Help:VisualEditor

It may take a few seconds for the page to open for editing, and longer if the page is very long.

Clicking on the "edit source" tab will open the classic wikicode Source Editor.

• The "Bold" item (B) bolds the selected text.
• The "Italic" item (I) italicizes the selected text.
• The "Superscript" item (x^I) causes the selected text to appear smaller than surrounding text and to be slightly higher than the surrounding text.
• The "Subscript" item (x_I) causes the selected text to appear smaller than surrounding text and to be slightly lower than the surrounding text.
• The "Strikethrough" item (S) adds a solid bar through the selected text.
• The "Computer code" item (a set of curly brackets: {}) changes the font of the selected text to a monospaced font, which sets it apart from surrounding (proportionally spaced) text.
• The "Underline" item (U) adds a solid line beneath the selected text.
• The "Language" item (文A) allows you to label the language (for example, Japanese) and direction (for example, right-to-left) of the selected text.
• The "Big" item (A^▲) causes the selected text to appear bigger than surrounding text.
• The "Small" item (A^▼) causes the selected text to appear smaller than surrounding text.
• The final item, called "Remove", removes all character formatting from the selected text, including links.

If you have not selected any text, then when you click the "A" to open the menu, and then select an item, that formatting will apply to the text that you start typing, from wherever your cursor is located.

• The "Images and media" icon (a picture of mountains) opens the media dialog.
• The "Template" icon (a puzzle piece) allows you to edit templates.
• The "Table" item allows you to insert a table.
• The "Comment" item (a !) allows you to insert comments that are not visible to readers; these comments can be seen only when in edit mode, where they are indicated by an exclamation mark icon. In edit mode, clicking on the exclamation mark icon allows you to edit or delete the comment.
• The "Chemical formula" icon (a flask) opens the formula inserter dialog.
• The "Math formula" icon (Σ) opens the formula inserter dialog.
• The "Gallery" icon (a set of photos) allows you to insert a gallery to the page.
• The "Your signature" item allows you to insert a signature that you use on the project. It will be greyed out (not selectable) when you are editing a type of page (a "namespace"), such as an article, where signatures should not be inserted.
• The "References list" icon (three books) opens a dialog in which you can specify where references will be displayed to the reader. Usually this needs to be done only once on a page.

• Categories allows you to add categories to this page and to adjust how the page is sorted, when displayed within a category by setting a different index to sort with.
• Page settings allows you to make the page a redirect and adjust options of this redirect, to adjust settings regarding the displaying of the Table of Contents, to disable the edit links next to each heading, and to define the page as a disambiguation page.
• Advanced settings allows you to adjust the settings regarding indexation of the page by search engines, showing a tab to add a new section, and the displayed title.
• Languages shows a list of pages in other languages that are linked to that page.
• Templates used shows a list of links to each template used on this page.

The tabs of the Options dialog are also displayed in the Page options menu and can be opened by clicking on them. Furthermore the Page options menu contains the items Syntax highlighting (which is only available when using the VisualEditor in "wikitext mode"), View as right-to-left, and the item Find and replace, which opens a bar, where you can insert words or regular expressions you are searching for and those to replace them with, together with several buttons for options.

You can also review your changes using the "Review your changes" button to confirm that they will function as intended before saving your changes. This is similar to the "Show changes" button in the wikicode Source Editor.

The "Resume editing" button (×) returns you to the page you were editing. You can publish all of your changes later.

If you select (highlight) text and then click the "Link" button, that text will be used in creating the link. For a link that involves only one word, you can either select that word or just put the cursor within that word.

The link tool will try to help with internal links by searching for likely matches. Once you have entered or selected the link, you complete the linking process by pressing Enter on your keyboard or by clicking the "Done" button. Your link will immediately appear on the page, but as with other changes to the page, it will not be published until you publish the entire page.

In the link editing dialog, you can then change where the link goes. You can also remove the link entirely by clicking the "Remove" button in the upper right corner of the dialog. You can also open the link's target in another window by clicking on the copy of the link in the dialog box. (You might want do this to check if an external link is valid.)

If you want to exit the link label (the text displayed as a link) or continue to write after this link, you can press "→" on your keyboard:

• Clicking it once will escape the link editing dialog and put your cursor at the end of the element linked (blue framed, to edit this element)
• Clicking it twice will put the cursor after the element linked, ready to type the rest of your text.

To edit the link label of an existing link, click within the link label and type the new one. But if you want to replace the entire label, please note:

• If you have selected (highlighted) the entire link label, the link will be deleted by typing any key.
• To edit the link label directly without deleting it, put the cursor within that link label, use the backspace and delete keys (no more than necessary), and a narrow blue link area will remain there. Now you may type in the new label for the kept link.
• You can also link to categories, files and more.

Editing an existing reference

Click on "Apply changes" when you are done.

Re-using an existing reference

To re-use an existing reference, place your cursor in the body of the text where you want to add a new reference (number) for that citation. Then click on the "Re-use" item from the "Cite" menu.

Adding a new reference

You can make the reference belong to a given group, although normally this is left blank. (This option is used to display groups of references with the "References list" tool.)

Place the cursor where you want to display the references list (usually at the bottom of the page), open the "Insert" menu and click the "References list" icon (three books).

The final step in the References list dialog is to click "Apply changes".

Editing images

You can change the search by changing the text in the dialog's search box.

To choose a file, click on its thumbnail image.

This places the image onto the page you are editing.

The media dialog also allows you to add alternative text captions, to help users who use screen readers, or who have disabled image display.

You can resize an existing image by clicking on it, then moving the resize icon (the two-headed arrow on one or both bottom corners).

You can also drag and drop an image to a place higher or lower on the page.

Uploading images

See: a:Help:Uploading images

Editing media galleries

The order of images can be rearranged by dragging the images on the left, and can be added using the "Add new image" button at the bottom of the list. The options tab allows size and layout to be edited. The default display options are preferred in most cases.

When you click the "Apply changes" button, you will exit the gallery editor. You should then see your changes, with the gallery as it will now appear to readers.

Remember that exiting the gallery editor does not save your changes. As with other changes made using VisualEditor, you must "Save" the entire page in order to save your work and make it viewable online.

In the VisualEditor you can search for a relevant template, add a transclusion on the page you’re editing and, if needed, add custom content using parameters.

Insert new template

If you’re having trouble finding the kind of template you want by using keywords, you can look on other wiki pages with similar content and view or edit the page source to see which templates are in use. When you find the desired template’s name, you can type it into this field to insert it here.

Template parameters

If you find in the documentation that the template expects parameters without names, fill in numbers as placeholders for the parameter names using the undocumented parameter input, then add text to the values you want to provide as you normally would.

Example:

• first unnamed parameter: “1”
• first unnamed parameter’s value: “en_US”
• second unnamed parameter: “2”
• second unnamed parameter’s value: “yes”

If you accidentally include nonexistent, misspelled or erroneous parameters, the values you enter for those parameters won’t show up on the page you’re editing.

Editing multi-part template content

This content often contains “unbalanced templates,” templates which are incomplete on their own and need to be paired with some wikicode or another template in order to function.

These related pieces of template content must be created in wikicode, but can be edited in the VisualEditor. In these cases you will see a notice at the top of the dialog to signal the situation and a specialized toolbar will be visible at the bottom of the sidebar. There you can use the icon buttons to add additional templates, additional wikicode, delete elements or change their order.

Nested templates

The VisualEditor can’t present this template within a template (a nested template) using the editor’s easy-to-use interface, so if you want to nest a template yourself, you’ll need to understand how to add the template by hand in wikicode into the appropriate parameter field.

Completing your edit

You may also see an error message; you may need to consult the template’s own documentation to get to the bottom of some errors. If you’re still having trouble, consider posting about your problem on the template’s talk page.

Removing a template

To start a new list, just click on one of the two menu items shown here. Or, if you already have typed the list (on separate lines), select (highlight) the list you have typed, then click on one of the menu items.

If you want to change the indentation level of part of an existing list, select the part of the list that you want to change. Then use the menu, or press the Tab key. (The Tab key increases indentation; use the shift key plus the Tab key to decrease indentation). You can even mix ordered (numbered) and unordered (bullet) lists, if the list items have different indentations.

You can even import a table by dragging a comma-separated value (.csv) file from your computer into the main editing window.

Clicking "Properties" allows you to choose whether the table has a caption, is sortable or collapsible, or if it has "wikitable" styling. For more information about these properties, see Help:Tables.

To end your editing of a cell, just click elsewhere.

You also have the option of setting or changing the general (default) sorting key, which determines where the page appears when listed with other pages in the same category.

For example, the default sorting key for the article "Satoshi Tajiri" is "Tajiri, Satoshi". In the category "People", the article is listed under the letter "T", not the letter "S".

Clicking on a category also allows you to specify a sorting key for that specific category. Such a sorting key overrides the default sorting key.

You can make a page a redirect to another page by checking the "Redirect this page to" checkbox, and then typing the name of the page to which you want to send the reader who tries to go to the page that you are editing. There is also an option to prevent page renames from updating this redirect. This is very rarely used.

You can change whether the page shows a Table of Contents by selecting one of these three buttons. The default option is "If needed", which shows a Table of Contents if there are three or more headings.

You can make a page not show edit links next to each section header. There is also an option to designate a page as a disambiguation page.