VisualEditor
| Group: | Features |
| Start: | 2011-05-15 |
| End: | |
| Team: | David Chan, Roan Kattouw, Inez Korczyński (Wikia), Rob Moen, Ed Sanders, Moriel Schottlender, Timo Tijhof, Christian Williams (Wikia), Rummana Yasmeen |
| Management: | James Forrester, Trevor Parscal |
| Status: | See updates |
- For the VisualEditor deployment at the English Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:VisualEditor.
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, using 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 the 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]
- Update help pages
- Add TemplateData
- Help new users
- TranslationCentral
- Translate & localize documentation
- Workshops:
The toolbar's text styling drop-down now has a down-indicator like the Insert menu and the formatting menu. We tweaked the order of the toolbar to put the reference and media insert options at the very top of the menu, and move the character inserter down out of the way. Changing the categories of a page now triggers a refresh of the categories box at the bottom of the page once you've saved (bug 48560). There is now a (very basic) editor for <gallery>s, though no scope for inserting a new one or changing its display type yet. VisualEditor now has a keyboard shortcuts help page in the help menu, and available by its own keyboard shortcut ⌤ Ctrl+/ or ⌘ Cmd+/ (bug 52844). When the page is loaded for editing, we no longer select the first node in the document if there's any text in it, but instead put the cursor just up-page of the first character (bug 58248).
We now only provide image resize handles on the "non-anchored" sides (so the bottom-right for left-aligned images and inline ones on LTR wikis, the bottom-left for right-aligned images and inline ones on RTL wikis, and both bottom corners for centred images), to avoid confusing behaviour where the resize handle let you drag the image into the wrong direction. In the transclusion dialog, parameters that are set using TemplateData to be 'required' now have a '*' symbol next to them to indicate this, but the requirement is not yet enforced (bug 53611). Template parameters are shown in the transclusion dialog using the recommended order specified in TemplateData; if no order is set, we use the order in which the parameters are declared in the template's <templatedata> block, or fall back to alphabetical order if that is missing (bug 51930). We have changed the encoding of the POST of the page HTML when saving which should reduce the amount of data sent over the network by ~40%, which will improve performance and reducing load when saving (bug 59660).
We fixed a major bug that meant inserting any template or other transclusion failed, and back-ported it to production so it should not occur anywhere (bug 59002). VisualEditor now removes, rather than just hides, the #contentSub links below the page title on old versions of pages or on sub-pages, so you can't accidentally click on the hidden-but-still-there text (bugs 52243 and 54325). We fixed a bug that meant that copying a link from one VisualEditor editor to another would result in some broken wikitext where you had an external URL given but in an internal link wikitext format (bug 58136). VisualEditor no longer throws an exception when the cursor is attempted to be put into a document with no content blocks, e.g. a document with 5 block images and no text (bug 59972).
- 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.
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]
- Parsoid
- Extension:VisualEditor (including installation instructions)
- 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).
