Topic on Extension talk:WikiEditor

What's the difference between this and the Visual Editor?

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AslanFrench (talkcontribs)

From the description it is not clear. Is this an older project that was eventually superseded by the Visual Editor but had similar ideas?

Jkmartindale (talkcontribs)

They're actually quite different. As the name suggests, Extension:VisualEditor provides a visual editing interface that doesn't require knowledge of wikitext. On the other hand, Extension:WikiEditor extends the standard wikitext editing interface. You may have noticed that the default editor included in MediaWiki core doesn't have as extensive a toolset as the wikitext editor on Wikimedia sites. The additional wikitext editor toolbars these wikis have are added by WikiEditor.

AslanFrench (talkcontribs)

@Jkmartindale Thank you, I can kind of get the gist of that but I wasn't clear on what their relationship was to each other within the organization? As in, if I were a new dev coming in, and I wanted to start learning how MediaWiki works, and I wanted to only focus on the new tools that would be actively evolved and developed going forward, which one would I focus on? Are they both being actively developed and have different use cases? Are the reasons why they're kept around due to a difference in design philosophy?

I eventually found a conversation on a third party website where an article described the WikiEditor as being superseded by the VisualEditor which confirms the idea that I got from their visual design etc, but it might be helpful if this information was explicated in the article in some way. I don't mean to tell you guys what to do, I'm just saying as a developer coming from the outside, it's difficult to see what the main thrust of the community or org is right now in it's development process. (for instance I can tell you off the top of my head what Wordpress, Canonical, ES6, Mozilla etc are all focusing on as communities and orgs, but it's much hard for me to parse this when looking at the MediaWiki project because things seem to be a bit all over the place).

Jkmartindale (talkcontribs)

It's been a while since I've been actively participating (if you could call it that) in the MediaWiki project, but judging from a quick glance at the trunk of WikiEditor, it's still actively developed. Not as actively as VisualEditor, but it's still getting bug fixes and being kept up-to-date with MediaWiki releases. WikiEditor is also pretty much "finished", so I'm not sure what else would be added to it other than maintenance fixes.

Don't treat this as an official statement or anything other than speculation, but I'm pretty sure WikiEditor is going to be around for a long time. VisualEditor is still "unstable" and some people like myself prefer WikiEditor by far (I've actually disabled VisualEditor on every Wikimedia site I'm a part of). Additionally, VisualEditor relies on Parsoid which in turn relies on Node.js, and I'm pretty sure WikiEditor would be kept around so that MediaWiki installs won't require both PHP and Node.

However if you're a new dev wanting to see how MediaWiki works, definitely ignore VisualEditor for now. You want to learn about MediaWiki core first, and when you get to extensions you'll want to look at simpler extensions. VisualEditor has a ton of moving parts that aren't necessarily tied to MediaWiki, so it's not going to give you much information that other extensions can't.

As far as what the main goals of the MediaWiki developers are, I don't really have a clue. I sort of just started fixing what I came across that was broken, or adding things that I wanted to a handful of extensions. I never really did figure out where all the developers hang out, except maybe IRC.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)

WikiEditor (aka the 2010 wikitext editor) is in active maintenance. That means that it will be kept working, but no new features are planned. The visual editor (aka VisualEditor's visual mode; it also has a wikitext mode) is still under development. The Editing team's current focus is VisualEditor on the mobile site.

If you are trying to figure out which one you're using, then you can go to the page Editor to see the screenshots.

SSethi (WMF) (talkcontribs)

@Thedonquixotic I understand your frustrations! I would like to share with you our New Developers guide which might give you an idea of our broader technical community, projects and recommended steps to start contributing. If you are interested in contributing to MediaWiki, then extension writing is what we recommend starting with and not MediaWiki core as its codebase is complex and we've limited resources to help with support and code review. If you would like to share your thoughts on how we could improve our New Developers guide to explain better what we do and anything else, I would love to hear your thoughts on the talk page.

AslanFrench (talkcontribs)

@SSethi (WMF) Thanks! I'll check it out. I'm going to start by fiddling around with creating skins since I'm really mostly a designer learning frontend development right now. But I've got some ideas of things I can do and it will help me learning the wiki way of doing things :) thanks!

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Side note from a non-technical person: Apparently, MediaWiki's definition of a "skin" is very narrow and specific, so some things that people call skins aren't really skins here. I don't know where (or even "if") that is documented properly.

AslanFrench (talkcontribs)

@SSethi (WMF) BTW here's another example of what I find really confusing when coming to MW: Topic:Unh0a9wd2ho92o09 I basically get the relationship between the wikitext editor and the visual editor (espc since I now know how the 2017 wikitext editor integrates into visual editor when you have both installed) but then I find stuff like multiple WYSIWYG editors (which seem MW supported, at least at some point though one of them seems to be supported by some org called BlueSpice?)

Maybe some kind of "Editors Explained" page that had every single major extension, past or present that served as an editor could be stacked up and compared, along with some comparative analysis on what they offer strengths and weaknesses wise, and what their current development status is etc.

Also btw, idk if you guys have looked at Gutenberg much but I'm a WP guy and I'm really excited about it. It might be something MW folks should check out, especially since Drupal peeps recently proved how it could be decoupled from the underlying CMS and pretty easily migrated to a new CMS. https://wptavern.com/first-look-at-live-demo-of-the-gutenberg-content-editor-for-drupal-8

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Editor has a list of (most of) the editors that are or were recently installed on wikis that are supported by the Wikimedia Foundation (e.g., the English Wikipedia). Most, but not all, of the software on that page is supported by devs employed by the Wikimedia Foundation.

The ones that aren't on that list are more like "this can be run on MediaWiki" rather than "supported".

I guess you could think of software in these groups:

  • the editing environments on the Wikimedia Foundation's wikis,
  • the third-party options, not on the Wikimedia Foundation's wikis, e.g., all things BlueSpice.
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