On 10/22/06, Sebastian Moleski sebmol@gmail.com wrote:
Please test your changes very carefully before committing them. There has been a lot of irritation at various projects when the user interface changed. Please also remember that individual projects use their own global javascript to manipulate MediaWiki pages (e.g. German Wikipedia which had a script that moves the edit-links from the far right of the page to right next to the heading). If you do decide to make such changes, please make sure it's widely announced. For reasons somewhat outside understanding, users seem to react more allergic to cosmetic changes to the user interface than actual functionality.
I did test my changes carefully before committing them. I just don't have access to a screenreader, so I tested them carefully in visual browsers. I dropped a note at the German and French Wikipedias' Monobook.js talk page informing them of the upcoming change.
And the changes were not merely cosmetic; a usability study posted to this list a while back found that of the two participants who tried using section edit links, both thought they belonged to the section above due to their misplacement, and both blanked the unexpected sections. This is obviously quite undesirable.