## 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.)
## Plan of action
Here's the plan for execution, which I've discussed with Howie Fung and some of the design team so far:
- 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.
- 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.
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