Who doesn’t love using the largest multilingual free encyclopedia on the Internet that is Wikepedia? Today, Wikimedia – the San Francisco-based organization operating Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, and many others – is launching the new prototype “visual editor”. The new visual editor aims to expand the number of people who contribute to the online encyclopedia. The company blames the difficulty in learning its wikitext, a lightweight markup language used to write pages in wiki sites, as the roadblock to growing its editor community.
“We want the process of learning how to edit to be trivial, so our volunteers, both new and experienced, can devote themselves to what they edit. That’s why we’re building the new visual editor, so that contributing to a wiki is as easy and natural as other modern editing systems, and new editors are not dissuaded from making their changes,” Wikimedia said. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales was also heard tweeting “This is epically important” via his Twitter account, pointing out to the visual editor demonstration pages which you can find here.
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