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• Main page
• Feedback at MediaWiki
• Sandbox (no account required)

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About

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• Documentation:
  • Introductory tutorial
  • User guide
  • Keyboard shortcuts
  • Frequently Asked Questions (or at MediaWiki)
• Development:
  • Roadmap up to 2017
  • Updates (2013–2023)
  • Weekly status reports (2015–2016)

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Help out

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• Update the help pages
• Add template data (Tutorial)
• Translate and localize documentation

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Research

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• Main research page

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Other

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• Why are the developers building this? (2013)
  • User Test Data (2013)
• Customization
• Known problems
• Requests for Comments (RfCs): Jul 2013 a, Jul 2013 b, Jul 2015, Sep 2015

For the current list of limitations, see Wikipedia:VisualEditor#Limitations

This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump.

• Not available in talk or discussion namespaces – On the English Wikipedia, VisualEditor is not enabled for any talk pages, on the Template or Wikipedia namespaces, and on several of the namespaces that are rarely edited. (T423728) The "Edit" button for VisualEditor is not available on pages where VisualEditor cannot be used. The Reply tool has a visual mode based on VisualEditor, as well as a wikitext mode with a live preview. One workaround is to edit the URL manually by removing 'source' from the end of the URL, or to add a prominent link with that customized URL, like the example below:

  Edit this page with Visual Editor

• Incomplete editing functionality – The content of some complex formatting, including definition lists, will display and can be edited, but editors using VisualEditor cannot modify certain details. Multi-column lists are edited through the complex transclusion dialog, which is difficult. Table editing on Mobile doesn't work properly. Adding features in this area is one of the developers' priorities.
• Requires JavaScript – If VisualEditor is not available in your browser, or if you have turned off JavaScript, then you will see the buttons for the wikitext editor only.
• Numeric reference names – Currently, VE automatically adds numeric ref names with a colon prefix, i.e., ":0", ":1", ":2", and so on. As of 2026^[update], WMDE is working on improved automatic reference names based on a longstanding wish in the Wishlist. There are no plans to support manually setting named refs in VE (T52568).
• Slower – Loading longer pages into VisualEditor can be significantly slower than the source editor for some users.^[1]
• Cannot edit a single section – VisualEditor loads and submits only entire pages. Clicking an edit link for a section will scroll to the appropriate section upon opening. In VisualEditor's model, editing sections would be paradoxically slower than editing the whole page. [Note: Opening an entire page for editing does not increase edit conflicts, which are (roughly) based on editing the same paragraph.]
• Limited support for user scripts – Most user scripts do not work when using VisualEditor; it is up to the script's developer to add support for VisualEditor.
• Cannot upload non-free images – At this time, images that are uploaded inside either the wikitext editor or VisualEditor are sent directly to the Wikimedia Commons, which does not accept non-free images. All images that fall under Wikipedia's non-free content policy must instead be stored on Wikipedia using the File Upload Wizard. Commons also runs a filter to reject many images uploaded by editors who have not made many prior edits to Commons, especially for small or low-resolution images.
• Data in merged cells is deleted – If rows or columns are moved across them. Workaround: Unmerge the affected areas before moving, and merge them again afterwards.
• Wikilink changes – May unnecessarily turn a simple link into a piped link when a change to the link text involves redirects.
• Copying and pasting – Copying and pasting text from the read mode of VE into the editor can cause templates to be expanded, among other problems. See T385558 for a partial list of VE copy/paste issues.
• Template issues
  • Parameters are wikitext, not rich text – VisualEditor lets you edit the parameters of template transclusions, but only as "wikitext" (so "[[Foo]]" or nested templates like "{{Foo|{{Bar}}}}", not "Foo" or "{{Foo|{{Bar}}}}"). (T52355)
  • Footnotes – Footnotes inside templates (most commonly, infoboxes and {{reflist}}) are not visible in the "reuse" dialog, causing discrepancies in the numbering of footnotes displayed at the bottom of the main VisualEditor editing window.
  • Unable to customize parameter order – VisualEditor does not give you the ability to customize the order in which template parameters are listed. This could cause problems with articles or sets of articles where there is an established, consistent order for templates, especially citation templates.
  • Changes template parameter and value alignment – Especially with infoboxes, VisualEditor can sometimes modify spacing done for parameter and value alignment purposes and add a space after each pipe. Note that this is a deliberate feature of TemplateData that can be managed in the documentation of a given template; see mw:Help:TemplateData#Custom formats for detailed information.
  • Table-formatting unawareness – Popular table cell templates (e.g. yes, no, tba, n/a) can cause issues. The reason is that these templates contain a pipe character to separate formatting and text, but VisualEditor isn't aware of this. As a result, table operations that change the table structure, such as merging/splitting cells or inserting/deleting/moving rows or columns, may not work properly.
  • Unbalanced code – VisualEditor struggles with templates that pass a bit of incomplete code, with markup, to another template or table. These may display oddly or may not be editable if selected in VisualEditor.

You can click "Review your changes" to review the wikitext changes before saving a page. Please report any problems you see, after first searching open VE tickets to make sure it hasn't been reported already..