On 1/6/07, Virgil Ierubino virgil.ierubino@gmail.com wrote:
Why is MediaWiki so low-tech?
....
The kind of MediaWiki advanced features I'm talking about could be something like instant editing. Think about if you're reading a long section of an article, and midway down there's a spelling error. There are so many reasons to not fix it: you'd have to scroll up to click the edit link on that section, you'd have to wait for it to load, you'd have to find the place again in the edit box, you'd have to wait for it to load again, and all this time you won't be able to continue reading your article, and you'll have lost your place. What if you could just click next to the relevant paragraph, turning it into an edit box on the same page - no loading - edit it, save it, and never once have to switch page. Something similar to the way you can edit posts in vBulletin without having to change pages. I know for sure that a feature like this would double the speed at which (and the likelihood of which) articles are improved.
Obviously once you accept the usage of advanced elements like this there's no stopping how much easier you can make the site, and how user friendly. If the only grounds to not include this kind of feature are accessibility, just put each feature on a switch in user preferences.
You may be interested in ASM's QuickEdit Javascript program; it edits in-frame by section and is very fast and nice. See http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Benutzer:ASM/quickedit.js.
I've enabled it in my monobook.js thusly: /////Edit-in-frame. fast and fun! document.write('<script src="' + 'http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Benutzer:ASM/quickedit.js' + '&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript"></script>'); var qeEnabled = true; // Activate Script? var qeEnableSection0 = false; // Enable QuickEdit link for section 0 (introduction)?
--Gwern