VisualEditor
This post was written by two recipients of Individual Engagement Grants. These grants are awarded by the Wikimedia Foundation and aim to support Wikimedians in completing projects that benefit the Wikimedia movement. The grantees of this project work independently from the Foundation in the creation of their project. Directionality tool. An…
The Wikimedia Language Engineering team, along with Red Hat, organised the Fall edition of the Open Source Language Summit in Pune, India on November 18 and 19, 2013. Members from the Language Engineering, Mobile, VisualEditor, and Design teams of the Wikimedia Foundation joined participants from Red Hat, Google, Adobe, Microsoft…
We’re pleased to announce Beta Features, a way you can try out new features on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites before they are released for everyone. Beta Features lets developers roll out new software in an environment where lots of users can use these features, then give feedback to help…
The VisualEditor beta release is being gradually rolled out to all Wikipedia editors in all languages. This is one the most exciting developments in the history of Wikipedia, because it will make editing the site accessible to the general public, rather than just to the people who have the patience to…
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2013 is well underway on the coding phase. Four projects this year are related to various aspects of MediaWiki and Wikimedia internationalization initiatives. On completion of these 4 projects, we expect to present: an Android app for MediaWiki translation, browser extensions for the input methods…
Today, the Wikimedia Foundation enabled VisualEditor–the visual interface to edit wiki pages–for all logged-in users on the English Wikipedia. Now, we need your help to ensure that editors are informed about how VisualEditor works, and that they can find help if they need it. There are various reasons that lead…
This post is available in 5 languages: English o Bangla o Deutsch o espa?ol o fran?ais & After several years of development and testing, VisualEditor, the new visual interface to edit Wikipedia pages, will soon be available in “beta” form for all users. This lets Wikipedia editors create and modify…
Today the Wikimedia Foundation launched an alpha, opt-in version of the VisualEditor to fourteen Wikipedias, which follows our release to the English Wikipedia in December. The VisualEditor lets editors create and modify real articles visually, using a new system where the articles they edit will look the same as when one reads them —…
Wikitext, as a Wikipedia editor has to type it in (above), and the resulting rendered HTML that a reader sees in her browser (below) When the first wiki saw the light of the world in 1995, it simplified HTML syntax in a revolutionary way, and its inventor Ward Cunningham chose…
One of the most important and challenging software development projects at the Wikimedia Foundation right now is VisualEditor: a rich-text editor for Wikipedia that does not require users to learn MediaWiki’s markup syntax. Today, we need your help to make it more robust and reliable.
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operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world.
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Powered byWikipedians: Meet VisualEditor and help with the rollout
Today, the Wikimedia Foundation enabled –the visual interface to edit wiki pages–for all logged-in users on the English Wikipedia. Now, we need your help to ensure that editors are informed about how VisualEditor works, and that they can find help if they need it.
Among the tools brought by VisualEditor, the Reference dialog provides an interface for editing references that is more convenient than editing &ref& tags in the middle of the page’s source wikitext.
There are various reasons that lead existing and prospective cont among them, the
is a major issue. One of VisualEditor’s goals is to empower knowledgeable and good-faith users to edit and become valuable members of the community, even if they’re not wiki markup experts. We also hope that, with time, experienced editors will find VisualEditor useful for some of their editing tasks.
VisualEditor has been available for several months now on the English Wikipedia, as an opt-in alpha test. A week ago, we also started an A/B testing campaign where VisualEditor was automatically enabled for half of the newly-registered contributors, while the other half continued to use the classic wikitext source editor.
Now, all registered users can benefit from VisualEditor without needing to explicitly turn it on in their preferences. Of course, the classic wikitext source editor remains available to edit both pages and page sections. While we hope that experienced editors will gradually transition to VisualEditor, this new interface doesn’t yet support the broad range of functionality that raw wikitext allows. We also appreciate that some editors may pr we are happy to stress that there are currently no plans to remove the ability to edit the wikitext source.
VisualEditor brings major changes to how you and your fellow contributors edit Wikipedia. In order to minimize the disruption, we’ve prepared a lot of documentation to guide users through the process. This includes a , a list of
and an extensive
illustrated with many screenshots.
The template dialog allows you to change template parameters in a way that is more robust than with wikitext, provided that the right metadata have been added to the template.
Early adopters of VisualEditor have provided us with a , and we’re immensely grateful for your help. This has allowed us to work with developers to fix many of the bugs and improvements that you reported. Thanks to you, VisualEditor has been much improved, and it is in good shape for wider adoption.
But there’s also a caveat: not all browsers will be supported by VisualEditor immediately. Supported browsers include the current and recent versions of Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Note that Internet Explorer is not a supported browser at this time.
How you can help
You can help with the following activities:
Continue to
as you notice issues with VisualEditor.
— Over the years, volunteers have created many help pages to guide new editors as they figured out the wiki markup language. We now need help to update them so that they reflect the new editing interface.
— Templates are one of the most difficult wikitext elements to edit. VisualEditor provides a nice interface in the form of a dialog where you can add values to a template’s parameters. In order for this to work automatically, however, metadata need to be added to the template’s documentation subpage. Usually, the information is already there in the form of a list of possible parameters, and it just needs to be formatted using the TemplateData syntax.
— If you edit Wikipedia in languages other than English, VisualEditor will soon be enabled on your wiki as well, and we need your help to make sure your fellow contributors can benefit from the documentation and help pages we’ve prepared.
The next few weeks are going to be busy, as we iron out issues and work together to adapt to the new interface, updating help pages and templates, and welcoming new editors. We hope that you’ll join us in our efforts to make this transition as painless as possible.
Philippe Beaudette, Director, Community Advocacy
James Forrester, Product Manager, VisualEditor and Parsoid
Wikimedia Foundation
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Daily update
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We're looking for Operations Engineer who wants the challenge of innovating & evolving the systems that power the core search engine.
We are looking for Development Coach to assist Wikimedia with it’s vision and to connect with our incredible communities of volunteers, researchers, and users.
Most Comments
After weeks of investigation, volunteer editors on English Wikipedia announced today that they blocked 381 ...
The Wikimedia Foundation is excited to introduce the new Wikimedia Public Policy site. Public policy ...
You can collaborate to make #Edit2015: a Wikipedia Year-in-Review video. Read how together we can ...
Six months of work at the National Library of Wales is already showing great benefits. ...
Featured Posts
Recent Posts
operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world.
The Wikimedia projects have an international scope, and the Wikimedia movement has already made a significant impact throughout the world. To continue this success on an organizational level, Wikimedia is building an international network of associated organizations.
This work is licensed under a . Some images under CC BY-SA
Powered byFrom Wikimania 2014 o London, United Kingdom
Scheduled for Saturday, August 9, 16:30 - .
Submission no. 1090
Title of the submission
VisualEditor — helping users edit more easily
Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop)
Presentation
Author of the submission
E-mail address
jforresterwikimedia.org
Country of origin
United Kingdom
Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)
Wikimedia Foundation
Personal homepage or blog
Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)
VisualEditor is the most significant and complex change that the Wikimedia wikis have ever undertaken since we began 13 years ago. We began our journey to build a visual editor three years ago, letting users create, fix and improve articles without having to learn wikitext, in a rich, browser-based editor that guides them to do the right things whilst still having the same power and flexibility that wikitext users enjoy.
A year ago, we released VisualEditor for normal users to try out for real, giving them a tool that was basic and missing some common abilities, but already better for new users than wikitext. Since then, we’ve made a huge number of improvements, helped by the great feedback and ideas from new and existing community members.
Building an editor that can express the richness of wikitext – a much more powerful system than HTML – and yet remains easy, intuitive and simple is a very hard task. The progress we have made since then has taken us on the first few steps of the journey, but we have a great distance still to go. This presentation is a companion piece to the more technical, engineering-side presentation about how VisualEditor works internally and some of the challenges that the team has overcome.
Work in VisualEditor yet to come spans everything from simple editing of entries on Wikidata and Commons while editing the Wikipedia page (so you don’t get distracted or taken away from your main edit when you add some categories to an image and some more references to an item) to collaborative, real-time editing (so that an experienced user can coach and help a newbie on how to best write an article, or a team at an event can work together at once on the same article without endless edit conflicts).
James and Trevor will talk about and show off the work we've done over the past year, the decisions we made and the issues we worry about. We will outline our current priorities for making VisualEditor better, and ask you to tell us what you think, what your issues or concerns are for you and your communities, and what more we need to do to making editing Wikipedia – and all our wikis – truly open to everyone.
WikiCulture & Community
Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long)
30 minutes
Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?
Slides or further information (optional)
Special requests
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