Board Thread:Darwin/@comment-5275700-20131014191604

This thread has further information about the beta release of VisualEditor on Wikia, as announced on the staff blog. This new editor was developed in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation, and here at Wikia we've been working on our implementation for some time. You can see it in action on the Community Test Wikia and details about the beta release are below.

We are looking forward to feedback from the community over the next few months, as we continue to release updates and additional functionality. So thanks in advance!

How To Use It
VisualEditor can be accessed in two ways: (You'll see that both of these methods employ the ?veaction=edit URL parameter)
 * 1) Edit an existing article by simply clicking the "Edit" button
 * 2) Create a new article by typing in the web address of a nonexistent page and then clicking the "Create" button.

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. 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 and references. Starting on October 16, it is also possible to insert images or videos that are already uploaded to the site. To do things like upload images/videos and create new templates or tables, you'll still need to use the "classic" Wikia editing experience. But we'll be adding more functionality soon! VisualEditor is only active for the main namespace at this time. VisualEditor is only available in the Wikia skin.

You can still access the standard Wikia editor using the "Classic editor" option on the "Edit" 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 VE-MediaIcon.png in the upper right
 * Add a new template using the More>Transclusion option on the Toolbar
 * Edit an existing template by selecting it and using the transclusion icon VE-TransclusionIcon.png in the upper right
 * Edit categories by clicking the Page Settings button in the toolbar: [[File:VE-PageSettingsButton.png]]
 * Search the community for existing images and videos and insert one or more into the article, using the Add Media button in the toolbar: [[File:VE-AddMediaButton.png]]
 * 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 VE-ReferenceIcon.png 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: 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.
 * Switching to source mode (and back) during your edit
 * Uploading new images and adding new videos to the site
 * Differentiating between images and videos in media search results
 * Previewing a video before inserting it into the article
 * Creating and modifying galleries
 * Creating and modifying tables
 * More streamlined addition of templates
 * More streamlined editing of template content
 * Using basic wikitext markup (such as 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
 * Improved transition between reading and editing; making the non-artcile content (right rail, etc.) less distracting

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

Questions to keep in mind:
 * Is the editing experience intuitive and straightforward?
 * Will the editing experience promote better quality edits from newer users?
 * Will newer users make fewer mistakes than they do in the current editor?
 * Will newer users make different mistakes than they do in the current editor?

We hope that you'll enjoy experimenting with this new feature. However, if you'd like to disable it in your own preferences, you can do so using the Beta Preferences section on Special:Preferences.

Update, October 16: Additional text has been added above, and on the Help page, to reflect today's release of media insertion functionality.  