VisualEditor/Portal
Welcome to the portal for VisualEditor. VisualEditor (VE) is a new way of editing Wikipedia that is being developed by the Wikimedia Foundation. It lets people edit without having to learn wiki markup. We hope it will help people contribute to Wikipedia.
| Read Help:VisualEditor/User guide. | Report a problem with VisualEditor. |
| 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). |
| VisualEditor portal |
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| General |
| About |
| Help with the launch |
About VisualEditor
VisualEditor is a "visual" way of editing Wikipedia. Editing Wikipedia has historically required people to learn wiki markup, a fairly complex markup language, even to make tiny changes to a page. In 2001, this was acceptable; in 2015, it is driving contributors away. We hope that VisualEditor will be useful to existing contributors and more welcoming to new users.
VisualEditor has been available as an opt-in "alpha" release at MediaWiki.org since mid-2012 and on the English-language Wikipedia since December 2012, in 14 more languages since April 2013, and almost all other languages since the beginning of June 2013. As of July 2015, it has been available by default to logged-in and logged-out editors at more than 75% of the Wikipedias. We expect to make it available by default to most of the remaining languages in late 2015. Since late November 2014, it is also available as an opt-in Beta Feature at all WMF wikis except Wiktionary and Wikisource.
We are releasing a multilingual newsletter, focused on WMF wikis.
Using VisualEditor
If you're interested in using VisualEditor for editing, we have a guide to doing so, as well as a list of common keyboard shortcuts.
VisualEditor has some current bugs and limitations. If you encounter an issue, please do not hesitate to report it on the Feedback page. Current limitations include:
- Slow to load — It will take some time for long, complex pages to load into VisualEditor. In the future the software will be a lot faster, and will allow for the loading of larger pages.
- Incomplete editing — Some elements of complex formatting will display and let you edit their contents, but will not let users edit their structure or add new entries – such as definition lists. Adding features in this area is one of our priorities.
- Most content pages, not talk pages — VisualEditor is only enabled for some namespaces. At most Wikipedias, VisualEditor can be used on articles, User:, File:, Help: and Category: pages. VisualEditor is not currently available for Wikipedia: pages or any talk pages.
We recommend that users click "Review your changes" before saving the page and report any problems they encounter.
How to help out
For VisualEditor to be as good as it can be, there are a lot of things we need help with. Obviously, one big area is using the software, finding bugs and reporting them, but there are many other tasks as well. These include:
- Updating help pages — All of our projects have help pages to make it easier for new users to contribute. Unfortunately they are all built around the markup editor, and as VisualEditor evolves, the screenshots and tutorials will all become outdated. It would be very useful if people could update help pages, based on our tutorial to using VisualEditor.
- Adding TemplateData to templates — VisualEditor features a nice template editor, which is described in more detail on our help page. As you'll see if you use it on Wikipedia, some templates have named parameters and nice descriptions that make it easy to use. Others do not. This is because templates need "TemplateData" before this feature will work. If you're interested in adding TemplateData, we have a guide to doing so, along with a list of the most important templates to add it to.
- Help your community — See the list of useful ways to help your local community to optimize the editing experience with the visual editor.
- Help new users — If the VisualEditor launch is successful, we will have a lot 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 spend some time on the help desk, or in the IRC help channel, to help these newcomers become acclimatized to Wikipedia.
See also
- Help:VisualEditor/VE as the main editor - a checklist about optimizing the editing experience for your wiki and your fellow editors.
- Help:VisualEditor/Community Taskforce - get and offer help for visual editor-related work from and to other Wikimedians like you.
- Help:VisualEditor/The visual editor at Wikisources and Wiktionaries
- Help:VisualEditor/VE as Beta Feature - a former guide for communities totally new to the visual editor.