Wikipedia:VisualEditor: Difference between revisions

Content deleted Content added

Inline

Revision as of 16:52, 5 July 2013

Wikipedia is happy to announce the live Beta of VisualEditor, a tool that offers a way to edit pages without needing to learn wiki markup. Both VisualEditor and the older wikitext editor are automatically available for all registered users on all articles. You can continue to edit the wikitext directly using the "Edit source" tab. Bug reports are welcome at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback.

VisualEditor is still in beta phase, and we hope that you will give it a try. While many users are more comfortable with wikitext, some features will be really useful to experienced editors as well, like dialogs to edit complex templates and references. Also, your help in identifying bugs and training new users will be invaluable.

That said, if you want to suppress the extra tab (giving you only access to the old system, rather than the normal system of having access to both on all articles), you can completely hide VisualEditor from your interface by enabling an experimental gadget: go to the gadgets tab of your preferences, scroll down to "Editing", tick the box labeled "Remove VisualEditor from the user interface", then scroll to the bottom and click "Save". You can reactivate it at any time by unticking the box.

Attention Internet Explorer (IE) users: VisualEditor is temporarily disabled for IE9 and IE10 users, due to various issues that are being fixed. VisualEditor will not be made available for users of IE8 and earlier; such editors should permanently switch to some other browser—it's 2013, you know.

Shortcut

WP:VE

Main page
Feedback at MediaWiki
Sandbox (no account required)

About

Documentation:
Development:
- Roadmap up to 2017
- Updates (2013-2023)
- Weekly status reports (2015-2016)

Help out

Research

Main research page

Other

Why are the developers building this? (2013)
- User Test Data (2013)
Customization
Known problems
Requests for Comments (RfCs): Jul 2013 a, Jul 2013 b, Jul 2015, Sep 2015

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

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, 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.

Video explaining the "alpha" version of the Wikipedia Visual Editor

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. On other types of pages, the old "Edit" button will take you to the old editor.

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

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

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

Sign up here!

External links

The mediawiki.org page about the VisualEditor, including the regular status reports
The mediawiki.org page about Parsoid, the bidirectional wiki parser behind VisualEditor and its regular status reports

@@ Line 4: / Line 4: @@
 VisualEditor is still in beta phase, and we hope that you will give it a try. While many users are more comfortable with wikitext, some features will be really useful to experienced editors as well, like dialogs to edit complex templates and references. Also, your help in identifying bugs and training new users will be invaluable.
-That said, if you want to suppress the extra tab, you can completely hide VisualEditor from your interface by enabling an experimental gadget: go to [[Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets|the gadgets tab of your preferences]], scroll down to "Editing", tick the box labeled "Remove VisualEditor from the user interface", then scroll to the bottom and click "Save". You can reactivate it at any time by unticking the box.
+That said, if you want to suppress the extra tab (giving you ''only'' access to the old system, rather than the normal system of having access to both on all articles), you can completely hide VisualEditor from your interface by enabling an experimental gadget: go to [[Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets|the gadgets tab of your preferences]], scroll down to "Editing", tick the box labeled "Remove VisualEditor from the user interface", then scroll to the bottom and click "Save". You can reactivate it at any time by unticking the box.
 '''Attention [[Internet Explorer]] (IE) users:''' VisualEditor is temporarily disabled for IE9 and IE10 users, due to various issues that are being fixed. VisualEditor will not be made available for users of IE8 and earlier; such editors should permanently switch to some other browser—it's 2013, you know.