KidzSearch Encyclopedia:VisualEditor
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VisualEditor is a new way of changing Wikipedia. It is being written 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 makes people want to leave 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 wikimarkup. Testing began as an opt-in "alpha" release on the English-language Wikipedia since December 2012. It is now available on many Wikipedias.
If you want to use VisualEditor, we have a guide to doing so, as well as a list of common keyboard shortcuts.
Today, VisualEditor has some problems because it is new. If you find a problem, please tell us on the Feedback page. It also cannot do everything. Current limitations include:
- Slow to load — It will take some time for long, complex pages to start in VisualEditor. In the future, the software will be a lot faster.
- Odd-looking — Sometimes the page may look a little (or even very) 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.
- Limited browser support — Today, VisualEditor works only on newer versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. It does not work today in very old web browsers or in Internet Explorer, nor in mobile browsers.
- Articles and User pages only — VisualEditor will be turned on for article pages and user pages, not for 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 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all built around the markup editor, and when VisualEditor is launched, the screenshots and tutorials will all become outdated.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 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.