Help:VisualEditor/VE as the main editor

Here is a quick-start guide so that you can learn how to support your community while VE>VE|VisualEditor becomes available by default to editors at your wiki.

The first step is involving your whole community to let them know VisualEditor is now available for editors at your wiki (or may soon be) and to get further help with the following tasks. To help the developers prioritize their work, please file a task on Phabricator (like [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T97315 this one]) to request an earlier enablement of the visual editor at your wiki, so they can assess any special needs your community may have. You can start a conversation at your Village Pump in your language and then link to this page, or you can set up a notice>MediaWiki:Sitenotice|sitenotice, or a watchlist>MediaWiki:Watchlist-details|watchlist notice for logged-in contributors.

Make sure that local documentation, especially pages read by new editors such as tutorials for newcomers, editing guides etc., mentions VisualEditor and its documentation. You may want to provide a dedicated space (a sandbox in the main or in the User: namespace) where even logged-out editors can try VE. [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AVisualEditor&type=revision&diff=600302691&oldid=598467251 Here is an example] of how this was done on the English Wikipedia (note the ?veaction=edit string at the end of the URL). There is key documentation to translate, mainly the guide>Help:VisualEditor/User_guide|User guide and [https://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special:Translate&group=ext-visualeditor-0-all&filter=%21translated&action=translate the interface itself]. Tip: For more information and instructions, please see VisualEditor/TranslationCentral. Help:TemplateData contains information about how to add TemplateData information to common templates on your wiki. This is important because if templates do not include this data, they will be difficult to use inside VisualEditor. Tip: There is now an tdgui>Help:TemplateData#TemplateData_editor|editing tool that allows you to add TemplateData in a simpler way. Start with templates that are often used in articles, such as citation and reference templates, as well as infoboxes. The MostTranscludedPages special page on your wiki might help you find out which are the most important templates you need to work on. The ones which are heavily used in the article namespace have the priority. Tip: Check how other wikis did this. For example, [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Cite_web/doc&action=edit&section=T-22 here is the TemplateData] for the   template at the English Wikipedia. If you recently imported   from that wiki and didn't customize it further, then copying and pasting their TemplateData will probably work for you.

Add special characters which are relevant to your language to the set of characters displayed inside the related tool.

Tip: See the chars>VisualEditor/Special characters|instructions page at mediawiki.org to learn more about this.

Set up a customized Cite menu with the most used Cite templates at your wiki.

Tip: See the cite>VisualEditor/Citation_tool#Citation_Tool_Definition|instructions page at mediawiki.org to learn more about this.

Enable Citoid on your wiki to make referencing easier and painless.

Tip: See the citoid>Citoid/Enabling Citoid on your wiki|instructions page at mediawiki.org to learn more about this. Check bugs on the local feedback page, if your wiki has one, to see [<tvar|vephab>https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/visualeditor/</> if they are already known to developers]. phab>Phabricator</>|Reporting bugs or feature requests directly on Phabricator will catch the developers' attention more quickly. A mention of the report and any updates to it will also appear live in the #mediawiki-visualeditor IRC channel. howto>Phabricator/Help#Creating_a_task</>|Learn how to file a task. You can also report problems by leaving a message at the fback>VisualEditor/Feedback</>|central feedback page on this site. Patrollers might want to keep an eye on the log of edits made with VisualEditor for a few weeks. You can reach it from [<tvar|rchanges>https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&tagfilter=visualeditor</> this link] (you'll need to change language code and sister project name in the browser's address bar after you click on it!). Tip: Experienced users may make more mistakes than expected, as they need some time to adapt to the new environment.

Keep yourself and your community up-to-date on VisualEditor news.

Tip: Sign up for the news>:m:VisualEditor/Newsletter</>|multilingual monthly newsletter, and please add your name translators>:m:VisualEditor/Newsletter/Translators</>|to the translators' list so that other people at your wiki will be able to read the bulletin in your language on community pages there.

Please fback>VisualEditor/Feedback</>|let the VisualEditor team know if you have further questions. portal>VisualEditor/Portal</>|Click here to go to the main VisualEditor page.