I was unable to find an existing bug for this, so I am filing a new one. This is either a VisualEditor or Citoid bug. Very occasionally, edits on en.WP tagged with "VisualEditor" are inserting a linked "ISBN" text followed by the ISBN value itself liked to Special:BookSources. This redundant linking is unnecessary. Here's a diff showing it happening:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Emperor_Jimmu&diff=next&oldid=795599385
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| · · · | ||||
| Open | None | T174303 Copy-pasting linked ISBN numbers from view mode HTML into VisualEditor inserts wikitext links to Special:BookSources (it should turn them into magic links?) | ||
| Open | Feature | None | T54091 The read HTML should have hinting to allow full DOM copying (as opposed to just rich copying) from read mode into VE surfaces | |
| · · · |
What are the steps to reproduce this? I tried:
I thought one of the last two might be the culprit, since VisualEditor might try to be "smart" and explicitly copy the link to Special:BookSources, but actually it just did the right thing.
If this can't be reproduced, diagnosis will be hard.
I don't know how it's happening. Maybe the editor who created the diff above will know.
I don't think this is a Citoid bug. These are bare references and citoid adds templates. And one of the ISBNs isn't even in worldcat which means citoid can't be used to add it anyway... maybe these were copy-pasted from somewhere?
This seems to have been copy-pasted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nara_period#cite_note-2 (from the view mode, not from VE). I can reproduce the issue when doing this (I get wikitext like [[International Standard Book Number|ISBN]] [[Special:BookSources/978-1-59884-162-6|978-1-59884-162-6]]).
This is still happening, and gnomes need to clean up every time it happens. Can you please fix it? Here's one of the latest additions:
You can see more of them here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Check_Wikipedia/ISBN_errors
As noted above, I've been unable to reproduce this behaviour, and if it can't be reproduced then fixing it will probably be impossible.
Can someone please fix this Visual Editor bug? It is causing gnomes to have to do unnecessary work. In an extreme example, this VE-using editor unwittingly added Special:BookSources links to 170+ articles on a single day:
Now all of those edits need to be fixed by a gnome. It sure would be better if this bug in VE were fixed. You can see many more examples of recent additions of Special:BookSources links here:
This is not a rare occurrence.
I tested this again today, with this test page: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Matma_Rex/sandbox&oldid=858044048. It seems @Deskana has already noticed and described this behavior above, but to re-state clearly:
| Case | Input wikitext | Output wikitext (after copy-pasting from view mode to VE) |
|---|---|---|
| Template | {{ISBN|0-7475-3269-9}} | [[International Standard Book Number|ISBN]] [[Special:BookSources/0-7475-3269-9|0-7475-3269-9]] |
| Template output | [[International Standard Book Number|ISBN]] [[Special:BookSources/0-7475-3269-9 |0-7475-3269-9]] | [[International Standard Book Number|ISBN]] [[Special:BookSources/0-7475-3269-9|0-7475-3269-9]] |
| Magic link | ISBN 0-7475-3269-9 | ISBN 0-7475-3269-9 |
| Manual link 1 | [[Special:BookSources/0747532699|ISBN 0-7475-3269-9]] | ISBN 0-7475-3269-9 |
| Manual link 2 | [[Special:BookSources/0-7475-3269-9|ISBN 0-7475-3269-9]] | [[Special:BookSources/0-7475-3269-9|ISBN 0-7475-3269-9]] |
@Jonesey95 If you wish to avoid the issue, convince the English Wikipedia community to change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:ISBN so that it produces output similar to the "Manual link 1" case, rather than the current output ("Template output"). I'm actually surprised that it doesn't do that; all the links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number that it produces seem like a bad case of overlinking, anyway. Was that already proposed before and rejected?
Doing so will at least produce magic links on copy-paste from view mode to VisualEditor, rather than the messy syntax.
Producing the actual template when copy-pasted from view mode is currently impossible, because there is no data as to what template generated the text in the PHP parser's output. It will become possible in the future when we use Parsoid's output for view mode (T54091, T55784). You can see that output for my test page at https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/html/User%3AMatma_Rex%2Fsandbox/858044048, and copy-pasting from there to VE works perfectly for all cases.
In short: We can't improve this behavior in VisualEditor, or not least not until far future. Instead, you can change Template:ISBN so that it copy-pastes better, but that has to be done by English Wikipedians rather than us.
There's been some discussion of this here and there from an OLINK perspective, but what I've seen it would be replacing the wiki link with an external link + plainlink class applied, which would fix the WLH for the ISBN page but which isn't better for this particular task (I'd say worse, in fact).
On the point of whether that link should be there, the reason the link is desirable is so that people who don't know what an ISBN is can go and find out. This is the same for all of our identifier templates, in fact, so I would guess this issue can be observed with e.g. {{DOI}}.
The link to ISBN exists for a reason, as @Izno explains.
Meanwhile, this problem continues and copy-pasting (or something) appears to be generating superfluous span tags as well. See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Virgil_Thomson&type=revision&diff=884836275&oldid=877453735
I wish the developers luck with fixing this annoying bug. In the meantime, it keeps us gnomes employed.
Per @Izno, this also appears to be happening with DOI and ISSN links. More junk for gnomes to clean up. See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Purges_of_the_Communist_Party_of_the_Soviet_Union&diff=prev&oldid=884801720 for a sample diff.
And now bdi tags are being added inside the Special:Booksources link:
Please just treat ISBNs as plain text.
Still happening (edit from March 29):
I just fixed about 40 articles with this problem. In addition, VE appears to be turning some cite and OCLC and DOI templates into plain text with links, which is a violation of CITEVAR and undesirable from a maintenance standpoint. See, for example:
This is still happening as of March 2021:
That link shows a BookSources manual link, bdi tags, and undesirable OCLC linking instead of the OCLC template.
Is it possible to get this bug fixed before the fourth anniversary of it being reported? That would be wonderful.
As I have explained soon after the first anniversary of this bug being reported (T174303#4557445), this is caused by users copy-pasting the ISBN template from view mode into edit mode.
As far as I know, it can still be fixed, at any moment, by changing that template in the way that I suggested back then.
Failing that, the solution is using Parsoid HTML, with its associated metadata, for read mode views, as I also explained in that comment. The Parsing team's work on that is still progressing but it's not the highest priority, but perhaps we can celebrate that happening around fifth or sixth anniversary of this bug.
The above workaround (displaying ISBNs without surrounding template code) is not viable. Magic links were deprecated by MediaWiki developers in 2016, a year before this bug was reported:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Future_of_magic_links#Proposal
They were deprecated on the English Wikipedia in 2017, four months before this bug was reported:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=772743896#Future_of_magic_links
All ISBN magic links were replaced on en.WP, and after much delay, MediaWiki developers were persuaded to follow through with their commitment to disable magic links on en.WP in early 2021 (see T275951).
The fifth anniversary of this bug is coming up in less than a year. Let me know if I can help with troubleshooting or QA of any proposed fix for it.
Once or twice a month, this bug results in tens of thousands of bytes being added to the error report at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Check_Wikipedia/ISBN_errors&action=history
It would be nice for this bug, and related bugs that cause this error report to expand, to be fixed so that cleaning up that report would not seem like cleaning out the Augean stables.
Please fix this bug. Here's the latest diff showing many pages with errors being added to the report. It is pointless to try to fix these pages when this bug is still generating more errors every day.