Wiktionary:VisualEditor

From Wiktionary
VisualEditor is a new way of changing Wiktionary
VisualEditor is a new way of changing Wiktionary

VisualEditor is a new way of changing Wiktionary. In the past, changing Wiktionary needed users to learn wiki markup, a fairly difficult markup language, even to make tiny corrections to an article. This difficult code makes people not want to change pages. VisualEditor allows people to change pages without having to learn wiki markup, making it easier for them to make Wiktionary better.

Currently, VisualEditor is only available as a beta feature and you must have a user account to use it.

About VisualEditor[change]

VisualEditor is a rich-text way of changing pages on Wiktionary. It allows users to change pages without having to learn the difficult wiki markup, therefore making them want to help out in improving Wiktionary.

However, there are still some problems with VisualEditor, such as:

  • Slow to load — It will take some time for long, complex pages to start in VisualEditor. However, this has improved significantly and is not a major issue now.
  • Odd-looking — Sometimes the page may look a little (or even very) odd. Improvements are being made to ensure that pages appear as what is intended.
  • Incomplete editing — Some parts of pages will display and let you change their contents, but not let users edit their shape or add new parts, such as tables or definition lists.
  • No indenting — Wiktionary uses a lot of indenting on entry pages for example sentences, but VisualEditor does not allow this.
  • 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.

How to help out[change]

To prepare for VisualEditor being enabled on Wiktionary, there are a few things that you can help out with:

  • Adding TemplateData to templates — VisualEditor has a nice template editor, but it needs information about the template itself so that it can provide more description for the user. If you're interested in helping to add TemplateData, we have a guide for doing so.
  • Updating help pages — Our help pages are written in the context of the wiki markup editor, but when VisualEditor gets enabled on Wiktionary, they will all become outdated. You can help out by updating these help pages with the context of using VisualEditor.

See also[change]