VisualEditor
| Group: | Features |
| Start: | 2011-05-15 |
| End: | |
| Team: | Roan Kattouw, Rob Moen, Alex Monk, Ed Sanders, Moriel Schottlender, Timo Tijhof • David Chan (Language Engineering), Rummana Yasmeen (Quality Assurance) • Kaity Hammerstein (Design) |
| Management: | James Forrester, Trevor Parscal |
| Status: | See updates |
- For the VisualEditor deployment at the English Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:VisualEditor.
- For changes made using the VisualEditor, see VisualEditor, VisualEditor: Check, and VisualEditor: Switched
The VisualEditor project aims to create a reliable rich-text editor for MediaWiki. It is being developed so it can be used as a MediaWiki extension, ug the Parsoid project to supply HTML+RDFa.
It is currently deployed to various namespaces on this wiki (including the main namespace in which this page exists); more information about this test deployment can be found on Wikimedia's blog, the FAQs, and VisualEditor:Welcome or VisualEditor:Test. Please note that the test deployment only works with the Vector skin. For more information, please visit the VisualEditor Portal.
Rationale[edit | edit source]
The decline in new contributor growth is the single most serious challenge facing the Wikimedia movement. Removing avoidable technical impediments associated with Wikimedia's editing interface is a necessary pre-condition for increasing the number of Wikimedia contributors.
Status[edit | edit source]
- Why are we building this?
- VisualEditor rollouts
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Media Q&A (in English)
- How to use VisualEditor
- VisualEditor roadmap
- User testing reports
- Design portal
- Update help pages
- Add TemplateData
- Help new users
- TranslationCentral
- Translate & localize documentation
Saving a page should now be noticeably faster in most cases, as we have implemented a system to compress the data the browser sends to the server (bug 66914). We will later experiment to see whether this should only apply in some cases, like where the page is longer than a length, the users' browser is well-written, or their computer is fast enough. Once we have solid numbers we'll report on them in the metrics section of the roadmap. The "reference" tool, which creates a blank <ref></ref> without a template, has been moved from the "insert" menu to the bottom "Cite" menu, below the community-selected templates like "Cite web" which create proper citations on those wikis that have configured it.
When you add a new media item, you are now able to set the caption before it is inserted (bug 67170), and you can switch out the image used in an existing one without losing the caption and other settings (bug 51033). When you use the media search, it resets to the name of the page each time you use it (bug 65038). You are now offered a prompt to retain changes when switching to the "Edit Source" tab, rather than having to find the option in the menus (bug 57462), and closing from that offer won't switch you to the edit source tab throwing away your changes.
A number of additional icons in VisualEditor now show a flipped variant when users are in a right-to-left environment like Arabic or Hebrew. The help window listing keyboard shortcuts now uses a more normal format, showing commands at "Ctrl + K" rather than "CTRL+K". The "language" Beta Feature now shows up in the styling menu, rather than the "insert" menu where it didn't make much sense.
We fixed a problem where selecting a node like an image or a template with the mouse (but not the keyboard) would make it not let you use backspace or delete to remove it (bug 67178). If you click on something you can't currently edit, like a reference defined inside a template, you now won't be prompted to try anyway by the context menu (bug 67176). We also changed the context menu so it doesn't appears over the top of items like formulæ that you edit in-place (bugs 66542 and 67306).
We made a big change to how templates covering partial items, like templates that generate a row of a table, behave; this should significantly improve how they behave, as well as their initial appearance, though there remain some issues if you edit the templates themselves (bugs 50607, 50951, 58387, 64780 and 67169). We changed the behaviour of selections so that deleting a block item like an image no longer highlights the previous line (bug 67213).
On mobile, we fixed a number of issues. In iOS Safari, a clutch of browser bugs meant that highlights were being misplaced around (bug 67063), links would be followed rather than editable (bug 65326), items like references or images would need to be tapped on twice (bug 66999), clicking on a reference would navigate back to the reading page (bug 67002), and closing the link editor would show the link suggestions would show in the editor (bug 67399). We fixed an issue that meant the link editor could crash in mobile if the page was blanked (bug 65418), and that link suggestions would not appear (bug 66753).
The context menu on images in the captions of other images, or inside references, now is correctly aligned with the image rather than being off to the side (bug 66494). We fixed the ability to tab to various dialogs and controls for users of Firefox, working around a browser bug there (bugs 65554 and 66824). The display of the title for templates which have a full stop ('.') now shows fully, not truncated at that point (bug 66939). VisualEditor now finds the TemplateData for non-templates used in transclusions (bug 52609).
If you update the page's display title in the page settings dialog, the page title will be updated when you save the page (bug 50341). We corrected a bug which meant that if your preferences are set to remind you to fill in an edit summary and you didn't, you weren't able to save the page after you had corrected this (bug 67345). A bug for users of Opera 12 that meant that pressing Escape or Tab on an empty line inserted a pawn symbol was also fixed (bug 63630).
The standalone core of VisualEditor now has a single-file distribution for third parties (bug 66117), which also has RTL stylesheets rather than expecting third parties to use CSSJanus like MediaWiki does (bug 65057). Work to support Internet Explorer continues, as well as performance.
You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.24/wmf12 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.- You can see the team's current code dashboard on gerrit.
Timeline[edit | edit source]
- 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 2011-12 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 2012-13 Engineering Goals document sets a timeline for VisualEditor's development and deployment up to the end of June 2013.
- VisualEditor is scheduled to be deployed across Wikimedia projects over the coming months. Below is the schedule as of December 2013:
| Week of… | Launch | Users | Projects | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Summer 2012 | Phase 0 | All users | Mediawiki.org[1] |  Done |
| 1 July 2013 | Logged-in users | English Wikipedia (en)[2] | Done |
|
| 15 July 2013 | All users | Done |
||
| 24 July 2013 | Phase 1 | Logged-in users | 7 of the largest Wikipedias
Spanish (es), French (fr), Hebrew (he), Italian (it), Polish (pl), Russian (ru) & Swedish (sv)[3] |
Done |
| 29 July 2013 | All users | Done |
||
| 30 September 2013 | Phase 2 | Logged-in users | 27 of the next largest Wikipedias
Bulgarian (bg), Catalan (ca), Cebuano (ceb), Czech (cs), Danish (da), Modern Greek (el), Estonian (et), Basque (eu), Finnish (fi), Galician (gl), Croatian (hr), Hungarian (hu), Indonesian (id), Latvian (lv), Malay (ms), Neopolitan (nap), Norwegian - Nynorsk (nn), Norwegian - Bokmål (no), Sicilian (scn), Simple English (simple), Slovak (sk), Slovenian (sl), Turkish (tr), Ukrainian (uk), Venetian (vec), Volapük (vo), Waray-Waray (war) |
Done |
| 7 October 2013 | All users | Done |
||
| 2 December 2013 | Phase 3 | All users | 91 Wikipedias with all characters normally directly available to users
Acehnese (ace), Aymara (ay), Central Bikol (bcl), Bislama (bi), Banjar (bjn), Chavacano (cbk-zam), Chechen (ce), Chamorro (ch), Cheyenne (chy), Corsican (co), Kashubian (csb), Zazaki (diq), Emilian-Romagnol (eml), Extremaduran (ext), Fijian (fj), Faroese (fo), Franco-Provençal/Arpitan (frp), North Frisian (frr), Friulian (fur), Scottish Gaelic (gd), Hawai'ian (haw), Fiji Hindi (hif), Haitian (ht), Interlingua (ia), Ilokano (ilo), Ido (io), Lojban (jbo), Kongo (kg), Kikuyu (ki), Greenlandic (kl), Komi-Permyak (koi), Ripuarian (ksh), Cornish (kw), Ladino (lad), Lak (lbe), Ganda (lg), Limburgish (li), Ligurian (lij), Lombard (lmo), Banyumasan (map-bms), Malagasy (mg), Maori (mi), Minangkabau (min), Maltese (mwl), Erzya (myv), Nauruan (na), Low Saxon (nds), Dutch Low Saxon (nds-nl), Novial (nov), Norman (nrm), Northern Sotho (nso), Chichewa (ny), Oromo (om), Pangasinan (pag), Kapampangan (pam), Papiamento (pap), Picard (pcd), Pennsylvania German (pdc), Norfuk (pih), Piedmontese (pms), Portuguese (pt), Quechuan (qu), Romansh (rm), Romani (rmy), Kirundi (rn), Aromanian (roa-rup), Tarantino (roa-tara), Kinyarwanda (rw), Northern Sami (se), Sango (sg), Samoan (sm), Shona (sn), Somali (so), Sranan (srn), Swazi (ss), Sesotho (st), Saterland Frisian (stq), Sundanese (su), Tongan (to), Tok Pisin (tpi), Tsonga (ts), Tumbuka (tum), Tahitian (ty), Tuvan (tyv), Veps (vep), West Flemish (vls), Kalmyk (xal), Yiddish (yi), Yoruba (yo), Zeelandic (zea), Zulu (zu) |
Done |
| 13 January 2014 | Phase 4 | All users | 23 remaining Wikipedias with all characters normally directly available to users
Alemannic (als), Aragonese (an), Asturian (ast), Bavarian (bar), Belarusian (be), Belarussian Taraškievica (be-x-old), Bosnian (bs), Esperanto (eo), West Frisian (fy), Irish (ga), Javanese (jv), Latin (la), Luxembourgish (lb), Lithuanian (lt), Occitan (oc), Palatinate German (pfl), Romanian (ro), Scots (sco), Albanian (sq), Swahili (sw), Tswana (tn), Vietnamese (vi), Xhosa (xh) |
Done |
| TBC | Phase 5 | All users | 53 Wikipedias with some characters not normally directly-available to users
(Provisional list) Abkhazian (ab), Afrikaans (af), Akan (ak), Anglo-Saxon (ang), Avar (av), Azerbaijani (az), Bashkir (ba), Samogitian (bat-smg), Bambara (bm), Breton (br), Buryat (bxr), Crimean Tatar (crh), Old Church Slovonic (cu), Chuvash (cv), Welsh (cy), Lower Sorbian (dsb), Ewe (ee), Fula (ff), Võro (fiu-vro), Gagauz (gag), Guarani (gn), Hausa (ha), Upper Sorbian (hsb), Igbo (ig), Inupiak (ik), Icelandic (is), Karakalpak (kaa), Kabyle (kab), Kabardian (kbd), Karachay-Balkar (krc), Komi (kv), Kyrgyz (ky), Lezgian (lez), Lingala (ln), Latgalian (ltg), Moksha (mdf), Meadow Mari (mhr), Macedonian (mk), Mongolian (mn), Hill Mari (mrj), Maltese (mt), Nahuatl (nah), Navajo (nv), Ossetian (os), Rusyn (rue), Sakha (sah), Silesian (szl), Turkmen (tk), Tatar (tt), Udmurt (udm), Venda (ve), Walloon (wa), Wolof (wo) |
|
| TBC | Phase 6 | All users | 59 Wikipedias with complex characters inserted using Input Method Editors
(Provisional list) Amharic (am), Arabic (ar), Aramaic (arc), Egyptian Arabic (arz), Assamese (as), Behari (bh), Bengali (bn), Tibetan (bo), Bishnupriya (bpy), Buginese (bug), Min Dong (cdo), Cherokee (chr), Sorani Kurdish (ckb), Cree (cr), Dhivehi (dv), Dzongkha (dz), Persian (fa), Gilaki (glk), Gothic (got), Gujarati (gu), Manx (gv), Hakka (hak), Hindi (hi), Akan (hy), Japanese (ja), Georgian (ka), Khmer (km), Kannada (kn), Korean (ko), Kashmiri (ks), Lao (lo), Malayalam (ml), Marathi (mr), Burmese (my), Mazanderani (mzn), Nepali (ne), Nepal Bhasa (new), Oriya (or), Punjabi (pa), Pali (pi), Saraiki (Western Punjabi) (pnb), Pontic (pnt), Pashto (ps), Sanskrit (sa), Sindhi (sd), Serbo-Croatian (sh), Sinhala (si), Tamil (ta), Telugu (te), Thai (th), Tigrinya (ti), Tagalog (tl), Uyghur (ug), Urdu (ur), Wu (wuu), Zhuang (za), Classical Chinese (zh-classical), Min Nan (zh-min-nan), Cantonese (zh-yue) |
|
| TBC | Phase 7 | All users | 9 language variant Wikipedias
Gan (gan), Inuktitut (iu), Kazakh (kk), Kurdish (ku), Tachelhit (shi), Serbian (sr), Tajik (tg), Uzbek (uz), Chinese (zh) |
VisualEditor may be offered to users at non-Wikipedia projects, such as Commons or Wiktionary, after deployment to the Wikipedias has completed. No timeline has been set for this.
VisualEditor was made opt-in on the English Wikipedia in September 2013.
VisualEditor was made opt-in on the Spanish Wikipedia in February 2014.
Notes[edit | edit source]
- ↑ Initially restricted to just the VisualEditor: namespace, later for all pages.
- ↑ Subsequently switched back to "opt-in" mode in September 2013.
- ↑ German (de) and Dutch (nl) initially proposed, but withdrawn before full deployment due to community concerns.
Documentation[edit | edit source]
You can speak with us in our chat channel, #mediawiki-visualeditorconnect.
Related pages[edit | edit source]
For more information on VisualEditor and its design process, see these directory pages:
See also[edit | edit source]
- Extension:VisualEditor (including installation instructions)
- Guide to hacking VisualEditor: VE gadgets
- Parsoid
- Future
- Wikitext.next
- Statistics: some are available at [1] (enter "visual" in the search bar, choose one and click "Visualize"), e.g. English Wikipedia hourly edits, visual editor vs wikitext (% by user group)
