Wikipedia:VisualEditor
Welcome to the portal for the VisualEditor,
a new way of editing Wikipedia being developed by
the Wikimedia Foundation. Editing Wikipedia at the
moment requires people to learn wikimarkup, a markup language, even to
make tiny corrections to an article. In 2001, it was
acceptable; in 2013, it drives
contributors away. The VisualEditor allows
people to edit without having to learn wikimarkup
and will, we hope, thereby encourage readers to
contribute.
The full timetable for the VisualEditor launch can
be found below;
but, by the end of July 2013, we expect this to be
available to users on almost all Wikimedia projects.
We know that many users prefer editing raw
wikitext, finding it faster and more precise:
Editing purely in wikitext will remain, and we have
absolutely no plans to remove it. Both editors are
accessible from the toolbar above each article.
About the VisualEditor[edit]
The VisualEditor is a new, "visual" way of editing
Wikipedia that will let people contribute without
having to learn wikimarkup. It has been available as
an opt-in "alpha" release on the English-language
Wikipedia since December 2012, in
16 other languages since April 2013, and in almost
all other languages since the beginning of
June. As explained
below, we expect to deploy this to almost
all Wikipedias by the end of July, making it
available for all users – starting with the
English-language Wikipedia on 1 July.
If you're interested in using the VisualEditor,
then you can enable the VisualEditor it by
going to your preferences,
and clicking "Enable VisualEditor" on the "Editing"
tab. We have a guide to
doing so, as well as a list
of common keyboard shortcuts. If you're
interested in helping us with the deployment, then
help in the lots of
tasks that we need to do. You can receive
regular status updates from us on your talk page by
signing up for our
newsletter.
At the moment, the VisualEditor has a number of
bugs; this bugginess is inevitable. The only way to
only deploy software when it is bug-free is not to
deploy it at all – we're still finding errors in
MediaWiki, and it's 10 years old. If you encounter
an issue, then please do not hesitate to report it
on the Feedback page. We still have to build
entirely new features. Current limitations include:
- Odd-looking – We currently struggle
with making the HTML we produce look like what you
are used to seeing, so styling and so on may look
a little (or even very) odd. We're spending more
time improving it, but our focus remains on
ensuring that the VisualEditor does not alter
wikitext unexpectedly.
- Incomplete editing – Some elements of
"complex" formatting will display and let you edit
their contents without letting users edit their
structure or add new entries - like tables or
definition lists. Adding features in this area is
one of our priorities.
- Limited browser support – Right now, we
have only gotten VisualEditor to work in the most
modern versions of Firefox, Chrome and Safari. A
volunteer is working on Opera support, and we aim
to have support for the latest versions of
Internet Explorer once we release the VisualEditor
more widely.
- Articles and User pages only – The
VisualEditor will only be enabled for the article
and user namespaces (so you can make changes in a
personal sandbox). In time, we will build out the
kinds of specialised editing tools needed for
non-articles, but our focus has been on articles.
Because of these limitations Visual Editor's
inevitable bugs, we recommend that users click
"review your changes" before saving the page and report any
problems they encounter.
Timetable[edit]
| Week of.. |
Launch |
Target projects |
| 1 July |
Launch to all logged-in users as the default
editor |
English-language Wikipedia |
| 8 July |
Launch to all logged-in and anonymous users
as the default editor |
English-language Wikipedia |
| 15 July |
Launch to all logged-in and anonymous users
on other first-stage projects |
TBD – definitely dewiki, frwiki, itwiki.
Probably also arwiki, nlwiki, hewiki, hiwiki,
jawiki, kowiki, ruwiki, plwiki, eswiki and
svwiki |
| 29 July |
Launch to all logged-in and anonymous users
on all other projects |
All Wikipedias, except those with writing systems
that we struggle with. |
How to help out[edit]
We need help in making the VisualEditor as good as
it can be: You can find and report
bugs while using the software or lend a hand
in our many other tasks, like
- Updating help pages – All our projects
have help pages to make contribution easy for new
users. Unfortunately, the full launch of Visual
editor will outmode their screenshots and
tutorials because they were all built by the
markup editor, for the markup editor. Therefore,
we need help updating
help pages. If you need help in helping the
helping, then read our
tutorial to using the VisualEditor.
- Adding TemplateData to templates – The
VisualEditor features an interactive template
editor—described in more detail on our help
page—and as you'll see if you use it on
Wikipedia, some templates have named parameters
and nice descriptions that make it easy to use.
However, other templates lack them because they
need "TemplateData" before this feature will work.
If you're interested in adding TemplateData, then
read our guide to it and our list
of the most important templates to add it to.
- Help new users – The successful launch
of VisualEditor could bring many more new users
than we are used to – and even though editing
may be easier, working out how to interact with
the community will still be hard. Please try to
spend some time on the
help desk or in the IRC help channel to help
these newcomers acclimate to Wikipedia.
Newsletter[edit]
Sign up here!
External links[edit]
