Seeing things

By L.M.

WIKIPEDIA has just unveiled the first version of its new visual editor. Babbage saw a preview of the new interface (now available here) before it went live and it would be no overstatement to call it the most significant change in Wikipedia's short history. The hope is that editing the online encyclopedia with the visual editor will be more like playing around on blogging platforms such as Wordpress or Blogger and less like something that only other people do.

For the moment the visual editor is still a developer prototype, or a demo of a demo, intended only for software developers to fiddle with and help improve. The options are limited to using pre-formatted lists and inserting bold, italics and links. There's also a dropdown menu with a list of formats (see picture), which obviates the need to mark up headers and boxes. Advanced users also have the option to see how their changes look in wiki syntax, HTML or JSON, a kind of Javascript-lite. Picture-related tools and the like will be included in later versions as the new editor is steadily improved before integration into Wikipedia starts in June 2012. Wikipedia reckons it is the most challenging technical project they have ever undertaken.