, the team developing the software presented it to attendees. The original web-based Wikipedia editor provided by
MediaWiki is a plain browser-based
text editor, also called 'Source editor', where authors have to learn the
wiki markup language to edit. A what you see is what you get 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
Wikipedians, 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. According to Wikimedia Foundation's Jay Walsh, the hope is to redress under-represented contributions from
Arabic,
Portuguese, and
Indic-language versions of the site. 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." 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 version was made available to select users in December 2012, widened to all registered users in April. It was the default editor for users logged-into the English-language Wikipedia in July 2013. 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.
Online rich-text editor According to the VisualEditor team, the aim is "to create a reliable rich-text editor for MediaWiki", The implementation is split into a "core"
online rich-text editor which can run independently of MediaWiki, and a MediaWiki extension. ==Response==