New VisualEditor

This feature will be going live on Monday (hopefully), and I will be assisting with the changes that it may create here on Scratchpad. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please comment below in this thread, and I will try to get it added or handled by Staff.

This implementation is being handled by the amazing staff member: BertH.

So, any questions → Aim them at him or me.

Thanks!

General information

Greetings Scratchpad Community! Today I'm happy to let you know that this community is helping out with beta testing of the brand new VisualEditor. This new editor was developed in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation who operate Wikipedia.

Here at Wikia we've been working on our implementation of the new editor for some time. We're one of the first communities to be trying out this new feature and Wikia Staff are looking forward to our feedback. So thanks in advance!

Here are some details about how the VisualEditor beta release works:

How To Use It

VisualEditor can be accessed in two ways:

1. Edit an existing article by simply clicking the "Start Writing" button
2. Create a new article by typing in the web address of a nonexistent page and then clicking the "Create" button.

(You'll see that both of these methods employ the ?veaction=edit URL parameter)

The transition from the reading view to the editing view is very quick and smooth, which is the exciting part! VisualEditor is meant to be a truly WYSIWYG experience, showing you what the article layout will really look like: What You See Is What You Get. No more green puzzle pieces and other odd placeholders like you get in Wikia's current visual editing mode.

This release allows for editing of:

• article text
• image captions
• templates
• categories
• references

To do things like uploading or inserting images/videos, and creating new templates or tables, you'll still need to use the "classic" Wikia editing experience. But we'll be adding more functionality soon!

 Note: VisualEditor is only active for the main namespace at this time.

You can still access the standard Wikia editor using the "Classic editor" option on the "Start Writing" drop menu. You'll have the "source" and "visual" tabs there. If you have visual editing disabled in your user preferences, you'll only see the source option in the Classic editor.

Using VisualEditor, you can:

• See Spell Check in action!
• Edit image captions by selecting an image and clicking the image icon in the upper right
• Add a new template using the Transclusion option on the More menu in the toolbar
• Edit an existing template by selecting it and using the transclusion icon in the upper right
• Edit categories by clicking the Page Settings button in the toolbar:
• Resize and move images already present in the article by selecting the image and using your mouse
• Add references by choosing the References option on the More menu in the toolbar
• Edit existing references by selecting the references section and clicking the references icon in the upper right

What it doesn't do yet

In the future we'll be adding more features as our engineers complete work on them. We'll be sure to update you as these are added. These include:

• Switching to source mode (and back) during your edit
• Searching and inserting images and videos from the wiki
• Uploading new images and adding new videos
• Creating and modifying galleries
• Creating and modifying tables
• More streamlined addition of templates
• More streamlined editing of template content
• Using basic wikitext markup (link double brackets and apostrophes)
• Editing a page using the Contribute drop-down menu
• Adding a new page with VisualEditor from Special:CreatePage (and the Contribute drop-down menu)
• Adding a new page with VisualEditor from a redlink
• Also note that any element that you can't modify using VisualEditor will be obscured with a striped overlay and a tooltip stating that it's not editable.

What we want to know

While we expect that the VisualEditor will be useful for all kinds of users, the target audience for this feature is newer users, and those who are not that experienced with wikitext. Since many of these users might not be giving us direct feedback, we're counting on more seasoned users to give us feedback on their behalf, based on observation. So here are the questions we're asking you to keep in mind over the next weeks and months:

• How are new users doing with VisualEditor?
• Do they seem more likely to stick around after making their first edit?
• Has the quality of their edits improved?
• Are they making less mistakes than before?
• Are they making different mistakes than before?

We're also confident that VisualEditor will be useful for more seasoned users as well, especially once the full feature set is available. So we're very interested in feedback about your own experience also! Please feel free to reply on this thread with your thoughts and ideas. Also check out the list of known issues if you encounter any bugs, and report anything that you don't already see listed!

Known bugs and issues

Below is a list of known bugs and issues with VisualEditor. We'll add to this list if we document others, and we'll note when they are resolved. Please use this thread to let us know about any other bugs you find! Thanks!

Text

• Anons can't add external links — captcha is broken
• Redlinks are blue inside the VisualEditor
• Header formatting is sometimes stripped when it is cut and pasted inside the VisualEditor
• External links are sometimes displayed as wikitext, but save properly as external links

Photos and Videos

• Media can't be easily deleted from articles
• Center-aligned media has over-aggressive shields
• In-line images sometimes appear incorrectly
• Sometimes non-thumbs will display captions and photo attribution

Templates

• Some hidden template elements may sneak out of the template. Please show us examples when this happens!
• The 'edit template' icon sometimes appears unattached from the template.
• Templates can't be easily deleted from articles. (Workaround: open the template tool and click the red 'Remove template' button)
• Template auto-suggest isn't displaying correctly when adding a new template.

Categories

• Categories are not updated after the page is saved. A refresh fixes the problem
• Category auto-suggest isn't displaying correctly when adding a new category
• Categories cannot be removed inside the VisualEditor (though the icon exists)
• Category sortkeys cannot be set inside the VisualEditor (though the field exists)

Misc.

• The VisualEditor is not Theme Designer friendly yet.
• Some various keyboard shortcuts don't work or have changed. Let us know what you're looking for so we can get them on our queue.