Ilmari Karonen wrote:
It would make a certain amount of sense to trigger edit mode if the "preload" parameter is present _and_ the page does not yet exist, even if "action=edit" is not present.
I'll see if I can produce a patch.
Here's a quick hack that seems to work: http://vyznev.net/misc/preloadWithoutEdit.diff
To digress a bit, it seems to me like the division of labor between the MediaWiki and Article classes is somewhat suboptimal, as evidenced by the fact that such as simple change requires patching two different classes. In particular, the return value of Article::getContent() has too many different meanings -- I've encountered some cases before where MediaWiki "no such article" notices appear in the edit box when something unexpected happens and the code gets confused. (I think trying to edit an old revision of a deleted article can cause this, for example. That happens quite often when doing new pages patrol.)