VisualEditor/Testing Non-Latin Characters Input and Behavior

Who:

 * People using non-Latin character sets routinely
 * People interested in exploring the new WYSIWYG Visual Editor for Wikipedia under development right now
 * People interested in accessibility and language representation
 * People interested in localization and internationalization issues

What:
Test Visual Editor

Visual Editor has a number of automated tests. To oversimplify, those tests check a large number of wiki pages by examining each one, loading into the Visual Editor, saving the page, and comparing the original page to the saved page. This is a valuable exercise and has pointed up a number of issues.

But there are important aspects of Visual Editor not checked by these automated tests. In particular, we are interested in how the editor behaves upon inserting, deleting, changing, and otherwise manipulating all sorts of text within the pages being edited. We are particularly interested in how non-Latin characters and strings may or may not affect the behavior of the Visual Editor. For example, there is an unsubstantiated report that strings from different non-Latin languages inserted into a page and saved with Visual Editor may cause loss of data in text elsewhere in the page. Finding and verifying such issues is important.

What this test is not: this test exercise will be done on English Wikipedia and possibly one other test environment. This is not a test of using Visual Editor in a local language wiki editing native language text. At this time there is not full support for native editing of Hebrew/Indic/Narayam/etc.; this test is an important step toward that support.

When:
There will be orientation and kickoff on Jan 28, and support for Visual Editor testers available throughout the last week of January 2013.

Where:

 * Kickoff on IRC #wikimedia-dev Jan 28 2013
 * Test documentation and discussion on mediawiki.org pages
 * Test environment on English Wikipedia
 * A labs instance dedicated to Visual Editor testing should be available for situation where production Wikipedia may not be desirable.

Why:

 * Visual Editor is an important project and this aspect of its behavior is not well explored
 * To encourage a community of people interested in helping test Wikipedia features in general
 * To have fun!

TODO:

 * Create testing guide/charters
 * Link up with Features Testing Group
 * Document steps to use VE in enwiki