Wikipedia:VisualEditor

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About

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• Why are we building this?
  • User Test Data
  • Quantitative data
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Media Q&A (in English)
• How to use VisualEditor
  • Keyboard shortcuts

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Help with the launch

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• Update help pages
• Add TemplateData
  • TemplateData tutorial
• Help new users
• TranslationCentral
• Translate & localize documentation

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VisualEditor is a way of changing Wikipedia. It is made by the Wikimedia Foundation. In the past, changing Wikipedia has required people to learn wiki markup, a fairly difficult markup language, even to make tiny corrections to an article. This difficult code can stop people editing Wikipedia. VisualEditor allows people to edit without having to learn wiki markup.

About VisualEditor

VisualEditor is a rich-text way of changing Wikipedia. It lets people help without having to learn wiki markup. Testing began as an opt-in "alpha" release on the English-language Wikipedia since December 2012. It now is available on most Wikipedias.

If you want to use VisualEditor, we have a guide to doing so, as well as a list of common keyboard shortcuts.

Video explaining the "alpha" version of the Wikipedia Visual Editor (English-language)

In the 2010s, VisualEditor had many problems because it was new. Not all have been fixed. If you find a problem, please tell us on the Feedback page. It also cannot do everything. Current limitations include:

• Slow to load — It may take some time for long, complex pages to start in VisualEditor. In the future, the software will be faster.
• Odd-looking — Sometimes the page may look odd. The software writers are working on this.
• Incomplete editing — Some parts of pages will display and let you edit their contents, but not let users edit their shape or add new parts, such as tables or definition lists. Many templates are only partly supported.
• Limited browser support — VisualEditor works only on fairly new versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. It does not work in very old web browsers and Internet Explorer.
• Articles and User pages only — VisualEditor is turned on for article pages and user pages, but not for project (Wikipedia:) pages or talk pages.

Because of these limitations, and inevitable bugs, we recommend that users click "Review your changes" before saving the page, and tell us about problems they have.

How to help out

• Use VisualEditor — Tell us or submit a bug report when it doesn't work. Learn how to use it and help new people learn how to use it.
• 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 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 VisualEditor.
• Adding TemplateData to templates — VisualEditor has a nice template editor. See the help page. Some templates have named parameters and 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.

See also

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