[QA] more better VisualEditor testing coming soon to beta labs

Wed Nov 6 17:57:19 UTC 2013

Hello QAers,

As you might or might not know, we recently released a bug to some
production wikis that caused significant data corruption when using the
VisualEditor.

The reason is that behind VE we have a wikitext<->HTML conversion engine
called "Parsoid".  We made a change such that Parsoid confused ISO-8859-1
and UTF8, thus corrupting some characters. You can read about the problem
here:
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation/20131104-Parsoid

So we have taken some steps to make Parsoid testable on beta labs, by
automatically updating the Parsoid code to the master branch:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/93939/

This is change is not yet enabled completely in beta labs, but very soon
now we will be able to exercise the most recent version of Parsoid with the
most recent version of VisualEditor.

If you'd like to test pre-release versions of VisualEditor and Parsoid,
create an account for yourself at http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org and
enable VE under Preferences/Editing.

I'll make another announcement when the Parsoid master code is in place and
working, but in the meantime, VE is a very interesting project for testing
if you haven't seen it yet.  .

-Chris
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/qa/attachments/20131106/d91f690f/attachment.html>