[WikiEN-l] Newbie friendliness, markup hell, and editing structure

[Ian Woollard]

On 17/03/2008, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Since there is very little consensus over the "correct" ordering of
>  metadata, any tool which reformats metadata in some rigid format is
>  bound to step on some toes. Which is probably just an argument for
>  *reaching* some consensus on metadata formatting, of course.

Yes, I've been using the tool for actual editing and that's already
happened; somebody claimed that there was a 'right' way to order the
interwiki language markups and rearranged it after I submitted.

The other problems I've had have been that one time the tool took an
image on the end of a section I was editing and placed it in the
interwiki language box. It kinda confused me because the image wasn't
where I expected. ;-)

I also have been having issues with the references; this is one area
where the editing tool shows great potential, but there's currently no
way to edit a reference, without entirely deleting it and recreating
it from scratch, which is a *huge* nuisance.

But other than that it looks promising. Oh and the 'header section and
templates' section is much too big- it should be about 2-3 lines tall
at most, they can always scroll if they need to.

>  Perhaps one solution to this is to make the GUI dynamic, reflecting
>  the contents of the wikitext. That is, this:

Not sure, perhaps simply a smaller box in each case might be a simpler
and more straightforward idea.

>  Steve

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.