VisualEditor

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Wikimedia Foundation project
VisualEditor
VisualEditor-logo.svg
Extending and improving the editing tools used at Wikimedia
Group: Contributors
Start: 2011-05-15
Team members: Editing team
For help installing and running VisualEditor, see Extension:VisualEditor.
For changes made on this wiki using VisualEditor, see the filters visualeditor and visualeditor-switched.

The VisualEditor project by the Editing team aims to create a reliable rich-text editor for MediaWiki. VisualEditor is available as a MediaWiki extension using the Parsoid project to supply HTML+RDFa; however, its core implementation can be run without any of MediaWiki, Parsoid, or Node.js.

Edit #50,000,000 in VisualEditor was made in March 2020.

As of 2020, the visual editor is available to all users here at MediaWiki.org and on almost all Wikipedias and Wikivoyages. On most other Wikimedia projects and languages, it is available as an opt-in Beta Feature to logged-in users. VisualEditor is only available in some namespaces, including the main namespace (where this page is), but generally not in discussion or template namespaces.

Information about VisualEditor's wikitext mode is at 2017 wikitext editor.

More information about VisualEditor can be found on Wikimedia's blog and the FAQs. Please visit the main, multi-lingual VisualEditor Portal.

Original rationale

The decline in new contributor growth was viewed as the single most serious challenge facing the Wikimedia movement. VisualEditor was built with the goal of removing avoidable technical impediments associated with Wikimedia's editing interface, as a necessary pre-condition for increasing the number of Wikimedia contributors.

History

  • 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 2011–2012 Wikimedia annual plan, released July 2011, states a goal for VisualEditor: "First opt-in user-facing production usage by December 2011, and first small wiki default deployment by June 2012".
  • The 2012–2013 Engineering Goals document sets a timeline for VisualEditor's development and deployment up to the end of June 2013.
  • The 2013–2014 Engineering Goals document lists the goals for that year.
  • VisualEditor was deployed to most users at most Wikimedia projects by the end of 2015. See VisualEditor/Rollouts for a list.

Enabling VisualEditor by default for all users or for all logged-in users can be requested by contacting the Editing team's product manager.

Core module

VisualEditor is a standalone program that can be run without MediaWiki, Parsoid, or Node.js that provides a visual editor for editing HTML5 pages. It is written in JavaScript and runs in the browser.

Here are some helpful links:

Developer documentation

You can speak with us in our chat channel, #mediawiki-visualeditor connect.

Dashboards

Related pages

For more information on VisualEditor and its design process, see these directory pages:

See also

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