Idea Wiki:VisualEditor

Welcome to the portal for the VisualEditor, a way of editing Wikipedia being developed by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) that does not require editors to learn wiki markup. Until VisualEditor, editors had to learn wiki markup to make most edits. VisualEditor will allow people to edit all pages without having to learn wikitext markup and may encourage more readers to become editors.

Even after the eventual anticipated full-feature release of VisualEditor, experienced editors still may prefer editing wikitext because they find it faster and more precise. Editing articles purely in wikitext is and will remain an option that the Wikimedia Foundation has no plans to remove. Even editors who enable VisualEditor will have the wikitext option available from the toolbar for each page and section.

VisualEditor still has many bugs and missing features. If you encounter an issue, please report it on the Feedback page.

About VisualEditor
VisualEditor is a new, "visual" way of editing Wikipedia that allows people to contribute without having to learn wiki markup. This rich-text editor was made available as an opt-in release on the English-language Wikipedia back in December 2012, in 14 other languages in April 2013, and in most other languages at the beginning of June 2013. As of April 2015, it is available by default to users of about 76% of the language editions of Wikipedias and as an opt-in beta feature to the rest, along with most non-Wikipedia projects except Wiktionary and Wikisource.

To learn more about using VisualEditor, please read the guide to VisualEditor and the list of common keyboard shortcuts. Your help with the many tasks that need to be done is appreciated. You can also receive regular status updates on your talk page by signing up for the VisualEditor newsletter.

Limitations
Current known limitations include:
 * Not available in talk or discussion namespaces – In the English Wikipedia, VisualEditor is not enabled for any talk pages, in the Template or Wikipedia namespaces, or in several of the namespaces that are rarely edited. The "Edit" button for VisualEditor is not available on pages where VisualEditor cannot be used.
 * Template parameters are wikitext, not rich edited – VisualEditor lets you edit the parameters of template transclusions, but only as "wikitext" (so " " or nested templates like " ", not "Foo" or "").
 * Incomplete editing functionality – The content of some "complex" formatting, including definition lists, will display and can be edited, but editors using VisualEditor cannot modify certain details. Multi-column lists are edited through the complex transclusion dialog, which is difficult. Table editing on Mobile doesn't work properly. Adding features in this area is one of the developers' priorities.
 * Some browsers not supported – VisualEditor works in almost all relatively modern (last three years) versions of Chrome/Chromium, Firefox, Edge, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, Midori, Falkon (formerly Qupzilla), SeaMonkey and WebPositive (approximately 95% of all users). VisualEditor will never work with some browsers that do not follow Web standards, including Android 2.3 or Internet Explorer 8 or prior. If VisualEditor is not available in your browser, or if you have turned off Javascript, then you will only see the buttons for the wikitext editor.
 * Footnotes inside templates – Footnotes inside templates (most commonly, infoboxes and reflist) are not visible in the "reuse" dialog, causing discrepancies in the numbering of footnotes displayed at the bottom of the main VisualEditor editing window.
 * Unbalanced templates – VisualEditor struggles with templates that pass a bit of incomplete code, with markup, to another template or table. These may display oddly or may not be editable if selected in VisualEditor.
 * Slower – Loading longer pages into VisualEditor can take 60 seconds or more for some users.
 * Cannot edit a single section – VisualEditor loads and submits only entire pages. Clicking an edit link for a section will scroll to the appropriate section upon opening. In VisualEditor's model, editing sections would be paradoxically slower than editing the whole page. [Note: Opening an entire page for editing does not increase edit conflicts, which are (roughly) based on editing the same paragraph.]
 * Cannot upload non-free images – At this time, images that are uploaded inside either the wikitext editor or VisualEditor are sent directly to the Wikimedia Commons, which does not accept non-free images. All images that fall under Wikipedia's non-free content policy must instead be stored on Wikipedia using the File Upload Wizard.
 * Unaware of table formatting done by templates - Popular table cell templates (e.g. yes, no, tba, n/a) can cause issues. The reason is that these templates contain a pipe character to separate formatting and text, but the VisualEditor isn't aware of this. As a result, table operations which change the table structure, such as merging/splitting cells or inserting/deleting/moving rows or columns, may not work properly.
 * Data of merged cells is deleted if rows or columns are moved across them. Work-around: Unmerge the affected areas before moving, merge them again afterwards.

You can click "Review your changes" to review the wikitext changes before saving a page. Please report any problems you see.

How to help out
Help is needed to make VisualEditor as good as it can be: You can find and report bugs and ideas for improvements or lend a hand in many other tasks, such as:
 * Updating help pages – All Wikimedia Foundation projects have help pages to make contributing easier for new editors. Unfortunately, the full launch of VisualEditor will make obsolete the screenshots and tutorials in these help pages, because they describe how to edit using the markup editor. Therefore, the VisualEditor development team needs help updating help pages. The user guide to VisualEditor is a starting place for text for the new help pages.
 * Adding TemplateData to templates – VisualEditor features an interactive template editor—described in more detail in the user guide—and as you'll see if you use it on Wikipedia, some templates have named parameters and nice descriptions that make it easy to use. However, other templates lack them because they need TemplateData before this feature will work. If you're interested in adding TemplateData, then read the guide to it and the list of the most important templates to add it to.
 * Help new users – The successful launch of VisualEditor might result in many more new editors than usual, and even though editing may be easier, learning policies and guidelines and how to interact with the community will still be challenging. Please try to spend some time at the appropriate venues: the Help desk, the Teahouse and the help chatroom. Additionally, please feel free to monitor the Category of Wikipedians looking for help.