Wikipedia:VisualEditor/2014 RFC
 | This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump. |
 | This is a draft of an upcoming RFC about whether to re-enable VisualEditor for non-logged-in users. It has not begun yet, and any comments will be reverted. To discuss this RFC itself, please use the talk page |
Background[edit]
On July 8, 2013, VisualEditor was enabled for all users on the English Wikipedia. There was significant backlash, as the software had many big problems, limitations, and bugs, including innocuous edits often wrecking up the wikitext. In a subsequent request for comments, begun on July 30, the Wikipedia community strongly supported disabling VisualEditor for non-logged-in users, and making registered users opt in before using the feature.
Over the months since then, the developers have done much work in improving VisualEditor. Major bugs were fixed, new features were added, and the pages load significantly faster. Meanwhile, the feature was enabled on the majority of all languages of Wikipedia. In particular, the following improvements were made:
- It is possible to switch from VisualEditor to wikitext without losing your changes.
- You can change an image's size by either choosing the exact height and width, or by dragging. You can also edit an image's position, alt-text, and caption.
- Many page settings are now configurable, like whether to show a table of contents.
- The template editor was redesigned, with a much easier-to-use layout.
- Numerous bugs have been fixed, including the occasional appearance of random characters, and abundance of useless <nowiki>s.
- Pages load much faster.
The first RFC opened 10 years ago. Hence, it may be time to re-evaluate consensus on whether to enable VisualEditor for all users.