Why is MediaWiki so low-tech?
I understand the imperitive for maximal accessibility, but is it not also true that, these days, fewer and fewer people are using browsers that can't handle advanced features? The fact of the matter is that a website's *usability* is improved by taking advantage of the higher-tech architecture that modern browsers allow you to use. Can't MediaWiki default to its current state, but offer a per-user preference to turn on advanced options?
Look at a site like Facebook, (http://www.facebook.com), for example, which is possibly one of the most beautifully constructed websites I have ever encountered. It is simple in layout and ridiculously easy to use on account of very good design, and the use of advanced code generating popups, immediate editing, etc. Furthermore their code is pristine; I have never seen an error, even in the advanced features, on any browser.
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.
MediaWiki is not low-tech. MediaWiki is one of the most advanced wiki engine, if not the most advanced in the world. I am not a web programmer...but....
What I think you're calling for need some javascripts. It might be really difficult to get it look right in every browser, especially browsers like IE. Anyway, options are bad. It would be a bad idea to have many options. It may allow for more bugs and make it harder for programmers and users in general. The last thing MediaWIki need is tons of bugs interfering with the operation of Wikimedia sites.
On 1/6/07, Virgil Ierubino virgil.ierubino@gmail.com wrote:
Why is MediaWiki so low-tech?
I understand the imperitive for maximal accessibility, but is it not also true that, these days, fewer and fewer people are using browsers that can't handle advanced features? The fact of the matter is that a website's *usability* is improved by taking advantage of the higher-tech architecture that modern browsers allow you to use. Can't MediaWiki default to its current state, but offer a per-user preference to turn on advanced options?
Look at a site like Facebook, (http://www.facebook.com), for example, which is possibly one of the most beautifully constructed websites I have ever encountered. It is simple in layout and ridiculously easy to use on account of very good design, and the use of advanced code generating popups, immediate editing, etc. Furthermore their code is pristine; I have never seen an error, even in the advanced features, on any browser.
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. _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Well we have to remember that -not everyone- owns a Dell Dimension with a 3gHz processor and 1GB of RAM, or a high-end MacBook from 2006. While I own both, not everyone does. Not everyone has the resources to run the latest browser with all the greatest implements and support for seventy thousand scripts. I wouldn't be surprised if a computer that was old by 1995 in the US is considered industry standard in Somalia.
On 1/6/07, Virgil Ierubino virgil.ierubino@gmail.com wrote:
Why is MediaWiki so low-tech?
I understand the imperitive for maximal accessibility, but is it not also true that, these days, fewer and fewer people are using browsers that can't handle advanced features? The fact of the matter is that a website's *usability* is improved by taking advantage of the higher-tech architecture that modern browsers allow you to use. Can't MediaWiki default to its current state, but offer a per-user preference to turn on advanced options?
Look at a site like Facebook, (http://www.facebook.com), for example, which is possibly one of the most beautifully constructed websites I have ever encountered. It is simple in layout and ridiculously easy to use on account of very good design, and the use of advanced code generating popups, immediate editing, etc. Furthermore their code is pristine; I have never seen an error, even in the advanced features, on any browser.
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. _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
On Sat, 6 Jan 2007 11:47:57 -0500, "James Hare" messedrocker@gmail.com wrote:
Well we have to remember that -not everyone- owns a Dell Dimension with a 3gHz processor and 1GB of RAM, or a high-end MacBook from 2006. While I own both, not everyone does. Not everyone has the resources to run the latest browser with all the greatest implements and support for seventy thousand scripts. I wouldn't be surprised if a computer that was old by 1995 in the US is considered industry standard in Somalia.
Hence his suggestion to:
On 1/6/07, Virgil Ierubino virgil.ierubino@gmail.com wrote:
Can't MediaWiki default to its current state, but offer a per-user preference to turn on advanced options?
Cheers, Philip
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
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Virgil Ierubino wrote:
The kind of MediaWiki advanced features I'm talking about could be something like instant editing.
[snip]
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.
[snip]
I'd love to see this, but it's somewhat more difficult for MediaWiki than for something like flickr or facebook where you're editing tiny individual data fields like titles or comments.
The level of edit addressability we have currently is at the section level (which currently runs you to another page rather than in-place but it's still a huge improvement over searching through a 100kb article-zilla). Even section editing, with the big easily-spotted section lines in the source code, have has its share of bugs; it took a year or two to shake most of them out.
Individual paragraphs, table cells, etc would be an even nicer fine-grained level to do inline editing on, but this requires having a reliable way to associate parts of rendered output with the parts of source code which created them.
Not impossible, but fraught with difficulty in edge cases due to our funky syntax, embedded HTML, template transclusions, conditional formatting, etc.
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.
It's really not a question of accepting it as an idea; section editing already *is that* at the first level. Rather, moving it to more finely-addressable parts of text will likely end up waiting on the much-fabled rewrite of the parser in order to accomplish it reliably.
And that's not necessarily trivial; the parser needs to maintain a pretty good degree of compatibility with our millions of articles, *and* fix a bunch of problems, *and* make it easier to do these future sorts of things.
Most effort currently is going to backend changes, performance/scalability/reliabilty work, bugfixes and maintenance, localization and user account support improvements, and simpler frontend/UI tweaks as we try to get some longstanding 'big issues' done and bring new volunteer developers up to speed.
What might more realistically happen in the near term is making section editing work 'inline' more cleanly, with AJAXy goodness. This is hard to guarantee (due to section boundaries being potentially in strange places), but it might be possible to make it work mostly reliably, perhaps falling back to separate page loads in unclean cases.
If you or someone you know wants to work on this, hop on over to wikitech-l and introduce yourself there and in the #mediawiki channel on irc.freenode.net.
If the only grounds to not include this kind of feature are accessibility, just put each feature on a switch in user preferences.
Rather, it should just degrade gracefully.
- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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