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The Misplaced Pages developers are happy to announce the live Beta of VisualEditor (VE), a tool that offers a way to edit pages without needing to learn wiki markup. Both VisualEditor and the original wikitext editor are automatically available for all registered editors, on all article pages. You can continue to edit wikitext directly using the "Edit source" tab.

Bug reports are welcome at Misplaced Pages:VisualEditor/Feedback. Your help in identifying bugs and training new users is invaluable.

VisualEditor is still in an early beta phase. While experienced editors are more comfortable with wikitext, some VE features are intended to be more user-friendly than the old style of editing, for example dialogs to edit complex templates and references.

If you want to suppress the extra tab (giving you only access to wikitext editing, rather than both VE and wikitext editing), you can completely hide VisualEditor from your user interface by enabling an experimental gadget:

Go to the gadgets tab of your preferences, scroll down to "Editing", tick the box labeled "Remove VisualEditor from the user interface", then scroll to the bottom and click "Save". You can reactivate VE access at any time by unticking that box.

Attention Internet Explorer (IE) users: VisualEditor is temporarily disabled for IE9 and IE10 users, due to various issues that are being fixed. VE will not be made available to users of IE8 and earlier; if you use these older versions of IE and want to edit with VisualEditor, you will need to use a different browser.

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Welcome to the portal for the VisualEditor, a new way of editing Misplaced Pages being developed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Editing Misplaced Pages has, in the past, required people to learn some wikimarkup, for most changes to articles. In 2001, this was acceptable; in 2013, it probably drives contributors away. VisualEditor allows people to edit without having to learn wikimarkup and will, it is hoped, encourage more readers to become editors.

The full timetable for the VisualEditor launch can be found below; but, by the end of July 2013, the VE team expects VE to be available to editors on almost all Wikimedia projects.

Experienced editors may well prefer editing wikitext directly, finding it faster and more precise. Editing purely in wikitext is still and will remain an option; the Wikimedia Foundation has absolutely no plans to remove this. Both editing options are accessible from the toolbar above each article.

About the VisualEditor

The VisualEditor is a new, "visual" way of editing Misplaced Pages that will let people contribute without having to learn wikimarkup. It has been available as an opt-in "alpha" release on the English-language Misplaced Pages since December 2012, in 16 other languages since April 2013, and in almost all other languages since the beginning of June. As shown below, the VE team expects to deploy this to almost all Wikipedias by the end of July, making it available for all editors without their opting in, starting with the English-language Misplaced Pages on 1 July.

For those interested in using VisualEditor, there is a guide to doing so, as well as a list of common keyboard shortcuts. If you're interested in helping with the deployment, there are lots of tasks that needed to be done. You can receive regular status updates on your talk page by signing up for the VE newsletter.

Video explaining the "alpha" version of the Misplaced Pages Visual Editor

At the moment, the VisualEditor has a large number of bugs. While some bugginess was inevitable, the developers' goal is to eliminate as many of these bugs as quickly as possible. Some entirely new features are still yet to be built. If you encounter an issue, then please report it on the Feedback page.

Current limitations include:

  • Odd-looking – The developers are currently struggling with making the HTML that VE produces look like what editors are used to seeing, so styling and so on may look a little (or even very) odd. Developer time is being spent on improving this, but their focus remains on ensuring that the VisualEditor does not alter wikitext unexpectedly.
  • Incomplete editing – The content of some "complex" formatting, such as tables and definition lists, will display and can be edited, but editors using VE cannot modify the structures or add new entries. Adding features in this area is one of the developers' priorities.
  • Cannot edit a single section. VisualEditor only loads entire pages. One impact is that large articles may take 15 seconds or so to load.
  • Limited browser support – VisualEditor currently works in only in the most modern versions of Firefox, Chrome and Safari. A volunteer is working on Opera support, and the developers aim to have support for the latest versions of Internet Explorer once they release the VisualEditor more widely.
  • Articles and User pages only – The VisualEditor is only enabled for the article and user namespaces (the latter allows editors to make changes in a personal sandbox). In time, VE will include the specialised editing tools needed for non-article pages, but the developer focus has been on articles. On pages other than those in the article and user namespaces, the "Edit" button will take editors to the old (wikitext) editor.
  • Slow loading - Loading longer pages into VisualEditor takes a long time, though significantly less time at the present moment than it did at the initial rollout of VE.

Because of these limitations and the many remaining bugs in Visual Editor, the developers recommend that VE users click "Review your changes" before saving a page, and report any problems they see.

Timetable

Week of.. Launch Target projects
1 July Launch to all logged-in users as the default editor English-language Misplaced Pages
15 July Launch to all logged-in and anonymous users as the default editor English-language Misplaced Pages
22 July Launch to all logged-in and anonymous users on other first-stage projects TBD – definitely dewiki, frwiki, itwiki. Probably also arwiki, nlwiki, hewiki, hiwiki, jawiki, kowiki, ruwiki, plwiki, eswiki and svwiki
29 July Launch to all logged-in and anonymous users on all other projects All Wikipedias, except those languages with language variants, such as Chinese.

How to help out

Help is needed to make the VisualEditor as good as it can be: You can find and report bugs while using the software or lend a hand in many other tasks, such as:

  • Updating help pages – All Wikimedia Foundation projects have help pages to make contributing easier for new editors. Unfortunately, the full launch of VisualEditor will make obsolete the screenshots and tutorials in these help pages, because they describe how to edit using the markup editor. Therefore, the VE development team needs help updating help pages. The user guide to VisualEditor is a starting place for text for the new help pages.
  • Adding TemplateData to templates – The VisualEditor features an interactive template editor—described in more detail in the user guide—and as you'll see if you use it on Misplaced Pages, some templates have named parameters and nice descriptions that make it easy to use. However, other templates lack them because they need "TemplateData" before this feature will work. If you're interested in adding TemplateData, then read the guide to it and the list of the most important templates to add it to.
  • Help new users – The successful launch of VisualEditor might result in many more new editors than usual, and even though editing may be easier, learning policies and guidelines and how to interact with the community will still be hard. Please try to spend some time on the help desk or in the IRC help channel to help newcomers acclimate to Misplaced Pages.

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