VisualEditor
| Group: | Features |
| Start: | 2011-05-15 |
| End: | |
| Team: | Roan Kattouw, Rob Moen, Ed Sanders, Inez Korczyński (Wikia), Christian Williams (Wikia), Timo Tijhof |
| Management: | James Forrester, Trevor Parscal |
| Status: | See updates |
- For the VisualEditor deployment at the English Wikipedia, check Wikipedia:VisualEditor.
The VisualEditor project aims to create a reliable rich-text editor for MediaWiki. It is being developed so it can be used as a MediaWiki extension, using the Parsoid project to supply HTML+RDFa.
It is currently deployed to a test namespace of this wiki; more information about this test deployment can be found on Wikimedia's blog, the FAQs, and VisualEditor:Welcome or VisualEditor:Test. Please note that the test deployment only works with the Vector skin.
Rationale
The decline in new contributor growth is the single most serious challenge facing the Wikimedia movement. Removing the avoidable technical impediments associated with Wikimedia's editing interface is a necessary pre-condition for increasing the number of Wikimedia contributors.
Status
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf7 branch deployment on Thursday 13 June. In the week since 1.22wmf6, the team worked on finishing the new features ahead of VisualEditor's launch as the default way users will edit our wikis in beta.
The most noticeable change for users is that you can now insert images and other media items from the local wiki and Commons - they default to right-floated thumbnailed images with no caption set. Images will also now appear "correctly", positioned in the normal places when editing. We will make it possible to set the caption, as well as convert images from thumbnails to inline or floating on the other side, in the coming week. We also changed the "Save page" workflow to no longer require users to view a wikitext diff before saving (bug 49258), and removed the 'alpha' notice, replacing it with a more subtle beta label (bug 48428). Work continued on inserting and editing Templates and References, the other two critical areas ahead of the release , which we hope to make available in the next week or so.
We fixed some bugs relating to support for multi-byte Unicode characters used by some languages (bug 49246 and 48630) and some tweaks to the category setting interface released last week (bug 48555, bug 48555 and bug 48565). HTML comments and elements that have no contents like some <span>s will now not be silently dropped when editing (bug 48605). You can now use the forwards and back buttons on your browser with VisualEditor as you would expect (bug 43844).
A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf7 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's list.
Timeline
Some level of exploration was done in 2010 by the Wikipedia Usability Initiative.
The 2011 product whitepaper published by the Wikimedia Foundation's strategic product team identified rich-text editing as one of the "Great Movement Projects". Work subsequently started in May 2011.
The 2011-12 Wikimedia annual plan, released July 2011, states a goal for the Visual Editor: "First opt-in user-facing production usage by December 2011, and first small wiki default deployment by June 2012".
The 2012-13 Engineering Goals document sets a timeline for VisualEditor's development and deployment up to the end of June 2013.
Subpages
See also
- Parsoid
- Extension:VisualEditor (including installation instructions)
- Future
- Wikitext.next