Wikimedia edges closer to banishing Wikitext
WYSIWYG Wikipedia editor to land in July
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Wikimedia's planned visual editor, a tool that will make it possible to pen Wikipedia entries without having to learn any markup language, will emerge as a beta “early July”.
The new tool was first made available in Alpha status to select users since December 2012, before all registered users were offered the chance to play in April
Vulture South is home to one of those users, who can offer the following look at the new tool, as applied to our own Wikipedia page.
Here's the current interface.
The current Wikipedia editor
And here's the new one.
The new Wikipedia editor. Click to enlarge.
Wikimedia's aim for the VisualEditor is to make it possible to contribute to its various projects without having to learn WikiText. Our brief exploration suggests it certainly removes any need to so much as remember what kind of parenthesis belongs where.
Wikimedia now says it “... will be carrying out a test of VisualEditor for some randomly-selected new accounts on the English Wikipedia beginning on 17 June. During this testing period, we will be monitoring the impact on users, listening to feedback, and solving problems.”
Once any issues that arise are behind it, the Foundation will be a little closer to its goal of making it easier for anyone to create and edit WikiPedia articles. Which may or may not, as many past incidents have shown, be a good thing. ®
