[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-ambassadors] Deploying alpha of VisualEditor to non-English Wikipedias

[Nicole Ebber]

Hey,

The VisualEditor is going to be deployed in an opt-in version to several
Wikipedias on Thursday next week.

I am planning to hold a BarCamp session this afternoon in the Milan to
discuss how chapters can support or facilitate a community communication
and feedback process in this regards.

So anyone interested in this topic is welcome to join!

Thanks,
Nicole Ebber
International Affairs

http://wikimedia.de

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 at wikimedia.org | @jdforrester

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