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VisualEditor

Extending and improving the editing tools used at Wikimedia

Group:	Contributors
Start:	2011-05-15
Team members:	Editing team
Backlog:	#VisualEditor

For help installing and running VisualEditor, see Extension:VisualEditor.

For changes made on this wiki using VisualEditor, see the filters visualeditor and visualeditor-switched.

VisualEditor is a reliable rich-text editor for HTML documents. It was created by the Editing team for MediaWiki's HTML+RDFa document format (generated by Parsoid) and is available as a MediaWiki extension. VisualEditor's core implementation is a standalone JavaScript library and can run without MediaWiki, Parsoid, or Node.js.

Edit #100,000,000 in VisualEditor was made in November 2022.

As of 2020, VisualEditor is enabled by default here on mediawiki.org and on most Wikipedia and Wikivoyage language editions. On remaining wikis, is available to logged-in users as an opt-in feature; since April 2023, this is directly, rather than as a Beta Feature. VisualEditor is generally not enabled for pages outside the content namespaces, such as discussion pages or template code.

More information about VisualEditor can be found on the multi-lingual VisualEditor Portal, on Wikimedia's blog, and the FAQ. Information about VisualEditor's wikitext mode is at 2017 wikitext editor.

Original rationale

The decline in new contributor growth was viewed as the single most serious challenge facing the Wikimedia movement. VisualEditor was built with the goal of removing avoidable technical impediments associated with Wikimedia's editing interface, as a necessary pre-condition for increasing the number of Wikimedia contributors. While the initial version of VisualEditor had no measurable benefits over wikitext for new contributors, research around 2019 showed people publish more non-reverted edits when shown VE on mobile (even if the share of reverts is higher); Edit Checks have since been introduced, which reduce revert rates.

Data

See VisualEditor/Data for an overview of the what we know about how people use and experience the visual editor (mobile and desktop).

History

Some level of exploration was done in 2010 by the Wikipedia Usability Initiative.
The 2011 product whitepaper published by the Wikimedia Foundation's strategic product team identified rich-text editing as one of the "Great Movement Projects". Work subsequently started in May 2011.
The 2011–2012 Wikimedia annual plan, released July 2011, states a goal for VisualEditor: "First opt-in user-facing production usage by December 2011, and first small wiki default deployment by June 2012".
The 2012–2013 Engineering Goals document sets a timeline for VisualEditor's development and deployment up to the end of June 2013.
The 2013–2014 Engineering Goals document lists the goals for that year.
VisualEditor was deployed to most users at most Wikimedia projects by the end of 2015. See VisualEditor/Rollouts for a list.
As of August 2026, 1,800+ bugs have been fixed and features introduced to improve peoples' experience using the visual editor.
Notable features and improvements introduced since 2015:
- Rich text paste handling, including table paste
- Table editing improvements
- Interwiki link improvements
- Command search (ctrl+/)
- Find and replace, including regexes
- Improved template editing interface with TemplateData
- Numerous performance & IME bugs
- Improved auto-saved
- Edit check

Enabling VisualEditor by default for all users or for all logged-in users can be requested by contacting the Editing team's product manager.

Core module

VisualEditor is a standalone program that can be run without MediaWiki, Parsoid, or Node.js that provides a visual editor for editing HTML5 pages. It is written in JavaScript and runs in the browser.

Here are some helpful links:

Developer documentation

You can speak with us in our chat channel, #mediawiki-visualeditor ^connect.

Dashboards

Usage dashboard on Superset (requires dev shell account)
Continuous Integration
Code review dashboard

For more information on VisualEditor and its design process, see these directory pages: