Okay, I did a little case study. The subject was a professor of art
history, the kind of person who's not technically inclined but whose
contributions to something like Wikipedia would be invaluable. I
looked through articles from the English Wikipedia's "in the news"
section for a suitable test, and found that Venus Williams had a good
stretch to look at, three second-level headings in a row with no
intervening headings. I prepared a screen with the usual edit section
links:
http://img405.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mediawikiheadingstest1ccg7.png
And a modified version with edit section links like the Germans have:
http://img524.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mediawikiheadingstest2cgh0.png
I told her I wanted to use her as a guinea pig for usability, which
she agreed to. I showed her the first image and asked what she
thought the middle edit link (corresponding to the 2004 section) would
do. She replied without hesitation that it would allow her to edit
the preceding section, 2003. Then I showed her the second image and
asked the same question. She expressed considerable confusion, and
after some thought said she didn't know *what* it would do. When I
explained the actual function of the link, she was completely
astonished that anyone could make anything like the current layout
without meaning for the edit link to correspond to the previous
section. This appears to correspond with the German usability study's
participants' confusion, which was great enough that they just deleted
the unexpected existing text, and it reinforces my commitment to get
it changed.
But she was also, as I said, confused about the second choice, as the
Germans have it. Happily, she was an art professor, so she was able
to articulate her issues well and make constructive suggestions. She
remarked that having the line under the section header was unusual and
confusing, and suggested it be moved above the header. (I don't think
this is feasible as an aesthetic change, given that the problem will
remain for third-level and deeper headings.) She thought it was much
more natural for the edit link to be in the lower right of the section
instead of anywhere on the top, saying something to the effect of that
it made more sense to want to edit the section *after* you've read it,
if I understood her correctly. I showed her the suggestion with a
downward-pointing arrow, and her opinion on that was that it was
inelegant and unexpected, but that at least if you *thought* about it
it was unambiguous.
It might be a good idea to consider other software packages for
comparison. Of forum packages, vBulletin has edit links on the bottom
of posts, SMF and IPB (at least the
invisionfree.com version of IPB)
on the top. Those aren't terribly useful to us, because posts are
more clearly marked as discrete than sections, since they are in fact
discrete. They're in their own boxes and all, so there can't be much
confusion.
DokuWiki.com, at least, has the edit links at the right as
MediaWiki does, so no help there. A couple of other packages I
glanced at (Instiki, PmWiki) seem to have no section edit links at
all. Overall that doesn't seem a very helpful line of inquiry.
So: I'm not sure I want to muck around with the skin's aesthetics so
much. I'm a programmer, not a designer. If someone else can come up
with suggestions that are both intuitive and pretty, be my guest, but
for now my primary thought is 1) have the edit link immediately next
to the header text, like the Germans; 2) have a downward-pointing
arrow as part of the link text; and 3) add JavaScript that will, when
your mouse moves over the edit link, highlight the text that will be
editable by clicking. I don't think this is great, but I think it
will make it very hard to be confused by the time you actually get to
the edit page, which is a lot more than can be said for the current
layout.