Last modified: 2013-09-12 04:26:02 UTC
I haven't worked out this out fully yet, but it seems that linking or annotating newly added text that contains accented or non-Latin characters frequently causes those characters to disappear. Re-adding them in the same word almost always results in their turning into pawns when, anywhere else on the page, the link dialog is subsequently opened or a link is inserted. This happens everywhere on a page including body text, tables and image captions.
Now also reported on the French Wikipedia: [[:fr:Route 2 (Ontario)]] and its revision history, the distance chart is a table and Unicode descriptive text added with VisualEditor didn't save properly.[https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Route_2_%28Ontario%29&diff=96342109&oldid=96342028] The damage was fixed using the standard MW wiki source editor but is still in history. Try inserting « La route 2 va à Montréal (Québec) » (or something/anything that isn't US ASCII) into a table cell and watch it fail to display correctly or fail to save. The fr.wp reported was using an unspecified version of firefox on Vector in Ubuntu. I use Firefox 23 on monobook in Xubuntu. Raising this to critical as being able to use all characters in a language is essential.
K7L comments: "I am seeing the same problems if I try to edit ordinary text such as the article intro. Pressing <save> or even <backspace> makes accented characters in newly-edited text vanish. This editor is not usable for non-English text on this browser [firefox]." This needs to be fixed urgently.
Same as bug 53747?
(In reply to comment #3) > Same as bug 53747? Yes. I don't want to just merge them though as they're assigned to different people.
There's code to address this bug in the following patch, which is due to go live by mediawiki.org on 13 September 2013: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/82858/ Please let us know whether it fixes the bug!
Marking this as "FIXED" on the expectation that it's fixed - please re-open if you find that it is still occurring.
*** Bug 54047 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
