Help:VisualEditor/FAQ - MediaWiki
Jump to content
From mediawiki.org
Help:VisualEditor
Translate this page
Languages:
Avañe'ẽ
Bahasa Indonesia
Cymraeg
Ido
Kreyòl ayisyen
Lëtzebuergesch
Nederlands
Scots
Sunda
Tagalog
Tiếng Việt
Türkçe
Yorùbá
asturianu
azərbaycanca
català
dansk
eesti
emiliàn e rumagnòl
euskara
føroyskt
galego
hrvatski
italiano
lietuvių
magyar
norsk bokmål
polski
português
português do Brasil
slovenčina
slovenščina
suomi
svenska
čeština
Ελληνικά
български
русский
саха тыла
српски / srpski
українська
հայերեն
ייִדיש
עברית
اردو
العربية
سنڌي
فارسی
پښتو
हिन्दी
বাংলা
தமிழ்
తెలుగు
ქართული
中文
閩東語 / Mìng-dĕ̤ng-ngṳ̄
한국어
Note:
When you edit this page, you agree to release your contribution under the
CC0
. See
Public Domain Help Pages
for more info.
VisualEditor portal
General
Leave feedback
2017 wikitext editor
VisualEditor on mobile
About
How to use VisualEditor
Keyboard shortcuts
Why are we building this?
VisualEditor rollouts
Frequently Asked Questions
User testing reports
Help with the launch
Update help pages
Add TemplateData
TemplateData tutorial
Help new users
TranslationCentral
Translate & localize documentation
How to take screenshots
translate
General
edit
What's VisualEditor?
VisualEditor is a software development initiative by the Wikimedia Foundation that will allow people to edit pages in MediaWiki without needing to learn wikitext syntax. With VisualEditor, formatting pages will work very similarly to a word processor. While editing, the page will look very similar to what the page will look like after it is saved.
Why is this change being made?
The complex wiki markup syntax used by the old editing window is the
biggest barrier
to making the first edit, and therefore the biggest barrier to beginning the path that could lead to someone's becoming a productive, experienced member of the editing community. To increase the number of successful first attempts at editing, we need a better editing system. Please read our
longer explanation
for more details.
Where do I go to learn more about using VisualEditor?
Please see the
VisualEditor User guide
When will VisualEditor be enabled on my wiki?
The current schedule for future rollouts is posted at
VisualEditor/Rollouts
. More than half of Wikipedias received VisualEditor as an option for all users during 2013. VisualEditor is available as an opt-in
Beta Feature
to almost all logged-in users at all Wikimedia Foundation projects.
Why are you deploying the software even though development is not finished?
The software has features to be added and issues to be resolved. Ultimately, the best way to detect bugs and identify missing features is to have as many people as possible using the software and playing with it. While we know that bugs are disruptive in the short term, they will be fixed, and the current use is what lets us identify things that need fixing.
I found an issue with VisualEditor. How can I tell you to fix it?
If you're willing and able, please
report the issue in Phabricator
in the
"VisualEditor" product
. Most large Wikipedias also have a wiki page dedicated to feedback about VisualEditor;
see the list on Wikidata
. There is also a
central feedback page
on mediawiki.org.
How do I disable VisualEditor?
To continue to edit the wikitext directly, simply click the "Edit source" button instead of "Edit". On section edit links, you can open the classic wikitext editor for that section by clicking "edit source" instead of the regular "edit" link. On wikis where VisualEditor is still a Beta Feature, you can simply uncheck its box in the
Beta tab
of your Preferences; on the other wikis, you can check the
Temporarily disable VisualEditor while it is in beta
box from the
Editing tab
instead.
A feature is missing in VisualEditor. How do I ask you to add it?
Some features are currently being developed or planned. The
Roadmap
, the
Wikimedia Engineering goals pages
for 2015–2016 and the
Phabricator workboard
provide some additional information as well. If you can't find any reference to the new feature you'd like to suggest, please submit it using the same process used to report an issue.
Will it still be possible to edit using wikitext after VisualEditor becomes the primary editing interface?
Yes. While VisualEditor will eventually be offered to all users by default, a method for editing the underlying “source” text will continue to exist. There are no plans to remove wikitext editing.
Can I use familiar wikimarkup like [[ ]] and {{ }} in VisualEditor?
No. Currently, those shortcuts will trigger the link and the template tool respectively. If you use wikimarkup in the article, a warning message will appear. See
VisualEditor User guide
for more about how to use VisualEditor.
Why is my browser not supported?
Building a modern editing interface for Wikipedia and its sister wiki is a technical challenge, but it's possible using modern web technologies and standards. Unfortunately, some browsers don't support many of the features we need for VisualEditor. We're doing our best to support the most common browsers: VisualEditor works well with recent versions of the most popular web browsers: Firefox 15 and up; Iceweasel 10 and up; Safari 7 and up; Chrome 19 and up; Opera 15 and up; Microsoft Internet Explorer 10 and up; Edge 12 and up. In some browsers, such as Internet Explorer 9, a warning message will still show up, but users shouldn't experience any major problems editing. Trying to work around the limitations of older browsers would divert resources from improvements that would benefit the majority of users. We encourage you to upgrade to a supported browser and, if you can't, to continue to edit using the source wikitext editor. (See
target browser matrix
for specific details.)
Does VisualEditor work with Wikisource's ProofreadPage, or Wiktionary's templates, and other features that Wikipedia doesn't have?
VisualEditor is flexible enough to be adapted to all Wikimedia sites. However, Wiktionary's heavy reliance on templates will require significant work by community members to provide TemplateData to their users, and Wikisource's ProofreadPage tool will require some additional work to integrate VisualEditor smoothly.
Can I install VisualEditor on my personal wiki outside Wikimedia?
Yes, at your own risk.
VisualEditor
and
Parsoid
extensions are available for download but they're still experimental; note that Parsoid requires
nodeJS
. If you do install and use them, please let us know what worked and what didn't
in Phabricator
Does VisualEditor make automatic fixes to pages?
In most cases, VisualEditor will not make changes to formatting on lines that are not being directly edited. In cases where markup already on the page is handled incorrectly (for example, with tables that are not closed), it may attempt to correct these.
Talk pages
edit
Will the visual editor be enabled on talk pages?
No. This question comes up quite often.
The visual editor is designed to edit content, plain pages of text.
Talk pages aren't content. Many of the tools and design patterns that make VE nice to use to edit content make it poor to use for discussions.
To make it usable for discussions, we would have to remove or break many of those patterns in VE. We have spent a lot of time researching with users what works best there.
VE can't deal with structured discussions and plain-text discussions are not structured discussions.
Discussions like they are on traditional talk pages are not structured discussions from a technical perspective, despite the fact there is a certain number of colons or bullet points added to each answer to provide a pseudo-structure. With the current design of classical discussions, a piece of software can't know who has replied to whom – only humans can. There is no real connection between posts (which post is the parent/child of which), which is the definition of a structured discussion.
DiscussionTools
is the default talk page system provided with MediaWiki.
It is the default discussion system at all Wikimedia wikis.
It is available on the desktop and mobile web site, but not in
Wikimedia Apps
DiscussionTools provide a set of tools to participate to discussions, with visual and wikitext editing modes.
Will the visual editor be enabled on namespaces that also host discussions?
This is the case of a good number of community boards, like village pumps, hosted under the Wikipedia: namespace.
The visual editor
has not been designed to edit discussions
With the deployment of
DiscussionTools
, it is possible to deploy the visual editor to Wikipedia namespace and to namespaces where conversations happen. However, editing or participating into discussions using the "edit" button will trigger limitations, like breaking indentations or page setup.
It is possible to deploy the visual editor to these namespaces,
only
if communities acknowledge of these limitations, and accept that the editing team will not be prioritizing any issues that emerge as a result of people using the visual editor in namespace it hasn't been designed for.
DiscussionTools
will be available on any page where
signatures
are present and either:
The
__NEWSECTIONLINK__
magic word
is present
The page exists in a namespace that project has declared as a
signature namespace
Community resources
edit
Where can I read more about what communities can do to adapt the visual editor to their sites?
You can find a sort of "checklist"
here on mediawiki.org
Where can I find people experienced in this kind of effort?
There is a list of names at
Community Taskforce
Miscellaneous
edit
My question isn't here. Where do I ask?
You can ask on the VisualEditor feedback page on your wiki (
see the list on Wikidata
) or on the
central feedback page
on mediawiki.org.
References
edit
Based on James Forrester's
message on wikimedia-l mailing-list
, June 2016
Retrieved from "
Category
VisualEditor
Help
VisualEditor/FAQ
Add topic