VisualEditor/Portal

Welcome to the portal for VisualEditor. VisualEditor (VE) is a new way of editing Wikipedia that is being developed by the Wikimedia Foundation. It allows people edit without having to learn wiki markup. We hope it will help people contribute to Wikipedia.

== About VisualEditor ==

VisualEditor is a "visual" way of editing Wikipedia. Editing Wikipedia has historically required people to learn wiki markup, a fairly complex markup language, even to make tiny changes to a page. In 2001, this was acceptable; in 2014, it is driving contributors away. We hope that VisualEditor will be useful to existing contributors and more welcoming to new ones.

VisualEditor has been available as an opt-in "alpha" release on the English-language Wikipedia since December 2012, [https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/04/25/visualeditor-alpha-in-15-languages/ in 14 more languages since April 2013], and [https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/06/06/preparing-for-visualeditor-on-all-wikipedias/ almost all other languages] since the beginning of June 2013. As of July 2014, we have made it available by default to logged-in and logged-out editors at more than half of the Wikipedias. We expect to make it available to almost all Wikipedias by the end of 2014 or early 2015.

We will be releasing regular status updates at Mediawiki.org.

== Using VisualEditor ==

If you're interested in using VisualEditor, we have a guide to doing so, as well as a list of common keyboard shortcuts.

At the moment, VisualEditor has a number of bugs; this is inevitable. If you encounter an issue, please do not hesitate to report it on the Feedback page. There are also some areas where we still have to build entirely new features. Current limitations include:

Slow to load — It will take some time for long, complex pages to load into VisualEditor. In the future the software will be a lot faster, and will allow for the loading of larger pages. Incomplete editing — Some elements of complex formatting will display and let you edit their contents, but will not let users edit their structure or add new entries – such as tables or definition lists. Adding features in this area is one of our priorities. Limited browser support — Right now, VisualEditor only works in the most modern versions of Firefox, Chrome and Safari. It does not work in very old versions of any browser. Support for Opera is limited. Internet Explorer currently does not work, but we are working on adding support for versions 9, 10, and 11 of Internet Explorer. Most content pages, not talk pages — VisualEditor is only enabled for some namespaces. At most Wikipedias, VisualEditor can be used on articles, User:, File:, Help: and Category: pages. VisualEditor is not currently available for Wikipedia: pages or any talk pages.

Because of these limitations, and inevitable bugs, we recommend that users click "" before saving the page, and report any problems they encounter.

== How to help out ==

For VisualEditor to be as good as it can be, there are a lot of things we need help with. Obviously, one big area is using the software, finding bugs and reporting them, but there are many other tasks as well. These include:

Updating help pages — All of our projects have help pages to make it easier for new users to contribute. Unfortunately they are all built around the markup editor, and as VisualEditor evolves, the screenshots and tutorials will all become outdated. It would be very useful if people could update help pages, based on our tutorial to using VisualEditor. Adding TemplateData to templates — VisualEditor features a nice template editor, which is described in more detail on our help page. As you'll see if you use it on Wikipedia, some templates have named parameters and nice descriptions that make it easy to use. Others do not. This is because templates need "TemplateData" before this feature will work. If you're interested in adding TemplateData, we have a guide to doing so, along with a list of the most important templates to add it to. Help new users — If the VisualEditor launch is successful, we will have a lot more new users than we are used to, and even though editing may be easier, working out how to interact with the community will still be hard. Please do try and spend some time on the help desk, or in the IRC help channel, to help these newcomers become acclimatized to Wikipedia.