The editing interface that lets Wikipedia users edit pages using a WYSIWYG principle is VisualEditor.
VisualEditor is a rich-text editor for MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia. WYSIWYG means “what you see is what you get”: instead of editing raw wikitext syntax, users can format text, add links, insert references, and modify page structure through an interface that resembles the finished article.
The project was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation with Fandom and began public rollout in 2013 after years of development. Its goal was to lower the technical barrier for newcomers, since traditional source editing requires familiarity with markup such as double brackets for links and apostrophes for italics.
VisualEditor did not replace source editing. Experienced contributors can still switch to wikitext, and the visual interface itself depends on complex conversion between wikitext and an editable document model. Early versions drew criticism for bugs and performance problems, but the tool became a standard part of MediaWiki. Citation Hunt, PageTriage, and WikiScanner are separate tools, not visual page editors.