User:Eran/draft
Written by Eranroz and Ravid Ziv that working on IEG project - gadgets compatibility for VisualEditor
Many gadgets and scripts have been created by volunteers across Wikimedia projects, which add various features. Many of them are intended for editors for improved editing experience. In the last months, there is a new VisualEditor interface for editing articles. While this interface is still in "beta" yet and the Wikipedians have not yet adapted it in common use. We believe there are many missing important features, that could expand the VisualEditor using. The known non-supported features are core features and extension features (such as timelines), but there are many unknown non-supported features - gadgets. Gadgets can extend and customize the visual editor and introduce new functionalities: to let more advanced users to use more features (such as timeline), to introduce work-flows that are project specific (such as deletion proposals), or to easily insert popular templates such as cite templates. Moreover, since there is no central repository for gadgets there is a huge mess with them: there is no easy way to tell what gadgets exist across all wikis.
Our project aims to organize the gadgets mess: improve gadgets sharing among communities, and to push gadgets improvements for edit interface to VisualEditor. As part of this project we already:
- We mapped all the gadgets (in any language) and created a list of all the gadgets in various projects, with popularity rating across projects
- Based on this list we select key gadget, the most popular editing gadgets, and rewritten them to support the new VisualEditor:
- Spell checker (Rechtschreibpruefung) - Spell checking for common errors. Spelling mistakes are highlighted in red online while writing!
- Reftoolbar - help editors add citation templates to articles.
- Directionality tool - Adds button to add RTL mark useful in RTL languages such as Arabic and Hebrew
- Common summaries - Add two new dropdown boxes below the edit summary box in save dialog with some useful default summaries
- Based on our experience with writing VE gadget, we created a guide for VE gadgets writers, which should help them extend the VisualEditor with custom features. May help develop support for Visual Editor by making it more integrated with existing tools.
We believe the VisualEditor is very important tool: it lowers the learning curve for editing Wikipedia (compared to wikitext), and it can help newcomers to get into Wikipedia. It may be also useful for experienced editors, as it provide almost all wikitext features in user friendly way (no need for "Show preview" anymore) and it is getting improved all the time (it has greatly improved since its first deployment. try it!).
We call the gadgets writers and developers to use our guide to learn how to extend the VisualEditor, and comment it. If you think of a cool feature that may help Wikipedia community, or a customization for a specific Wikipedia language, don't hesitate to write it!
We invite the Wikipedians to test, comment and use the VisualEditor and the gadgets that we wrote. You are welcome to suggest missing features and gadgets for the VisualEditor in our project talk page.