VisualEditor
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- TranslationCentral
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- For the VisualEditor deployment at the English Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:VisualEditor.
The VisualEditor project aims to create a reliable rich-text editor for MediaWiki. It is being developed so it can be used as a MediaWiki extension, using the Parsoid project to supply HTML+RDFa.
It is currently deployed to various namespaces on this wiki (including the main namespace in which this page exists); more information about this test deployment can be found on Wikimedia's blog, the FAQs, and VisualEditor:Welcome or VisualEditor:Test. Please note that the test deployment only works with the Vector skin. For more information, please visit the VisualEditor Portal.
VisualEditor is one of several rich-text editing tools.
Rationale[edit | edit source]
The decline in new contributor growth is the single most serious challenge facing the Wikimedia movement. Removing the avoidable technical impediments associated with Wikimedia's editing interface is a necessary pre-condition for increasing the number of Wikimedia contributors.
Status[edit | edit source]
| Group: | Features |
| Start: | 2011-05-15 |
| End: | |
| Team: | Roan Kattouw, Rob Moen, Ed Sanders, Inez Korczyński (Wikia), Christian Williams (Wikia), Timo Tijhof |
| Management: | James Forrester, Trevor Parscal |
| Status: | See updates |
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[edit status] • [add new]2013-09-26 (MW 1.22wmf19):VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf19 branch deployment on Thursday 26 September. In the week since 1.22wmf18, the team worked on fixing bugs and stability improvements to VisualEditor.
You can now drag-and-drop elements other than just images - references, reference lists, templates and other "nodes" should all be moveable with the mouse. Blanking the contents of a heading, pre-formatted block or other formatting block now deletes the block rather than leaving it empty, which is consistent with how OpenOffice and Google Docs behave (bug 50254).
The page settings dialog was briefly broken in Firefox but now is restored (bug 54322). A bug that meant that unnamed references got their names corrupted on using VisualEditor has also been fixed (bug 54341). A regression in copy-and-paste which meant that copy-and-paste stopped working outside VE even once it was closed was corrected (bug 54375), and the functionality was fixed to allow pasting images in Firefox (bug 54377).
Links are no longer possible to be applied to images, as this isn't possible to represent in wikitext (bug 53151). A bug which means that VisualEditor selected both the "slug" (blank line) and the infobox at the start of an article on initialisation was fixed (bug 54446).
A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf19 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.
Timeline[edit | edit source]
- Some level of exploration was done in 2010 by the Wikipedia Usability Initiative.
- The 2011 product whitepaper published by the Wikimedia Foundation's strategic product team identified rich-text editing as one of the "Great Movement Projects". Work subsequently started in May 2011.
- The 2011-12 Wikimedia annual plan, released July 2011, states a goal for Visual Editor: "First opt-in user-facing production usage by December 2011, and first small wiki default deployment by June 2012".
- The 2012-13 Engineering Goals document sets a timeline for VisualEditor's development and deployment up to the end of June 2013.
- VisualEditor is scheduled to be deployed across Wikimedia projects over the summer of 2013. Below is a schedule for July 2013:
| Week of… | Launch | Users | Projects | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 July | Phase 0 | Logged-in users | English-language (en) |  Done |
| 15 July | All users | Done |
||
| 24 July | Phase 1 | Logged-in users | Spanish (es), French (fr), Hebrew (he), Italian (it), Polish (pl), Russian (ru) & Swedish (sv) | Done |
| 29 July | All users | Done |
||
| 30 September | Phase 2 | Logged-in users | Bulgarian (bg), Catalan (ca), Cebuano (ceb), Czech (cs), Danish (da), Estonian (et), Basque (eu), Finnish (fi),
Galician (gl), Croatian (hr), Hungarian (hu), Indonesian (id), Latvian (lv), Malay (ms), Norwegian - Nynorsk (nn), Norwegian - Bokmål (no), Simple English (simple), Slovak (sk), Slovenian (sl), Turkish (tr), Ukrainian (uk), Volapük (vo), Waray-Waray (war), Modern Greek (el), Neopolitan (nap), Venetian (vec), Sicilian (scn) |
 Doing... |
| 7 October | All users | Doing... |
||
| TBC | Phase 3 | Logged-in users | Language variant wikis, e.g. Chinese | |
| TBC | All users | |||
| TBC | Phase 4 | Logged-in users | Remaining wikis (TBD) | |
| TBC | All users |
VisualEditor may be offered to users at non-Wikipedia projects, such as Commons or Wiktionary, after deployment to the Wikipedias has completed. No timeline has been set for this.
Documentation[edit | edit source]
You can speak with us in our chat channel, #mediawiki-visualeditorconnect.
Related pages[edit | edit source]
For more information on VisualEditor and its design process, see these directory pages:
See also[edit | edit source]
- Parsoid
- Extension:VisualEditor (including installation instructions)
- Future
- Wikitext.next
- Statistics: some are available at [1] (enter "visual" in the search bar, choose one and click "Visualize"), e.g. English Wikipedia hourly edits, visual editor vs wikitext (% by user group).
