From: erik_moeller(a)gmx.de (Erik Moeller)
Reply-To: wikitech-l(a)wikipedia.org
Date: 21 Apr 2003 01:36:00 +0200
To: wikitech-l(a)wikipedia.org
Subject: [Wikitech-l] "Edit this section"
Just an idea, don't know if I'll find time to implement it:
Long articles can get painful to edit, because you have to scroll to the
section you want to work on, and always load the entire page. Some
browsers also have problems with long texts. Realistically, some articles
will always be in the 20-30K range. So an easy way to edit smaller
portions of a large article might make sense.
We already have section markers in the text:
== foo ==
=== bar ===
It would not be very difficult to add a little [edit] link behind each
section headline (should be made as non-ugly as possible), which would
lead to an URL like
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/
wiki.phtml?title=Robert_Atkins&action=edit§ion=References
The resulting edit window would only contain the text from this section
and subsection. Preview would also only show this text. When saved, it
would be merged with the remaining text.
Edit conflicts could be handled at first like they are now: If an edit
conflict occurs, the entire text - not just the section - has to be edited
again. However, smarter edit conflict handling would be neat -- if someone
edits text in an entirely different section, the two edits could be auto-
merged.
The name of the section that is being edited could also be automatically
added to the recent changes comment line, so when I edit ==External
links==, the text (section: "External links") is appended to the RC
comment.
One problem case would be articles with duplicate section titles. To
properly reference section titles, there might therefore have to be an
additional iteration parameter. Or we assume that this doesn't happen and
always edit the first section of that name.
What do you think?
Regards,
Erik
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