VisualEditor (VE) is an online rich-text editor for MediaWiki-powered wikis that provides a way to edit pages based on the "what you see is what you get" principle.

It was hoped this would reduce the technical hurdle for would-be Wikipedians, enabling wider participation in editing, and was an attempt to reverse the decline in editor numbers of 50,000 in 2006 to 35,000 in 2011, having peaked in 2007.

[13] According to Wikimedia Foundation's Jay Walsh, the hope is to redress under-represented contributions from Arabic, Portuguese, and Indic-language versions of the site.

[6][note 1] According to Wikimedia Foundation, "There are various reasons that lead existing and prospective contributors not to edit; among them, the complexity of wiki markup is a major issue.

One of VisualEditor's goals is to empower knowledgeable and good-faith users to edit and become valuable members of the community, even if they're not wiki markup experts.

"[4] In 2012, Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, said "we don't think that the visual editor, in and of itself, is going to solve the challenge",[14] and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales remarked "This is epically important".

[22] The technical implementation required improvements to MediaWiki in parsing, wiki markup language, the DOM and final HTML conversion.

[23] A necessary component is a parser server called Parsoid[note 2] which was created to convert in both directions between wikitext and a format suitable for VisualEditor.

[6][27] Irish Wikipedia administrator Oliver Moran, echoing concerns of other editors, said that users may feel belittled by the implication that "certain people" are confused by wiki markup and therefore need the VisualEditor, comparing the learning of wikitext favorably to Twitter's hashtag and @ (at sign) mention syntax.