Steve Bennett wrote:
Don't tell me that when my table has exploded due to an extraneous | somewhere...
?? so? It's still your decision that the table is exploded.
If a user's error makes half the article disappear or turn bold or something, they're going to want to know about. Let's not patronise here.
It's not patronizing to use the wiki-wiki method, it's *human*. I realise that Wikipedia and some other Wikimedia projects have long since moved to a hybrid approach using some degree of machine intervention, but on the whole wiki-wiki works because of editorial vigilance, not machine error detection.
We don't know for a given editor whether seeing a warning or seeing a page blow-out is going to be more scary. Therefore it should be a setting. I think the default should be not to show the error, or perhaps to show a little widget that links to the warnings from text like "Why is this page messed up?".