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Wikipedia:VisualEditor

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Opt-in to use VisualEditor. Read VisualEditor's User Guide. Report a problem with VisualEditor.
Login, choose VisualEditor in Beta Features, and save your preferences. Or use this sandbox link for testing. Find out how to make links, add or move images, create citations, insert templates, edit tables, and more. Please include your web browser, computer operating system, and Wikipedia skin (usually Vector, sometimes Monobook).
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For instructions on using the new VisualEditor, see Wikipedia:VisualEditor/User guide.


Welcome to the portal for the VisualEditor, a way of editing Wikipedia being developed by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) that does not require editors to learn wikimarkup. Until VisualEditor, editors had to learn wikimarkup to make most edits. In 2001, this difficulty was acceptable; now, it drives away some contributors. VisualEditor will allow people to edit all pages without having to learn wikitext markup and will hopefully encourage more readers to become editors.

Even after the eventual anticipated full-feature release of VisualEditor, experienced editors still may prefer editing wikitext because they find it faster and more precise. Editing articles purely in wikitext is and will remain an option that the Wikimedia Foundation has no plans to remove. Even editors who enable VisualEditor will have the wikitext option available from the toolbar for each page and section.

VisualEditor still has many bugs and missing features. If you encounter an issue, please report it on the Feedback page.

About VisualEditor

VisualEditor is a new, "visual" way of editing Wikipedia that allows people to contribute without having to learn wikimarkup. This rich-text editor was made available as an opt-in release on the English-language Wikipedia back in December 2012, in 14 other languages in April 2013, and in most other languages at the beginning of June 2013. As of April 2015, it is available by default to users of about 76% of the language editions of Wikipedias and as an opt-in beta feature to the rest, along with most non-Wikipedia projects except Wiktionary and Wikisource.

To learn more about using VisualEditor, please read the guide to VisualEditor and the list of common keyboard shortcuts. Your help with the many tasks that need to be done is appreciated. You can also receive regular status updates on your talk page by signing up for the VisualEditor newsletter.

Limitations

Current known limitations include:

  • Slower – Loading longer pages into VisualEditor can be slow for some users. (For others, it may be as fast or faster than wikitext.)
  • Not available in talk or discussion namespaces – At the English Wikipedia, VisualEditor is not enabled for any talk pages, in the Template or Wikipedia namespaces, or in several of the namespaces that are rarely edited. The "Edit" button for VisualEditor is not available on pages where VisualEditor cannot be used. Flow will eventually support editing on discussion pages, using either the wikitext editor or VisualEditor.
  • Cannot edit a single section – VisualEditor loads and submits only entire pages. Clicking an edit link for a section will scroll to appropriate section upon opening. In VisualEditor's model, editing sections would be paradoxically slower than editing the whole page. Section editing does not reduce edit conflicts.
  • Template parameters are wikitext, not rich edited – VisualEditor lets you edit the parameters of template transclusions, but only as "wikitext" (so "[[Foo]]" or nested templates like "{{Foo|{{Bar}}}}", not "Foo" or "{{Foo|{{Bar}}}}").
  • Some browsers not supported – VisualEditor works in almost all relatively modern (last three years) versions of Chrome/Chromium, Firefox/Iceweasel, Internet Explorer 10 or higher, Safari, Opera, Midori, Qupzilla, SeaMonkey and WebPositive (approximately 93% of all users). VisualEditor does not yet work with Internet Explorer 9, and will never work with Android 2.3 or Internet Explorer 8 or older.
  • Unbalanced templates – struggles with templates that pass a bit of incomplete code, with markup, to another template or table. These may display oddly or may not be editable if selected in VisualEditor.
  • Incomplete editing functionality – The content of some "complex" formatting, including definition lists, will display and can be edited, but editors using VisualEditor cannot modify certain details. Table editing on Mobile doesn't work properly. Adding features in this area is one of the developers' priorities.
  • Supports only Vector and Monobook skins – of the four skins available in user preferences, VisualEditor works only with the two most popular.

You can click "Review your changes" to review the wikitext changes before saving a page. Please report any problems you see.


How to help out

Help is needed to make VisualEditor as good as it can be: You can find and report bugs and ideas for improvements or lend a hand in many other tasks, such as:

  • Updating help pages – All Wikimedia Foundation projects have help pages to make contributing easier for new editors. Unfortunately, the full launch of VisualEditor will make obsolete the screenshots and tutorials in these help pages, because they describe how to edit using the markup editor. Therefore, the VisualEditor development team needs help updating help pages. The user guide to VisualEditor is a starting place for text for the new help pages.
  • Adding TemplateData to templates – VisualEditor features an interactive template editor—described in more detail in the user guide—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 the guide to it and the list of the most important templates to add it to.
  • Help new users – The successful launch of VisualEditor might result in many more new editors than usual, and even though editing may be easier, learning policies and guidelines and how to interact with the community will still be challenging. Please try to spend some time at the appropriate venues: the Help desk, the Teahouse and the help chatroom. Additionally, please feel free to monitor the Category of Wikipedians looking for help.

Newsletter

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to VisualEditor.

References


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