Edit #100,000,000 in VisualEditor was made in November 2022.
As of 2020, VisualEditor is enabled by default here on mediawiki.org and on most Wikipedia and Wikivoyage language editions. It is available as an opt-in Beta Feature to logged-in users on other Wikimedia projects. VisualEditor is generally not enabled for pages outside the content namespaces, such as discussion pages or template code.
The decline in new contributor growth was viewed as the single most serious challenge facing the Wikimedia movement. VisualEditor was built with the goal of removing avoidable technical impediments associated with Wikimedia's editing interface, as a necessary pre-condition for increasing the number of Wikimedia contributors. Subsequent research found no measurable gains over wikitext for new contributors.
The 2011 product whitepaper published by the Wikimedia Foundation's strategic product team identified rich-text editing as one of the "Great Movement Projects". Work subsequently started in May 2011.
The 2011–2012 Wikimedia annual plan, released July 2011, states a goal for VisualEditor: "First opt-in user-facing production usage by December 2011, and first small wiki default deployment by June 2012".
The 2012–2013 Engineering Goals document sets a timeline for VisualEditor's development and deployment up to the end of June 2013.
VisualEditor was deployed to most users at most Wikimedia projects by the end of 2015. See VisualEditor/Rollouts for a list.
Enabling VisualEditor by default for all users or for all logged-in users can be requested by contacting the Editing team's product manager.
Core module
VisualEditor is a standalone program that can be run without MediaWiki, Parsoid, or Node.js that provides a visual editor for editing HTML5 pages. It is written in JavaScript and runs in the browser.
