On 7/2/07, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Actually I prefer the icons, because they provide a
consistency which you
simply cannot get with text.
Also a lack of comprehensibility, especially cross-culturally. Icons
are much more abstract than a word, and in particular they're more
context-sensitive: a pen or eraser or anything else you can think of
could just as easily be taken as "comment on this" or "make a personal
note" or "write a message to the authors". Unless you're really
exceptionally clever, perhaps, but with no offense to participants in
making a UniversalWikiEditButton, nobody seems to have been quite that
clever yet.
Of course, I'm not saying that "edit" is totally clear, but it at
least rules out interpretations like "comment on this section".
Whilst "edit" is blessedly succinct in
English,
I'll bet that in other languages the equivalent is much more verbose
Thirteen characters as opposed to four, I counted the longest as being
in Angela's link. Hardly going to mess up the display, even on a
handheld, or be slow to read.
Would it be possible to actually produce a
"MySkin" which worked like this?
If not, what more would be necessary to make this possible?
You don't even need to use MySkin. Just change the 'editsection'
message using MediaWiki:Editsection. It currently allows arbitrary
HTML, such as images with alt text, to be inserted. Until r23645 just
now, the brackets around [edit] were hardcoded, but I've just changed
those to be removable (or localizable).