VE is like Microsoft Word. Pretty nice until you try to move an image and suddenly everything is messed up, and if you put the image back in the previous place, everything is still messed up.
On the Honkai: Star Rail Wiki, we strongly discourage the use of Fandom's Visual Editor.
While the Visual Editor serves an important role as many newcomers' first introduction to editing, it comes with notable flaws and drawbacks. Beyond the limiting features, the biggest pain point of Visual Editor is its tendency to make arbitrary, inconsistent, and generally undesirable changes to the formatting of the wikitext source. These issues are frequent yet unpredictable, and may occur even when editing completely unrelated parts of a page.
Thus, each use of the Visual Editor risks adding unnecessary cleanup tasks for other editors. Additionally, even when the changes do not impact the page or code readability, they render the diff views nearly useless; the diff views end up being primarily filled with Visual Editor's numerous arbitrary changes, making it difficult or even almost impossible to see what was actually changed by users. To avoid this, we strongly advise any contributor who plans to edit regularly to switch to the Source Editor.
Prominent Issues
Complex Templates
The wiki hosts many relatively large templates (e.g. VO, Enemy Skills, Character Infobox). Due to their size, experienced editors follow a specific formatting style in the wikitext to make them easier to read and edit.
Although TemplateData can reduce undesirable template changes to a certain extent, the preferred formatting often relies on empty lines and HTML comments to clearly delineate different sections of the template. There is no way for Visual Editor to understand or respect these conventions.
For example, in this edit, Visual Editor removed intentional spacing from the VO template and repositioned comments to inappropriate locations. Not only does this make the page harder to parse for the next editor, it also significantly disrupts the diff view, making it effectively impossible to discern the actual changes made.
Tables
While slightly rarer, Visual Editor can easily destroy the formatting of wikitext tables. This includes adding or removing spaces, or breaking a one-line table row into multiple lines for no reason, as observed here.
Section Headings
Visual Editor often adds unnecessary spacing to section headings. Bizarrely, the location of the extra space is inconsistent: sometimes it's before the text, sometimes after, and sometimes both. It is even possible for Visual Editor to add an extra space after the closing == of a heading.
This means that a section heading like ==Trivia== (which is the preferred format) can randomly become any of the following after a Visual Editor edit:
== Trivia ==== Trivia====Trivia ====Trivia==(with a space at the very end)
An example can be found here.
Bullet Points
Similarly to section headings and tables, Visual Editor can arbitrarily add or remove spaces before bullet points, as observed here. In particular, the removal of spaces goes against our guidelines.
Galleries
When adding files to a <gallery> section, Visual Editor always adds the File: prefix to the filenames, which is both unnecessary and discouraged in our guidelines. This creates inconsistencies that we'd rather avoid.
Making the Switch
While you can simply choose "Edit Source" from the dropdown menu at the top-right of a page, it is recommended to make the switch permanent by changing your default editor in your preferences.
In the "Preferred editor" dropdown menu in the "Editing" tab, you may either select Source editor (also known as the 2010 Source Editor), or VisualEditor - source mode (also known as the 2017 Source Editor). Both versions are perfectly functional and free of the issues described above, with no significant differences in features. The choice between the two comes down to personal preference.
Even though the Source Editor may seem intimidating to newcomers, it is not as difficult to learn as it may appear.
- When editing any existing textual content, everything you see in Visual Editor is also present in the Source Editor as plain text. If you have trouble locating something, use the search function (Ctrl + F).
- When editing a template, see its documentation for guidance on its syntax.
- If you want to add a new template, table, etc. but are unsure how to start, you can copy-paste existing wikitext from another page and modify it as needed.
- Always use the preview function to check your changes before saving them.
- If you have any questions, we are always happy to assist in the Discord server.
Previewing Edits
When previewing an edit that you made in Source Editor, DO NOT do so by switching to the Visual Editor. Even if you perform no modifications at all in Visual Editor, the mere act of opening it will already have applied unwanted source code changes.
Instead, kindly use the preview button below the edit summary field.