• This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 50182 ***

Re-wording; this isn't a duplicate of bug 50182, which is about non-dialog editing of templates.

Current thinking about switching modes:

Basic appearance
Editing with support
Switched to 'wikitext' mode

@Ironholds the page has become a disambig since you filed. Looking at the history were you linking to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_(Modern_Family) originally?

I have literally no idea, it was in 2014.

In T52355#2079713, @Esanders wrote:

@Ironholds the page has become a disambig since you filed. Looking at the history were you linking to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_(Modern_Family) originally?

I fixed the link.

Comments from discussion about this:

• Wikitext button should look depressed when used. MW theme needs this to be improved mode generally. Need to avoid mode error
• Important to remember that the types aren’t for validation, just hints – don’t frustrate the user if they want to over-ride, make it easy to replace.
• Styling of wikitext mode needs improving.
• Need to separate “allowing to use VE” from “helping with type hinting”
• Flow has this issue too (switching mode) – share feature design?
• Edge case (partial wikitext) for not being able to use VE isn’t very common, we believe?
• One switch for the whole dialog?
  • Issues?
  • In Advanced mode? (alongside multi-template transclusion editing)
• Possibly get rid of the (i) too, to simplify the clutter around boxes?

Wikitext button should look depressed when used. MW theme needs this to be improved mode generally. Need to avoid mode error

Would a ButtonSelectWidget make sense here?

There is no facepalm token, so consider this little goat as the facepalm token, because still we literally force VE users to use wikicode for nested templates.

Change 451020 had a related patch set uploaded (by Chris Barnard; owner: Chris Barnard):
[mediawiki/extensions/VisualEditor@master] Working on Task #T52355 - ve.ui.MWTemplateDialog and ve.ui.MWParameterPage changed.

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/451020

Change 451020 abandoned by Bartosz Dziewoński:
Working on Task #T52355 - ve.ui.MWTemplateDialog and ve.ui.MWParameterPage changed.

Reason:
Patch doesn't seem to actually do anything related to task T52355, no response from submitter

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/451020

Basically, the central thing for me would be this:

Some templates are difficult (infoboxes) and some templates are easy ({{Quote}}, {{lang-it}}). VE allows editing links and bold text directly as first-class content element, but all templates are seen by VE as templates and not as formatting, and forces users to edit their content using the dialog. The result is that it's easier to edit such templates in wiki syntax (if you know which parameter to change, of course) than in VE for everyone: both wiki syntax lovers and newer people who like VE.

If VE could allow editing at least some simpler templates as just text, and treat them as custom formatting rather than a complex form, this would make editing much easier. Perhaps TemplateData could be modified to allow specifying some parameters as "directly-editable" or something.

I understand it's not trivial and requires some development time, but it's worth revisiting this.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2021/Editing/Editing_templates_recursively