (talk) 01:49, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

I agree with your comments on Suggested Edits. I think that they need to provide instructions to users on how to disable it. Rogermx (talk) 15:42, 17 February 2026 (UTC)
Thank you, both.
Re: "When I click on “Edit”, I usually already have something specific in mind that I want to edit and am not looking for suggestions. - We appreciate you raising this point. Inside of it, I believe you are highlighting the importance of striking a balance that simultaneously enables both:
  • People who tap edit out of curiosity, can discover a constructive change that they are inspired to Publish. (Especially complete-newcomers, who will eventually become the primary audience of some aspects of this feature)
  • People who, like you, arrive into the editing interface knowing what you're wanting to edit, to do so without as little friction/distraction as possible.
This is something we are thinking about a lot, and are partially covering with the upcoming on/off toggle in the form of a dedicated toolbar button (linked below). If you have more ideas about how we could meet that balance well (within the user interfaces on desktop and mobile), please do share them.
Re: "I assume most users click “Edit” not out of idle curiosity, but for a specific reason." - Surprisingly, there are a very large number of newcomers who click "Edit" and then don't attempt to save anything. We've measured that everyday 150,000–200,000 mobile web edit sessions end with someone abandoning the editing interface (i.e. people who abandon the interface without making a change more than 2 seconds after the editing interface reaches a 'ready' state). There are some graphs and details in this page section and many more in or linked from this summary post.
Re: "[this] groups together multiple most likely unrelated changes into one. It would be better to add citations in a separate edit than e.g. fixing a typo" - To be doubly sure I'm following here, could you please share what (if anything) the below misses/misinterprets about what you're saying?
  • "It's important that edit summaries describe all of the distinct changes someone is making in an edit. This way, the people reviewing those edits can effectively moderate them. I wonder/worry whether this experience could cause newcomers to make many changes in a single edit without adequately describing them in the edit summaries."
  • "More broadly, I think we ought to monitor how/if this feature changes the size/complexity of edits people are publishing because I think there is a relationship between edit size/complexity and edit quality."
[I have more thoughts/questions here, but I'll wait for your reply before sharing them.]
Re: disable/toggle the Beta Feature (and the eventual launched feature): The team is currently working on the method to toggle the feature on/off in phab:T415589 ("Suggestion Mode: Find a way to toggle suggestion mode on/off on mobile + desktop") and it should be available fairly soon.  
Please do keep the feedback coming, even beyond my questions here, if you continue to experiment with the feature. Detailed feedback is greatly appreciated. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:29, 20 February 2026 (UTC)
When I click on “Edit”, I usually already have something specific in mind that I want to edit and am not looking for suggestions. agree! Prototyperspective (talk) 23:46, 9 March 2026 (UTC)

Using with wide display

On Vector 2022, I have the width set to Wide instead of Standard. When I open the visual editor, it squishes the entire article to create the space for the cards. I had to turn the feature off because the width is more important to me than the suggestions. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 00:32, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

@Thebiguglyalien thank you for being in touch about this. The tradeoff you described is not one we'd like for you/people to experience.
Accordingly, we're working on a fix in phab:T415589...we will post here once there is something ready for you to try. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 18:03, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

Feedback - layout issues once editing is completed

When this feature is turned off in Vector 2022, once I'm done editing, the page width ratio remains the same. It scuffs the layout and squishes the table of contents once it reappears. The right sidebar also seems to remain missing even though I have it toggled to on. Refreshing the page after editing is done seems to revert the layout back to your preferences. Fallbackintoreality (talk) 19:12, 6 March 2026 (UTC)

Hi, thank you for this feedback/bug-report, it is appreciated.
Please could you share some details about your editing configuration, so that we can try to reproduce this behaviour you describe? - It would be helpful to know: (1) Which browser/OS are you using? (2) Which page(s) were you editing where you noticed these problems, and has it occurred more than once? (I.e. I'm wondering if it might be a "browser cache" related bug, and perhaps only happens a single time), (3) Are you using the "standard" or "wide" setting in your Appearance menu?
E.g. I tried to reproduce the bugs by editing w:Video design, with the "wide" setting, and my "Tools" menu pinned-open, in Firefox (in Linux). However, after I published an edit, the TOC re-appeared at the normal size, and the pinned Tools menu immediately reappeared. (Sidenote: The pinned-menus are hidden during editing, so that they don't overlap with the Suggestion cards).
If it would be helpful/easier to share screenshots as part of your reply, I'll note that you can upload files to phab:file (which may be preferable to using external sites).
Thanks again, Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 22:12, 6 March 2026 (UTC)

I disabled it because

It was talking too much of the screen (on pl wiki), offering suggestions I don't need (as an experienced editor) and I didn't see an easy way to close the popups and get the 1/5 screen back. Right now it's too intrusive to be useful for anyone but new editors. Piotrus (talk) 00:59, 15 March 2026 (UTC)

I agree – I do like seeing them sometimes, e.g. if I find an article that I want to improve, I can use it to quickly find uncited sentences, clunky sentences and other things. But most of the time I don't want it enabled as I just want to edit an article. Would be nice to have a button to toggle it somewhere. GearsDatapacks (talk) 06:41, 15 March 2026 (UTC)
@Piotrus and @GearsDatapacks, thank you both.
Re: easy way to close - There will be a simple on/off toggle coming later this week (as a button in the Toolbar) that works per-edit-session (phab:T420245); then in the near future, that button will be enhanced to have a setting-memory (for more than per-edit-session) and then later to have a numerical count overlay (to show how many Suggestions there are on a page, so that editors who've hidden the Suggestions can be reminded to potentially toggle it on, within that article) (phab:T415589).
Re: Right now it's too intrusive to be useful for anyone but new editors - it is currently only available as a Beta Feature, so that experienced editors like yourselves can share feedback on any kinds of potential-improvements, or bug-reports. In the future we plan to make it available to newcomers. It is also already possible for each community to create custom local Suggestions (see Help:Suggestion mode#Create custom local types of Suggestions), some of which might be more complicated and thus only appropriate to be shown to experienced editors (I.e. communities can already each configure things like "maximum edit count" or "minimum edit count" for a Suggestion type to be shown to someone). There's a listing of more ideas for potential types of at Edit check/Ideas which we'd welcome your additions to. Please do share any further thoughts you each have on how we can make this feature more useful to everyone, over the months ahead.
Re: I do like seeing them sometimes […] - thank you for the positive feedback, and details on which types you are finding to be especially useful to you. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:24, 16 March 2026 (UTC)
I will try to take a look when the QoL features are live; for now it was so intrusive I disabled the feature to auto-load all beta stuff that I had active on pl wiki... I do agree that this has potential to be very useful, and it may be a good tool to enable by default for new editors (as long as there is obvious and easy way to toggle it off for a session or permanently). Piotrus (talk) 02:06, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

Where it can be translated?

Is it on Translatewiki? I found the edit tags for it, but I didn't found the extension text. It's partially translated. MarMi wiki (talk) 14:42, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

Yes, on Translatewiki, in the Visual Editor (MediaWiki extension) - Edit check group. --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 17:06, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

Feedback on work in RuWiki

The tool suggests adding a source to the article’s preamble. In 99% of cases, this is not necessary. (example)

The tool suggests moving external links to the “External links” section, but these links are already in the “External links” section (example). Mitte27 (talk) 23:39, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

Привет. Thank you for commenting. The community (admins) can and should change these settings! The feature is highly configurable, to fit local needs and nuances. Would you be willing to help request a change for the page w:ru:MediaWiki:Editcheck-config.json? Essentially, a local admin needs to create that page, using the content at Help:Suggestion mode#Create a local configuration page (but replacing those Spanish example heading-names, with Russian). If you'd prefer, I can try to write it in English, but I don't want to frustrate anyone. Thanks again, Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 18:28, 27 March 2026 (UTC)
@Mitte27 Oh, I'll add a ping, too, in case that helps. (I know everyone has potentially unique settings for Notifications!) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 19:37, 27 March 2026 (UTC)
Thanks for the tip. The page has been created, and things have improved significantly. Mitte27 (talk) 09:33, 28 March 2026 (UTC)

Fault

HI, I created El sonido de la caída. It is not possible to add references: [cbc51b5c-2c5b-4f98-8ee8-7d5e0f4cbe56] Excepción capturada de tipo Wikimedia\Rdbms\DBConnectionError. Please check Rafstr (talk) 12:00, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

This was caused by phab:T422130. --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 15:56, 2 April 2026 (UTC)