Help:VisualEditor/User guide

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

Pressing on the "Edit source" tab will open the classic wikitext source editor.

Formatting: Pressing the "A" opens a menu.

• The "Bold" item (B) bolds the selected text.
• The "Italic" item (I) italicizes the selected text.
• The "Superscript" item (x²) causes the selected text to appear smaller than surrounding text and to be slightly higher than the surrounding text.
• The "Subscript" item (x₂) 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 final item (), called "Remove", removes all character formatting from the selected text, including links.

If you have not selected any text, then when you press 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.

Instructions for adding local citation templates to the "Manual" tab at a specific wiki are available at VisualEditor/Citation tool .

Instructions for enabling the Automatic tab are available at Enabling Citoid on your wiki

The citoid service tries to fill out citation templates automatically.

• 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 speech balloon) 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, pressing on the exclamation mark icon allows you to edit or delete the comment.
• The "Hieroglyphs" icon (an ankh symbol - ☥) allows you to enter the hieroglyphics inserter. (See below.)
• The "Code block" item allows you to insert code.
• The "Musical notation" item allows you to insert a musical notation.
• The "Gallery" icon (a set of photos) allows you to insert a gallery to the page.
• The "Math formula" icon (Σ) opens the formula inserter dialog.
• The "Graph" item allows you to insert a graph.
• 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 it. Furthermore the Page options menu contains the items View as left-to-right or 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 wikitext 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 press 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 or by pressing 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 pressing the "Remove" button in the upper right corner of the dialog. You can also open the link's target in another window by pressing 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 →:

• Pressing 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)
• Pressing 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, press 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.

Many wikis use templates to format references. If a template is used in your reference, then when you move your pointer over the reference information, all the information in that field will be highlighted.

If a template was used and you press on the reference information, then the Template icon (puzzle piece) will appear with some information. Press on the "Edit" button to edit the content of the template in the template editor dialog.

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 press on the "Re-use" item from the "Cite" menu.

(Note: If your wiki has the second or third footnote system described above, you'll see a "Re-use" tab, in a dialog, instead of a "Re-use" item on the "Cite" menu.)

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.)

After you are done editing your new template, press on "Apply changes" to return to the Reference editor, and "Apply changes" again to return to the page you are editing.

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

The final step in the References list dialog is to press "Insert".

Press on "Insert" when you are done.

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

To choose a file, press on its thumbnail image.

This places the image onto the page you are editing.

You can resize an existing image by pressing 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.

When you press the "Done" 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 publish your changes. As with other changes made using the visual editor, you must publish the entire page in order to publish your work.

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.

When a template contains TemplateData, the VisualEditor can use it to present annotated fields for you to fill in.

For templates that have some community-provided TemplateData, the VisualEditor displays a list of the named parameters and, often, descriptions and instructions explaining the meaning and required format for each parameter’s values.

When you insert a new template, you may find that some optional parameters are pre-selected. That means the author(s) of the template recommends the use of those parameters. It’s best to review all parameters that will be used in a template to ensure you understand their use.

Clicking an unchecked parameter adds it to the template. Clicking a parameter that’s already been added takes you to the parameter’s input field.

Some template parameters will show as “deprecated”. Don’t use deprecated parameters when inserting a template; they’re only visible to you because those parameters are in use on older pages where this template was included.

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.

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

These related pieces of template content must be created in wikitext, 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 wikitext, delete elements or change their order.

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 wikitext into the appropriate parameter field.

You may also see an error message, which (like the other TemplateData mentioned above) is community-provided content and may vary in usefulness. 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.

There’s another, much less common way to use templates, though, and that’s to substitute a template. Doing this permanently includes the template content just as it appears at the moment you insert it. It will not update if the template code is later changed.

Most users won’t ever need to resort to substitution. Substitution is typically only useful when you need to capture the exact appearance of one version of a template, such as when content is under development and needs evaluation.

To substitute a template in the VisualEditor, insert a template using the name syntax subst:<template name>. Then press the blue “Add” button.

When you’re finished, press “Insert”, which will insert the template content as you see it.

To start a new list, just press 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 press on one of the menu items.

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

Now the "Table" menu is available. From that menu, you can add a caption to the top of the table.

To end your editing of a cell, just press 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 "George Washington" is "Washington, George". In the category "Presidents of the United States", the article is listed under the letter "W", not the letter "G".

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

At the bottom is the option to prevent page renames from updating this redirect. This is very rarely used.

To edit an existing musical notation on the page, double press on it.

Until they are fully supported, you can copy an existing one from another page, or edit the source wikitext directly.

To switch from the visual editor to the wikitext editor, press the [[ ]] button on the far right of the toolbar.

Scroll down, and you'll see the wikitext editing area.

You can also switch from the wikitext editor to the visual editor. To do that, press the pencil icon on the far right of the toolbar.