User blog:Brandon Rhea/SWFanon is beta testing the VisualEditor feature

Hello! Today I'm happy to let you know that Star Wars Fanon is helping out with beta testing the VisualEditor feature. This new editor was developed in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation, and Wikia has been working on its implementation for some time. We're one of the first communities to be trying out this new feature, so we can provide crucial feedback to the Wikia Product Team to make sure the VisualEditor is the best it can be. Note that it is not available in Monobook.

Here are some details about how the VisualEditor beta release works:

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. To do things like uploading or inserting images/videos, and creating new templates or tables, you'll still need to use the "classic" Wikia editing experience. But Wikia will be adding more functionality soon! VisualEditor is only active for the main namespace at this time.

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]]
 * 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&mdash;yet
In the future, Wikia will be adding more features as the 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
 * Searching and inserting images and videos from the wiki
 * Uploading new images and adding new videos
 * Creating and modifying galleries
 * Creating and modifying tables
 * More streamlined addition of templates
 * More streamlined editing of template content
 * Using basic wikitext markup (link 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

What Wikia wants 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 Wikia direct feedback, we're counting on more seasoned users to give us feedback on their behalf, based on observation. So here are the questions Wikia is asking you to keep in mind over the next weeks and months:
 * How are new users doing with VisualEditor?
 * Do they seem more likely to stick around after making their first edit?
 * Has the quality of their edits improved?
 * Are they making less mistakes than before?
 * Are they making different mistakes than before?

We're also confident that VisualEditor will be useful for more seasoned users as well, especially once the full feature set is available. So Wikia is very interested in feedback about your own experience as well! Please feel free to reply on this thread with your thoughts and ideas. Also check out the this list of known issues if you encounter any bugs, and report anything that you don't already see listed!

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.