VisualEditor

For character mode editors in general, see Visual editor.

For the Wikipedia project page about the VisualEditor feature, see Wikipedia:VisualEditor.

VisualEditor

VisualEditor logo, set in Gill Sans
VisualEditor's text formatting menu
Developer(s)	Wikimedia Foundation and Fandom, Inc.
Repository	gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/mediawiki/extensions/VisualEditor
Written in	JavaScript, Node.js, PHP
Operating system	Cross-platform
Platform	MediaWiki extension
Type	Wiki
License	MIT[1]
Website	www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor

VisualEditor (VE) is an online rich-text editor for MediaWiki-powered wikis that provides a way to edit pages based on the "what you see is what you get" principle. It was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation in partnership with Fandom.^[2] In July 2013, it was enabled by default on several of the largest Wikipedia projects.^[3][4]

The Wikimedia Foundation considered it the most challenging feature to date, while The Economist has called it Wikipedia's "most significant feature".^[5] According to The Daily Dot, the Wikimedia Foundation's pursuit of wider participation may regret alienating existing editors.^[6] In September 2013, English Wikipedia's VisualEditor was changed from opt-out to opt-in, following user complaints,^[7][8] but it was returned to being available by default (for new registered users only) in October 2015 after more development.^[9] A 2015 study by the Wikimedia Foundation found that VisualEditor failed to provide the anticipated benefits for new editors.^[10]

VisualEditor is bundled with every MediaWiki releases since version 1.35, released in September 2020.^[11]

Development

Main article: MediaWiki § Editing interface

'Editing makes me feel stupid' - user tests commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation from 2009 which demonstrate the difficulty that ordinary users were having with editing MediaWiki code.

In a presentation from Wikimania 2013, the team developing the software presented it to attendees

The original web-based Wikipedia editor provided by MediaWiki is a plain browser-based text editor, also called 'Source editor', where authors have to learn the wiki markup language to edit.^[12] A what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editor for Wikipedia had been planned for years in order to remove the need to learn the wiki markup language. It was hoped this would reduce the technical hurdle for would-be Wikipedians, enabling wider participation in editing, and was an attempt to reverse the decline in editor numbers of 50,000 in 2006 to 35,000 in 2011, having peaked in 2007.^[5][6] It was part of a $1m project aimed at developing new features and making improvements.^[5] A goal of the project is to allow both the former wiki markup editing and editing with the WYSIWYG VisualEditor.^[13] According to Wikimedia Foundation's Jay Walsh, the hope is to redress under-represented contributions from Arabic, Portuguese, and Indic-language versions of the site.^{[6][note 1]}

According to Wikimedia Foundation, "There are various reasons that lead existing and prospective contributors not to edit; among them, the complexity of wiki markup is a major issue. One of VisualEditor's goals is to empower knowledgeable and good-faith users to edit and become valuable members of the community, even if they're not wiki markup experts. We also hope that, with time, experienced editors will find VisualEditor useful for some of their editing tasks."^[4] In 2012, Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, said "we don't think that the visual editor, in and of itself, is going to solve the challenge",^[14] and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales remarked "This is epically important".^[15]

Rollout

MediaWiki is used by numerous wikis, with smaller sites originally conceived as being rolled out first.^[16] VisualEditor was planned to be rolled out on the English-language Wikipedia for editors with registered accounts, and then for anonymous editors.^[17] The alpha version was made available to select users in December 2012, widened to all registered users in April.^[18] It was the default editor for users logged-into the English-language Wikipedia in July 2013.^[4][6] It was subsequently made opt-in on the English-language Wikipedia in September 2013 due to community complaints over its stability, and implementation was buggy and had limitations^[7][8] (though it remained active for most non-English Wikipedias).^[19] In 2015, it completed its beta development phase and was again made available on English Wikipedia.^[9][20]

Technical

The Wikimedia Foundation joined forces with Wikia to work on the project.^[21] The implementation encountered challenges with the wiki markup language (the basis for Wikipedia articles), due to it being continuously extended over 12 years to include seldom-used rich and complex features making reproduction of the final article appearance dependent on many factors that were not easy to reproduce.^[22] The technical implementation required improvements to MediaWiki in parsing, wiki markup language, the DOM and final HTML conversion.^[23] A necessary component is a parser server called Parsoid^{[note 2]} which was created to convert in both directions between wikitext and a format suitable for VisualEditor.^[22] The Wikimedia Foundation considered VisualEditor its most challenging technical project to date.^[5]

Before 2024, supported web browsers included modern versions of Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. In 2024, the code to check for a supported browser was removed.^[24]

The VisualEditor MediaWiki extension is available for download by server operators and typically requires the latest version of MediaWiki, it is bundled since MediaWiki 1.35.^[11]

Online rich-text editor

According to the VisualEditor team, the aim is "to create a reliable rich-text editor for MediaWiki",^[19] a "visual editor" which is "WYSIWYG-like".^[25] The implementation is split into a "core" online rich-text editor which can run independently of MediaWiki,^[26] and a MediaWiki extension.^[27]

Response

Responses to the introduction of the VisualEditor have greatly varied, with The Economist's L.M. calling it "the most significant change in Wikipedia's short history."^[5]

Opposition

Some editors expressed concerns about the rollout and bugs, with the German Wikipedia community deciding to use an opt-in model instead of an opt-out one.^[6][28] Irish Wikipedia administrator Oliver Moran, echoing concerns of other editors, said that users may feel belittled by the implication that "certain people" are confused by wiki markup and therefore need the VisualEditor, comparing the learning of wikitext favorably to Twitter's hashtag and @ (at sign) mention syntax.^[29]

Three months after the rollout of the VisualEditor to the English Wikipedia, The Daily Dot reported that the Wikimedia Foundation had experienced backlash from long-time editors who deemed the editor "buggy and untested". Following discourse between the community and the foundation, Wikipedia administrator Kww overrode the foundation's rollout, making it opt-in, instead of opt-out. The Foundation did not revert the change, instead committing to further improving VisualEditor.^[7][8]

Support

Softpedia ran an article titled "Wikipedia's New VisualEditor Is the Best Update in Years and You Can Make It Better".^[30] The Register said that the update brings the foundation "a little closer to its goal of making it easier for anyone to create and edit Wikipedia articles."^[18]

Research results

Aaron Halfaker, a research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation, ran a controlled study on the effects of VisualEditor in May 2015. The study found that VisualEditor did not increase editor productivity, however reducing the burden upon existing editors. Editing took 18 seconds longer with VisualEditor before hitting save, and new editors were less likely to save their work. Halfaker however did ascribe these negative results as from editors testing the new system, not any real struggle.^[10] A previous June 2013 controlled test — when VisualEditor was less mature — showed similar neutral and negative results.^[31]

See also

• List of HTML editors § WYSIWYG editors

Notes

1. Respective Wikipedia websites: Arabic, Portuguese and Indic languages' Urdu, Hindi, Bihari, Gujarati
2. "Parsoid". MediaWiki. Archived from the original on 2014-11-25.

References

1. LICENSE.txt, VisualEditor source code repository
2. Andrew Webster (2012-06-22). "Wikimedia releases updated prototype for simplified visual editor". The Verge. Archived from the original on 2013-09-27. Retrieved 2013-07-27.
3. "Wikipedia:VisualEditor". Wikipedia. Retrieved 15 September 2013.
4. Emil Protalinski (2013-07-02). "Wikimedia rolls out WYSIWYG visual editor for logged-in users accessing Wikipedia articles in English". The Next Web. Archived from the original on 2013-07-05. Retrieved 2013-07-06.
5. L.M. (2011-12-13). "Changes at Wikipedia: Seeing things". The Economist. Archived from the original on 2013-06-09. Retrieved 2013-07-28.
6. Tim Sampson (2012-07-04). "Will Wikipedia's pretty new editing software solve its recruitment crisis?". The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on 2013-09-27. Retrieved 2013-07-27.
7. Andrew Orlowski (2013-09-25). "Revolting peasants force Wikipedia to cut'n'paste Visual Editor into the bin". The Register. Archived from the original on 2013-10-01. Retrieved 2013-10-06.
8. Tim Sampson (2013-09-24). "Wikipedia faces revolt over VisualEditor". The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on 2013-09-25. Retrieved 2013-09-25.
9. Forrester, James (2015-09-01). "Gradual availability of VisualEditor for new users is now complete". Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
10. "VisualEditor's effect on newly registered editors/May 2015 study". Wikimedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 2 August 2016.
11. "MediaWiki 1.35". MediaWiki. Retrieved 2021-03-16.
12. Martin Brinkmann (2012-02-24). "Wikipedia Visual Editor Coming Soon". ghacks. Archived from the original on 2013-09-27. Retrieved 2013-07-28.
13. ehe (2011-12-14). "Wikimedia testing visual editor". h-online. Archived from the original on 2013-07-27. Retrieved 2013-07-28.
14. Megan Garber (2012-07-12). "On the Ugliness of Wikipedia". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on 2013-07-03. Retrieved 2013-07-29.
15. Gene Ryan Briones (2012-06-21). "Wikimedia launches new prototype "visual editor" for Wikipedia". Ubergizmo. Archived from the original on 2013-09-29. Retrieved 2013-07-29.
16. Jamie Keene (2011-12-15). "Wikimedia Foundation previews simplified visual editor". The Verge. Archived from the original on 2013-09-28. Retrieved 2013-07-28.
17. Gabriela Vatu (2013-06-06). "Wikipedia's Visual Editor to Be Rolled Out". Softpedia. Archived from the original on 2013-06-15. Retrieved 2013-07-06.
18. Simon Sharwood (2013-06-07). "Wikimedia edges closer to banishing Wikitext". The Register. Archived from the original on 2013-07-28. Retrieved 2013-07-28.
19. "VisualEditor". MediaWiki. Archived from the original on 2013-09-27.
20. "Wikimedia Engineering 2015 Q1 Goals". MediaWiki. Archived from the original on 2018-10-24. Retrieved 2018-10-24.
21. Kirkburn (June 3, 2014). "VisualEditor - the past, present and future". Wikia Community Central. Archived from the original on 2015-12-08. Retrieved 2015-12-02.
22. djwm (2012-12-13). "VisualEditor launched in Wikipedia". h-online. Archived from the original on 2013-07-27. Retrieved 2013-07-28.
23. Sumana Harihareswara; Guillaume Paumier. "The Architecture of Open Source Applications (Volume 2): MediaWiki". aosabook.org. Archived from the original on 2013-09-24. Retrieved 2013-07-27.
24. "rEVED8cb070f4d7fe". phabricator.wikimedia.org. Retrieved 2024-09-10.
25. "Project:VisualEditor testing/Welcome". MediaWiki. Archived from the original on Oct 23, 2022.
26. "wikimedia/VisualEditor". GitHub. 11 January 2022.
27. "wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-VisualEditor". GitHub. 11 January 2022.
28. Andrew Orlowski (2013-08-01). "Wikipedians say no to Jimmy's 'buggy' WYSIWYG editor". The Register. Archived from the original on 2013-08-04. Retrieved 2013-08-05.
29. Simonite, Tom (October 22, 2013). "The Decline of Wikipedia: Even As More People Than Ever Rely on It, Fewer People Create It". MIT Technology Review. Archived from the original on October 23, 2013. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
30. Lucian Parfeni (2013-07-02). "Wikipedia's New VisualEditor Is the Best Update in Years and You Can Make It Better". Softpedia. Archived from the original on 2013-10-03. Retrieved 2013-07-30.
31. "Research:VisualEditor's effect on newly registered editors/June 2013 study". Wikimedia Foundation. Archived from the original on 10 September 2016. Retrieved 10 August 2016.

Further reading

• Roth, Amy; Davis, Rochelle; Carver, Brian (2013). "Assigning Wikipedia editing: Triangulation toward understanding university student engagement". First Monday. 18 (6). doi:10.5210/fm.v18i6.4340.
• Florian Leander Mayer. "Erfolgsfaktoren von Social Media: Wie "funktionieren" Wikis?: Eine vergleichende Analyse kollaborativer Kommunikationssysteme im Internet, in Organisationen und in Gruppen" (2013) Lit Verlag, pp. 30–32. ISBN 978-3643122100

External links

• MediaWiki VisualEditor
• MediaWiki Extension: VisualEditor
• Help:VisualEditor - Community Central
• What you see is Wiki - Questioning WYSIWYG in the Internet Age
• MediaWiki alternative parsers
• Building a Visual Editor for Wikipedia
• Wired: Wikipedia's WYSIWYG Dilemma