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VisualEditor (VE) is an
online rich-text editor An online rich-text editor is the interface for editing rich text within web browsers, which presents the user with a "what-you-see-is-what-you-get" (WYSIWYG) editing area. The aim is to reduce the effort for users trying to express their formatt ...
for
MediaWiki MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWik ...
-powered wikis that provides a direct visual way to edit pages based on the "what you see is what you get" principle. It was developed by the
Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...
in partnership with
Fandom A fandom is a subculture composed of fans characterized by a feeling of empathy and camaraderie with others who share a common interest. Fans typically are interested in even minor details of the objects of their fandom and spend a significant ...
. In July 2013, it was enabled by default on several of the largest Wikipedia projects. The Wikimedia Foundation considered it the most challenging technical project to date, while '' The Economist'' has called it Wikipedia's "most significant change". According to '' The Daily Dot'', Wikimedia Foundation's pursuit of wider participation may risk alienating existing editors. In September 2013, English Wikipedia's VisualEditor was changed from opt-out to opt-in, following user complaints, but it was returned to being available by default (for new registered users only) in October 2015 after further development. A 2015 study by the Wikimedia Foundation found that VisualEditor failed to provide the anticipated benefits for new editors.


Development

The original web-based Wikipedia editor provided by
MediaWiki MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWik ...
is a plain browser-based text editor, also called 'Source editor', where authors have to learn the
wiki markup A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication Collaborative editing, collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be ...
language to edit. A 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
Wikipedian The Wikipedia community, collectively known colloquially as Wikipedians, is an informal community that volunteers to create and maintain Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Since August 2012, the word "Wikipedian" has been an '' Oxford Dicti ...
s, 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. It was part of a $1m project aimed at developing new features and making improvements. A goal of the project is to allow both the former wiki markup editing and editing with the WYSIWYG VisualEditor. According to Wikimedia Foundation's Jay Walsh, the hope is to redress under-represented contributions from
Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walte ...
,
Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Portu ...
, and Indic-language versions of the site.Respective Wikipedia websites: /ar.wikipedia.org/ Arabic /pt.wikipedia.org/ Portugueseand Indic languages' /ur.wikipedia.org/ Urdu /hi.wikipedia.org/ Hindi /bh.wikipedia.org/ Bihari /gu.wikipedia.org/ Gujarati/ref> 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." In 2012,
Sue Gardner Sue Gardner (born May 11, 1967) is a Canadian journalist, not-for-profit executive and business executive. She was the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation from December 2007 until May 2014, and before that was the director of the C ...
, 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", and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales remarked "This is epically important".


Rollout

MediaWiki is used by numerous wikis, with smaller sites originally conceived as being rolled out first. VisualEditor was planned to be rolled out on the English-language Wikipedia for editors with registered accounts, and then for anonymous editors. The
alpha Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἄλφα, ''álpha'', or ell, άλφα, álfa) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph , whic ...
version was made available to select users in December 2012, widened to all registered users in April. It was default editor for users logged-into the English-language Wikipedia in July 2013. 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 (though it remained active for most non-English Wikipedias). In 2015 it completed its beta development phase and was again made available on English Wikipedia.


Technical

The Wikimedia Foundation joined forces with Wikia to work on the project. 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. The technical implementation required improvements to MediaWiki in parsing, wiki markup language, the DOM and final HTML conversion. A necessary component is a parser server called Parsoid which was created to convert in both directions between wikitext and a format suitable for VisualEditor. The Wikimedia Foundation considered VisualEditor its most challenging technical project to date. supported web browsers include modern versions of
Chromium Chromium is a chemical element with the symbol Cr and atomic number 24. It is the first element in group 6. It is a steely-grey, lustrous, hard, and brittle transition metal. Chromium metal is valued for its high corrosion resistance and hardne ...
( Chrome, Edge, Opera), Firefox, Midori, and Safari. 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.


Online rich-text editor

According to the VisualEditor team, the aim is "to create a reliable rich-text editor for MediaWiki", a "visual editor" which is "WYSIWYG-like". The implementation is split into a "core"
online rich-text editor An online rich-text editor is the interface for editing rich text within web browsers, which presents the user with a "what-you-see-is-what-you-get" (WYSIWYG) editing area. The aim is to reduce the effort for users trying to express their formatt ...
which can run independently of MediaWiki, and a MediaWiki extension.


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."


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. 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. 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.


Support

'' Softpedia'' ran an article titled "Wikipedia's New VisualEditor Is the Best Update in Years and You Can Make It Better". '' 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."


Research results

Aaron Halfaker Aaron Halfaker (; born December 27, 1983) is principal applied scientist at Microsoft Research. He previously served as a research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation until 2020. Education Halfaker earned a Bachelor of Science degree in compute ...
, a research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation, ran a
controlled study A scientific control is an experiment or observation designed to minimize the effects of variables other than the independent variable (i.e. confounding variables). This increases the reliability of the results, often through a comparison betwe ...
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. A previous June 2013 controlled test — when VisualEditor was less mature — showed similar neutral and negative results.


See also

*


Notes


References


Further reading

* * 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.


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
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