VisualEditor/Portal

Welcome to the portal for the VisualEditor - a new way of editing Wikipedia being developed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Editing Wikipedia at the moment requires people to learn wikimarkup, a fairly complex markup language, even to make tiny corrections to an article. In 2001, this was acceptable - in 2013, it's driving contributors away. The VisualEditor allows people to edit without having to learn wikimarkup, and will, we hope, help encourage people to contribute to Wikipedia.

The full timetable for the VisualEditor launch can be found below - but by the end of July 2013, we expect this to be the default editor for users on almost all Wikipedia projects.

About the VisualEditor
The VisualEditor is a new, "visual" way of editing Wikipedia, which will let people contribute without having to learn wikimarkup. It has been available as an opt-in "alpha" release on the English-language Wikipedia since December 2012, in 16 other languages since April 2013, and in almost all other languages since the beginning of June. As explained below, we expect to deploy this to almost all Wikipedias by the end of July as the default editor, starting with the English-language Wikipedia on 1 July.

If you're interested in using the VisualEditor, we have a guide to doing so, as well as a list of common keyboard shortcuts. If you're interested in helping us with the deployment, there are lots of tasks you can do. We will be releasing regular status updates, which you can have delivered directly to your talkpage by signing up for our newsletter.

At the moment, the VisualEditor is going to have 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 the VisualEditor, and particularly big ones may time out after 60 seconds. In the future the software will be a lot faster, and will allow for the loading of larger pages.
 * Odd-looking – we currently struggle with making the HTML we produce look like what you are used to seeing, so styling and so on may look a little (or even very) odd. So far, this hasn't been our priority, as our focus has been on making sure we don't disrupt articles with the VisualEditor by altering the wikitext.
 * Incomplete editing – Some elements of "complex" formatting will display and let you edit their contents, but 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, we have only got VisualEditor to work in the most modern versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer. It does not work in very old versions of each browser, and does not work in Opera, although a volunteer is working on Opera support.
 * Articles and User pages only – The VisualEditor will only be enabled for the article and user namespaces (so you can make changes in a personal sandbox), and will not work with talk pages, templates, categories, etc.. In time, we will build out the kinds of specialised editing tools needed for non-articles, but our focus has been on articles.

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

How to help out
For the 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 when the VisualEditor is launched, 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 the VisualEditor.
 * Adding TemplateData to templates. The 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 here, 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 acclimatised to Wikipedia.