Good to see this isn't dead.

I agree that a monochrome icon that matches the other work being done would be awesome.

It's sort of been on the back-burner for a while, but mostly because it's not as trivial as it looks.

The reason this is a tricky change is because the output of the parser currently places the section edit link and the heading text in the wrong order. That is, the section edit link comes first (and is floated right) and the heading text comes second. Attached is a screenshot of the DOM structure as it is now on Wikipedia.

It's important to note that the experiment I ran was a JavaScript hack that rearranged DOM elements on the fly. The correct way to do this (as long as we are busting out the "productized" word) is to make these changes before we send the HTML out to the client. This means making changes to the parser's output. This could 

Bug #11270 calls for this change to be made, and there's even a patch (but it's 3 years old, so don't get your hopes up). The patch changes the output of the parser, which affects all skins, and then adjusts the CSS for non-Vector skins to make them look the way they used to. Bug #41729 calls for the experimental stuff I did a while back to be cleaned up - basically what you are calling for now. There's also #11555 which relates to this issue, and may be solved by whatever we do to resolve the other 2 bugs.

- Trevor

On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 3:13 PM, Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah@wikimedia.org> wrote:
On 11/13/2012 06:07 PM, Steven Walling wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> This is a note of prior explanation about a small design enhancement
> upcoming.
>
> *## Background*
>
> You might remember that part of the original Vector plans was to redesign
> section edit links to make them more accessible to new contributors. (Look
> at the Acai release on usability.wikimedia.org).
>
> Later on, Trevor collaborated with the Community Dept. to run an A/B test
> on English Wikipedia of his redesign, which conclusively showed that the
> new look increased both clicks and the net number of edits by a significant
> amount.
>
> At the time, there was no big push to productize the changes, but the code
> has been sitting around inside the ClickTracking extension. My team became
> the de facto maintainers of ClickTracking since we were its most heavy
> users, and are now deprecating it in favor of EventLogging.
>
> Skipping the big analytics discussion there, suffice it to say that we
> don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, and are working to
> productize Trevor's road tested new design for section edit links in
> Vector. (No change in Monobook et al.)

Compare the old to something much like the new:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/03/09/ui-design-experiments/

> *## Plan of action*
>
> Here's the plan for execution, which I've discussed with Howie Fung and
> some of the design team so far:
>
>    1. We'll deploy the current version of the section edit redesign, which
>    you can see at http://piramido.wmflabs.org/wiki/Hipster_ipsum. I've
>    committed to handling the necessary community announcements and final QA.
>    2. For the second iteration, Munaf and Vibha will work on a redesigned
>    icon to fit with Agora style, and we'll explore the idea Munaf had -- the
>    icons appearing only on hover in the section. It's a good one.
>
> The current iteration is perhaps not perfect, but it was tested with users
> and showed an improved conversion across the board. It also appears to be
> using the previous localization message, so we can safely deploy it
> everywhere Vector is in use.
>
> The caveat Howie and I have discussed is the fact that no quality
> measurements were done on the increase in editing. This change is really a
> basic necessity as far as Product is concerned, so we aren't going to make
> that a blocker, but should be prepared to roll it back if it makes the
> wikis explode with vandalism etc.

Steven, this is great news and I'm looking forward to seeing it live on
our sites!  Thanks for taking this the last few steps to completion.
And thanks to everyone who did the design, coding, analysis, and other
thinking on this change.

--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation

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