Template:Warning VisualEditor bug/doc

Usage

A bug in VisualEditor caused citations to be malformed (May-Aug 2019). If text was copy-pasted from VisualEditor outside VE's edit-mode, citations would transform into garbled text, for example <sup>[[Asylum in France#cite%20note-7|[7]—]]</sup> which is an invalid Wikipedia citation.

The garbled text can take many forms but the common string is cite%20note - please search your page for this string and repair the citation before it is copied or moved into mainspace.

The error can be reverse engineered in some cases. In the above example it maps to citation #7 in the article Asylum in France. Because citation numbers change each time a page is edited, the #7 would map from the same time the copy-paste was done. Thus, find the revision time in the source article when the bug was introduced, then find the revision time in the secondary article that equates to this time, and this is the revision where the citation number can be found. Replace the entire <sup>[[Asylum in France#cite%20note-7|[7]—]]</sup> with the valid reference.

A bot was written to try and repair these bugs, but it only ran in mainspace and had technical limitations due to the complexity of the bug. For User: and Draft: space this template warning allows editors the opportunity to accurately repair or remove this error before it gets copied into mainspace.

Further reading

• SearchFilter861, shows recent live edits containing "cite%20note"
• "cite%20note", show pages containing the bug
• Phab T150418, ticket for VE bug
• RfC to block edits (started September 3 2019)
• User:GreenC bot/Job 18, bot to repair bug in mainspace