All,

TL;DR: VisualEditor will be deployed on 14 new Wikipedias next week as an opt-in alpha. Your assitance is requested to inform your wikis about this and help get the software translated.

Next week (on 25 April) we are going to deploy the alpha opt-in version of the VisualEditor to some non-English Wikipedias in the same way that it has been on the English Wikipedia since December 2012.

This will let users get familiar with the VisualEditor, give us feedback on what works and what is broken, and help us prioritise further work ahead of the planned deployment as a 'default' editor for all users which we intend to do in a few months' time.

Due to a number of issues we have been unable to release VisualEditor to non-English wikis until now, and we would very much like to get some great feedback from as many wikis as possible - especially for extended Unicode and RTL languages, but also other languages. Does the VisualEditor work in your language? Does it gel with your wiki's workflow?

The initial languages we want to target are the "top 10" Wikipedias by way of scale - de, nl, fr, it, ru, es, sv, pl, ja - plus selected others to help us discover issues we anticipate: ar, he, hi, ko, zh. These will let us test most of the locales we are concerned about. If this goes well, we hope to deploy the opt-in alpha to all Wikipedias.

Please tell your wiki colleagues that this is coming, especially if your wiki is in this list! Additionally, you can see how fully-translated the software is into your language in the stats at TranslateWiki.Net[0] - please encourage wiki colleagues to help translate the messages ahead of the deployment!

As a note, we have just updated the VisualEditor integration so that the "Edit" tab goes to VisualEditor, and there is an "Edit source" tab to go to the wikitext editor.

This change (which affects the English Wikipedia opt-in deployment and MediaWiki.org as well as the new deployments mentioned above) moves the way that VisualEditor integrates with the wiki's workflow to be closer to how it will appear when it is the 'default' editor. It is still easy to use the wikitext editor if that is what you want to do - the "Edit source" tab (at least for now) will be "above the fold" and not in the drop-down menu on Vector.

Happy to answer any questions you might have!

Yours, -- James D. Forrester Product Manager, VisualEditor Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforrester@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester