Are there screenshots for all non-en-registered user to see of this new editor? --93.203.237.138 (talk) 18:25, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
I didn't see anything about this on the project page, but it looks like this only works in vector. I normally use modern, and it's not showing up there. Maybe that should be added to the information? —Torchiest talkedits 20:20, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
Is there anything approximating a timeline for regular, full deployment? I realize that it's early days, so things could change, but is the general sentiment that the VisualEditor will become the normal default later this year, next year, or some future year? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:42, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
It seems like all template instances typed in VE window end up wrapped in nowiki tags, right? How can one remove these tags from within VE, rather than switching to plain oldtimey editing? Retired electrician (talk) 22:06, 1 April 2013 (UTC)
I just added the date for development. I have no idea why that wouldn't be among the first things you would say about a project. They've been talking about this for months and years now, and it's really irritating for a user that this hasn't been deployed yet. Perhaps there is more involved, but it's hard to find any information about it without wading through really long conversations. There's a great resource for learning about these things... it's called Wikipedia. If you want to actually engage users like the whole point of this thing is intended, the following information is among the minimal, basic information needed in order to do that.
NittyG (talk) 16:11, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
When this is installed as the default, and new editors start using it to create new articles, without being able to create references, they will, unsurprisingly be left creating articles, many if not most of which will be deleted as a result. This, I predict, is a signficant new editor bite problem in the making. --j⚛e deckertalk 02:01, 7 May 2013 (UTC) Nevermind, it appears that y'all are on this. Awesome, my bad. --j⚛e deckertalk 02:03, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
This new editor used VE and it seems to have duplicated all the references. Or was it just a newbie making a mistake? Darkness Shines (talk) 04:48, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
I just wanted to quickly mention that I stopped editing Wikia sites because their visual editor was screwing up the wiki source in the stupidest ways. Even a null edit would sometimes break a previously working table. I trust that the community-consensus model of Wikimedia projects will prevent these kinds of horrors from happening here at Wikipedia... - dcljr (talk) 00:00, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
I like VisualEditor because it includes the syntax highlighter. 𝕁𝕠𝕣𝕕𝕒𝕟𝕂𝕪𝕤𝕖𝕣22 (talk) 20:19, 7 June 2013 (UTC)
I was trying to mess with this thing, and now it's just vanished. Poof. No tab, no preference setting. Just gone. What gives? --Nathan2055talk - contribs 15:51, 14 June 2013 (UTC)
User:Kephir/acid is a page I created for unrelated purposes. Opening it in the VisualEditor reveals some discrepancies between Parsoid and native MediaWiki parser. Check it out. Keφr 13:34, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
Is this meant, ultimately, as a supplement or as a replacement for wikitext editing? — TORTOISEWRATH 21:12, 24 June 2013 (UTC)
"Slow to load" - just sucks. That's why KISS is such a good principle. Electron9 (talk) 01:23, 25 June 2013 (UTC)
Can some one tell us whether the VE will be used on a trial basis -- or bring it to the attention of the various individuals who are making these decisions for us? That would be 'neet'. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 00:21, 28 June 2013 (UTC)
Just commenting about this page- I have spent days tracking the feedback page and 24 hours assisting in providing data for the programming team so I feel that can constructively comment here- and these comments are about this page.
In principle the section labelled current limitations does not reflect the feedback page.
There are two redlinks- having status reports would be a very good idea
And sign up here -(no link)
In 2001, this was acceptable; in 2013, it's driving contributors away.
If anything this statement needs to be backed up with a reference. As such it is a POV, and most of us would just delete it in main space or if it was a newbie {{cn}}.
but by the end of July 2013, we expect this to be the default editor for users on almost all Wikipedia projects. Please tell us that this should read 2014, at the moment what we have can only e described as 'Proof of Concept' as it is nowhere near submitting it for beta-testing. It is functionally flawed, and the way that users see inline comments, the way they add references, and visually edit tables needs to be thought out, the specifications written and put out to consultation before any coding is even started.
useful if people could update help pages, based on our tutorial to using the VisualEditor.
Firstly the tutorial isn't a tutorial it is a list of how to use each button. It is pointless damaging help pages when everything is changing on a daily basis. Looking at the referencing section it shows a button pushing approach- ten years behide the system used for DYK of GA on wiki- maybe in 2001 it was done that way but look at Little Moreton Hall and examine how we now expect referencing to be done.
Adding TemplateData to templates
Even following the links there is no simple description to say how to do the task.
The VisualEditor features a nice template editor,
Well that is a POV- and a delusion (my POV). My other POV is that this is a software project that is not being managed, subject to no professional discipline where the coders have been allowed to assume control, and will lose editors and confuse the hell out of newbies who are used to rock solid apps- who will not hang around.
Could someone stop 'rearranging the deck chairs' and clean up this page. -- Clem Rutter (talk) 09:16, 28 June 2013 (UTC)
Specifically, Internet Explorer. I use nearly exclusively IE8 as it is the highest version of IE which XP Pro can support. Both the OS and browser are still on a huge percentage of machines, is still supported by MS until next Spring, and I'm sure will remain a large percentage for a significant time after. (And will have to be pried out of my cold dessicated hands from my desecrated crypt)
I rather not entertain or field discussion or comments about what the browser/OS can and cannot do. I've been online since the days when "the internet" was a series of interconnecting courtesy portals between dial-up BBSes, and I've not had a significant viral infection in the past decade, the chief exception being a week I tried Firefox and wound up infected with a total of 213 virii (detected by Avira, not one of those pop-up fake detections). In addition to a strict regimen of what I do and do not access, download, or open, I don't use a slew of add-ons, opting instead to utilize IE's built-in features and My Good Ole "Mark I Computer Number One" to recognize what is real vs spoofs. My system and Browser have been tweaked to minimize things such as ads and other things which in my experience Other Browsers will not support without add-ons. And frankly I've found every add-on is a potential hole in security.
My point mainly is that I HOPE IE8 will be considered as "latest of IE", cause otherwise I will be severely impacted. — Love Robin (talk) 14:18, 28 June 2013 (UTC)
For something that is supposed to be user-friendly, it isn't easy to find. Where exactly is it? Why don't I seem to have access to it? The blurb at the top of the VE page says it's been around since Dec. 2012 (?) I've never heard of it until today (and I edit daily) and I cannot find it. freshacconci talktalk 14:42, 28 June 2013 (UTC)
I'm I missing something, or is there no warning message like MediaWiki:Protectedpagewarning and MediaWiki:Semiprotectedpagewarning that displays on the VisualEditor when editing a protected or semi-protected page? This is just as important as the page notices. Zzyzx11 (talk) 04:54, 29 June 2013 (UTC)
Just tried out VE in Firefox. I edited Nazaaray. A lot of words are red-underlined, presumably that's flagging them as spelling errors. However, this is sometimes wrong (kilometres, winemaking, favoured - is the spellchecker using US English only?), and often over-zealous (1. there's no sense flagging the word Naazaray in the article when it's actually the title of the article, so can be presumed to be correctly spelled; 2. Ghumman is marked as a misspelling even though it's a link). Colonies Chris (talk) 11:10, 29 June 2013 (UTC)
OKeyes, July will be an adventure—an Odyssey — Thank you for your great work, Charles Edwin Shipp (talk) 12:18, 29 June 2013 (UTC)
For those of us actually used to Wikimarkup, it's far easier to use that. Adam Cuerden (talk) 23:00, 27 June 2013 (UTC)
I edited my userpage using this editor after enabling it in my preferences. It seems to work all right though I did find it more than a little confusing - you can see what I did, it wasn't anything useful - vandalism, essentially.
However, something very strange happened: it decided my edits and edit summaries needed spellchecking, and it shows funny red lines under stuff even now I've got Visual Editor turned off! I appreciate that some of us like spellchecking, but I don't, and I would like to know how you fix this bug; as it would appear to be a bug. It never spellchecked anything before now.
As for speed, which was all I really wanted to test, it is quite a bit faster than the Wikia visual editor, though it does take slightly more time to load and to save. As far as that aspect it looks to be about ready to become a permanent feature, should we decide it is a good idea.
Another comment about the necessity of this - we do already have toolbars on the edge of the edit window that allow you to semi-automate the addition of bold text, italic text, reference tags, etc. It seems a bit strange that these wouldn't be enough. I suppose it's not necessarily easy to understand what happens to the source code when you press certain buttons:
[[[1]—≈≥≤]]
...but then I don't know who would do something like that on purpose with the intent of being constructive. All I'm saying is that the toolbars I produced that hash with are apparently intended to avoid driving users away with wikicode, and the emergence of the visual editor means that this previous strategy must have been ineffective. Cathfolant 17:11, 28 June 2013 (UTC)
I have to say that some comments I am reading here really leave me speechless. Personally I can't understand all this bad reaction to VE. To write my experience... About a couple of years ago, I wanted to edit an article and when I clicked on the "edit" button I was in shocked with what I saw. I didn't know that to just write something, you had to learn a whole code. I edited only 5% of what I wanted because it was the easy part, but when I tried to edit something more, I couldn't. Not because I couldn't learn the code but because I didn't have time to do it. That since two weeks ago... An article of an actor I like was not updated for the last two years and everytime I was getting here I was getting frustrated seeing that. So, having free time this time, I updated it completely. Took me hours and days to manage to do it and learn how to "move" within the code but I did it. Except from writing in the main article (that's the easiest to do), I added and created templates, I created new tables, new articles and added many references. I even translated a page to my language and posted it there!
While still learning the code, I found VE and I started using that instead. It's way more exciting than using the code because except that it saves me time, I am not going back and forth to be checking what I am doing. Cause with the code that's what I was forced to do. Click "preview" and scrolling up and down the page checking what I did wrong to correct it! Not to mention wasting time to find the exact line the mistake was! With VE I don't have to do that because simply the mistake is right there where I am writing and I can correct it immediately! I can't even imagine how much time I am saving on that part!
Many people mentioned that new editors won't be able to add references, create/add templates etc. As a new editor who is learning both systems in two weeks, I CAN add references, I CAN add templates/infoboxes that already exist and I CAN create a new template by using only VE! Did it took me time to learn how? Of course! Did it took me time at the beginning to learn how to do it with the code? Ditto! But learning how to do it with VE took me much less time and sure takes me much less time to add a reference using it than using the code.
I know people are not willing to change something they know for something new easily. But before you crucify it, give it a try. Yes it will take some time to learn how to do things with VE, just like it took time to learn how to do them when everyone started with the code. But that doesn't mean VE is not a good thing. All I say is, give it a try and some time. Don't give up on it because you can't add a reference in 30sec. It took me time to find out how to do it right with VE, but now it only takes me 30sec. It's not difficult to do it!
And after all, VE is not forced to the editors as many people say. The option to edit with the code is still there and it's not going anywhere. Some people reacting like tomorrow the option to edit with the code will vanish! There are still things that can't be done with VE. For them and only them, I am using the code but for everything I know I can do with VE, I am doing it with it! Was it a little confusing at the beginning going from one way to another? Yes! But it's all matter of will and try.
And one last thought about vandalism (I am sorry for the long post). I am reading comments all the time that with VE people will vandalize more. The way I see it, if someone wants to vandalize, they WILL vandalize either VE exists either not! That is something that happens everywhere in life. To vandalize is the easier thing to do and trust me, the person who is willing to do it, doesn't need to learn the code to do it, the code won't stop them! So, if they either click "edit" or "edit source", the action will be done.
Just wanted to say my thoughts on the subject and again, I am sorry for the long post and if there are any mistakes I am sorry again. English is not my first language.
P.S. The comments saying that code is for the "intelligent" people who can learn how to use a code and that VE is going to allow everyone who's not "smart enough" to learn the code are just ridiculous AND INSULTING. TeamGale (talk) 03:20, 30 June 2013 (UTC)
Can I create new test account for visual editor? --M4r51n (talk) 11:40, 30 June 2013 (UTC)
Not sure if I can post this here...just wanted to say that editing with VE it can be done if you just try it!
Article's history and article itself
Goodnight everyone! Happy editing! :) TeamGale (talk) 23:07, 30 June 2013 (UTC)
Is unclear.
'The system as is, is somewhat old hat.'
'This new system is being rolled out.'
'There may well be bugs.'
So how do old and new systems compare? 'The casual passer by' is none the wiser.
Do people actually mind putting square brackets and quote marks around things to 'get text to do what they want' - or do they regard it as one of the charms and standard procedures of WP? Jackiespeel (talk) 21:35, 28 June 2013 (UTC)
(reset) More 'To achieve (x) in conventional WP do [this sequence], in VisualEditor do [this sequence]' for convenience/on those occasions when people find one method preferable to another/trying to disentangle snarly-ups. Jackiespeel (talk) 21:32, 30 June 2013 (UTC)
With Wikia there are Monobook (WP style) and Oasis camps: and in most Windows programs there are usually several ways of doing things (of which one uses one and occasionally another when more convenient) - the same is likely to happen here. Jackiespeel (talk) 18:16, 1 July 2013 (UTC)
I was super excited to hear about VisualEditor and tried it out as soon as I saw the banner. The thing I'm most excited about is how it could make adding references to articles easier. References are by far the most irritating part of editing Wikipedia for me, because it involves digging up lots of different bits of information and stringing them together as a long hard-to-parse lump of Wikimarkup. I almost always do it by copying an existing reference and swapping the content out. It's fiddly and boring. So I was excited to see how a friendlier UI might streamline this experience.
Unfortunately, the experience wasn't good. I've taken some screenshots and documented my thought process to explain it.
I tried to add a new reference to the Hail to the Thief article. This is a page I've spent a lot of time on over the months.
I go to to the point I want to add the reference and click the add reference button. A window pops up: http://i.imgur.com/FazafG1.png
OK, so there's a list of all the references in the article so far, cool. But I want to add a new reference.
There's a box that contains the text: "what do you want to reference?"
Hmm. I don't understand this question. Is it asking for a URL, or the name of the publication I'm referencing, or what?
I want to reference an article in the music magazine NME, so maybe this is asking that. I try typing "NME": http://i.imgur.com/7MCQv4n.png
Ah. it narrows the list of references in the article to ones containing the word NME. so this is actually filtering the existing references. That isn't indicated by the text.
Clearly I need to do something else to add a new reference. There's a piece of text that says "Create a new source", but it doesn't look like a button, and it's above a very similarly-framed text that says "Use an existing source", which I don't think is a button at all, but rather a heading. I'm also confused because sometimes references are called sources. Are these different things?
Anyway, I click "Create a new source". Nothing happens except that's highlighted. That wasn't what I was hoping to happen: http://i.imgur.com/O3y5mGQ.png
Now I'm sort of out of ideas. So I click "insert reference" at the bottom, even though that feels like it's going to close this window and insert something into the article that doesn't actually contain anything.
Sure enough, that's what seems to happen... momentarily. Then a new window opens: http://i.imgur.com/L7qTqVJ.png
"Reference content" - what does that mean exactly? Is it reference the verb - am I referencing content here? Or am I giving content to the reference?
What is the Options heading all about, and what does "Use this group" mean?
I have a little window here to type into. I'm not sure what to type. Do I just write out my reference in Wikimarkup and click "Apply changes"? Or do I write them out as if I'm writing a list of references at the end of an essay?
At this point I'm really disappointed. I was hoping to be given a complete list of individual fields to fill out - a box for author, a box for date, a box for date accessed, a box for the title, a box for the URL, and so on - and have this generate the reference nicely for me. Instead, I seem to have the old system in a confusing UI.
At this point I give up and add the reference with Wikimarkup instead.
VisualEditor is definitely the future, so I'm glad it's happening. But it still has a way to go if we want people to find editing easier. I actually work as a technical writer/UI designer at a software company, so I'd be happy to help out trying to fix this if need be. Popcornduff (talk) 16:43, 29 June 2013 (UTC)
According to the timetable, I should be seeing the new interface today, but nothing seems to have changed. -- Beland (talk) 21:19, 1 July 2013 (UTC)
Change site notice? It still says "VisualEditor will soon be enabled for all logged-in users. Learn more, help out and give feedback." Apteva (talk) 22:16, 1 July 2013 (UTC)
There may be some confusion in that you won't see the feature on a page until you reload it, if you had loaded it before the activation. -- Beland (talk) 22:48, 1 July 2013 (UTC)
Or is it only going to be switched on for articles and user pages? If not, isn't that going to be a problem? I've tried out VisualEditor and I like it - it feels much more user-friendly than wikimarkup, and I can barely believe it's taken Wikipedia so long to adopt something like this. If used everywhere, it should make Wikipedia more accessible for newbies. But if it's only going to be used on articles but not talk pages, that seems like it will make Wikipedia more complicated for newbies by requiring them to understand two different systems. If the current thinking is 'talk pages aren't meant for newbies, and they don't need to know how to edit them', I can only say that I disagree. Robofish (talk) 22:42, 1 July 2013 (UTC)
I thought a screenshot here would explain this most easily:
This obscuring page notice box is what I see on every page when I try to use the visual editor. If relevant, I'm using the latest Firefox on an Imac.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 01:05, 2 July 2013 (UTC)
I made a game attempt at using the thing today; don't like it but I suppose I could get used to it. But one problem arose immediately: I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to enter a reference. Is there a user's manual somewhere? The "cite" button on the current Wikipedia editing window is so user-friendly - just fill in the blanks and it plugs the info into the preferred formatting style - but all I could figure out to do with the VisualEditor "references" button was to enter the entire reference link by hand. --MelanieN (talk) 03:34, 2 July 2013 (UTC)
[ This is such an FAQ (it's on this talk page about 8 times (now, um, 9)), that I've written this answer and put it at the top -- even though I know that's an uncommon approach. Note that I'm not responsible for this policy; I'm merely reporting it more clearly. ]
As is now noted on the article itself, the deployment of Visual Editor will not replace the ability to edit raw mediawikitext; the traditional editor will remain and there are -- as of this writing -- no strategic plans ever to change that. So if you, like me, prefer the power, speed, and precision of putting the wikitext code mapping inside your head instead of inside your browser, you will be able to do that, by setting a user preference entry to prefer the traditional editor. So relax. :-)--Baylink (talk) 20:27, 28 June 2013 (UTC) [Not any kind of administrator or staffer at all]
And it should be noted: if you don't want to use the new system, click "edit source" instead of "edit". The "edit source" button takes you to the familiar Wikipedia editing system. --MelanieN (talk) 17:06, 2 July 2013 (UTC)
I don't suppose there's away to just make the links to the new editor go away? I want my edit buttons to bring up the old editor, and not have to adapt to the change. Yes, I'm being a curmudgeon - I will admit that. draeath (talk) 19:02, 2 July 2013 (UTC)
Is there any way that one could opt-out of using Visual Editor and go back to using HTML? Epicgenius(talk to me • see my contributions) 14:40, 27 June 2013 (UTC)
As a conservative editor, who simply wants to keep his layout and modus operandi undisturbed and therefore refuses almost all technical novelties forced upon him, I ask: 1) Is there a possibility of opt-out in advance? 2) Will the opt-out work accross projects with one action (i.e. one mouseclick "killing the beast" instaneously everywhere)? I would be very frustrated if forced to waste time with separate opt-out switching in each of c. two dozens of projects I regularly, occasionally or exceptionally contribute to. --Miaow Miaow (talk) 00:06, 30 June 2013 (UTC)
Just out of interest, how many users are really being driven away by this 'problem' with editing? If it was acceptable in 2001, why not now? What changed? I know the retention rate has fallen, but have we got any solid statistics that definitively show that new users are leaving just because they're unwilling to learn wiki markup? Why are we so sure this is the cause? I don't think there's any way to prove that. I suspect there is something else at play here besides having to edit the source, and the retention rate may not necessarily be brought up by this visual editor. The vandalism rate might also be brought up by having an easier way to edit pages, if it really is easier and not still discouragingly slow when it is implemented. If it's still buggy when implemented it could decrease vandalism, but it would also decrease good-faith edits, as does any barrier to editing.
It would be a real shame if this were implemented at all before a non-buggy version was created. I have edited (Wikia) wikis that default to the slow, buggy visual editor and it is so annoying to have to wait while the thing loads - especially for one who knows wiki markup and would much prefer being able to use that instead. If the buggy version is implemented by default on English Wikipedia as well, I will take care to stay away until I can edit pages normally and painlessly; and I know I'm not alone in feeling this way. The two edit tabs would address this concern - one might also have something in preferences that would let you choose which editor you wanted to use by default.
The banner announcing this says 'logged-in' users. What about IPs? What will they see? Will they still be forced, as we all are now, to edit the source? Are we just testing the feature on logged-in users initially or will it never be enabled for IPs as well? This is a bit confusing.
Finally - 'tiny corrections' mostly do not need knowledge of wiki markup and I don't understand why it says they do. Tiny corrections, as I understand the word 'tiny', consist mainly of things like typo fixing. That has nothing to do with wiki markup, does it? Cathfolant 20:06, 27 June 2013 (UTC)
Minor point: The current editing system didn't exist in 2001. And if you want to understand the difference between then and now, compare this version of Helium, which qualified as a Featured Article in 2003 against the current version of the article. Most people could probably figure out how to change the text of the 2003 version, except for the nasty HTML table at the top, on their first try. There's almost nothing there except words, section headings, and wikilinks. Now, there are more than a dozen images, 112 inline citations, and a large number of templates. The software needs to get simpler to use because the articles have gotten far, far more complex. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 11:17, 1 July 2013 (UTC) one
I want to opt out of this. How? I see nothing in preferences about it. Everyking (talk) 23:05, 1 July 2013 (UTC)
importScript('User:Matma Rex/VE killer.js');
We need a simple opt out under preferences. Being discussed here as well [3] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 23:47, 1 July 2013 (UTC)
This seems not to work with VE. Is there something I should fix in preferences or is it a software problem? And if so, how long till we get this fixed? Daniel Case (talk) 04:22, 2 July 2013 (UTC)
