Hi Anthony,
Thanks for this initiative!
As someone who deals with budget tables, I am very supportive of improving
features for table editing. Have you tried editing tables in VE?
You might also consider using a spreadsheet like Google Sheets, Microsoft
Excel, or (offline) LibreOffice Calc.
Because the use case here involves medical content, I am cross-posting this
thread to the Wikimedia-Medicine mailing list, and also pinging Doc James
to ask for comments.
Pine
On Apr 16, 2016 23:21, "Anthony Cole" <ahcoleecu(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> BMJ, the publishers of the *British Medical Journal* and other top-tier
> biomedical journals, have kindly recruited the best minds they can get to
> review the en.Wikipedia's article, "Parkinson's disease".
>
> We began the review by passing the article, in a Word document, from one
> reviewer to the next by email. Each made proposed changes to the article
> text and left comments in the document, using Word's "Review" and "Track
> changes" features.
>
> At that point we needed to start a discussion, and Word isn't ideal for
> that. So I pasted the relevant paragraphs from the Word document into the
> left column of a wiki table, and the reviewers' comments into the right
> column, where the discussion could happen. [1] I manually applied
> background colours to distinguish deletions from additions in the left
> column, using <span style="background:#xxxxxx">.
>
> That discussion has now begun but one of the many things I've learned
> during all this is, the top researchers and theorists spend a lot of time
> in the air (travelling to conferences, lectures, meetings), and it is then,
> free from the demands of job and family, when they do their reviewing.
>
> So, I have pasted that wiki table into Word and have made it available to
> the reviewers here: [2]. Now they can download a copy before they get on a
> flight, and email it back to me with their comments when they're online
> again, and I'll transcribe their comments into the wiki table for
> discussion.
>
> This may be as simple as it gets but I just thought I'd put this before
> you, in case you may have thoughts on a better technical approach for next
> time. (BMJ have offered to do more of these.) I'm finding the construction
> of the wiki table tedious (particularly highlighting the deletions and
> additions) though I'm getting faster, and transcribing offline comments
> from the Word document into the wiki table will be a small chore. The wiki
> table pastes easily into Word with highlighting and formatting intact, but
> not vice versa. (I've also asked at Village pump (technical).)
>
> Any thoughts on making this easier or smarter would be much appreciated.
>
> Anthony Cole
>
> 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Anthonyhcole/sandbox
> 2.
>
> https://onedrive.live.com/view.aspx?resid=C1FF29217E209194!2141&ithint=file…
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Publication from the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the
Department of Molecular and Experimental Medicine, Scripps Research
Institute:
http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/11/16/031971
Pine