Hi Anthony,
Thanks for this initiative!
As someone who deals with budget tables, I am very supportive of improving features for table editing. Have you tried editing tables in VE?
You might also consider using a spreadsheet like Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, or (offline) LibreOffice Calc.
Because the use case here involves medical content, I am cross-posting this thread to the Wikimedia-Medicine mailing list, and also pinging Doc James to ask for comments.
Pine On Apr 16, 2016 23:21, "Anthony Cole" ahcoleecu@gmail.com wrote:
BMJ, the publishers of the *British Medical Journal* and other top-tier biomedical journals, have kindly recruited the best minds they can get to review the en.Wikipedia's article, "Parkinson's disease".
We began the review by passing the article, in a Word document, from one reviewer to the next by email. Each made proposed changes to the article text and left comments in the document, using Word's "Review" and "Track changes" features.
At that point we needed to start a discussion, and Word isn't ideal for that. So I pasted the relevant paragraphs from the Word document into the left column of a wiki table, and the reviewers' comments into the right column, where the discussion could happen. [1] I manually applied background colours to distinguish deletions from additions in the left column, using <span style="background:#xxxxxx">.
That discussion has now begun but one of the many things I've learned during all this is, the top researchers and theorists spend a lot of time in the air (travelling to conferences, lectures, meetings), and it is then, free from the demands of job and family, when they do their reviewing.
So, I have pasted that wiki table into Word and have made it available to the reviewers here: [2]. Now they can download a copy before they get on a flight, and email it back to me with their comments when they're online again, and I'll transcribe their comments into the wiki table for discussion.
This may be as simple as it gets but I just thought I'd put this before you, in case you may have thoughts on a better technical approach for next time. (BMJ have offered to do more of these.) I'm finding the construction of the wiki table tedious (particularly highlighting the deletions and additions) though I'm getting faster, and transcribing offline comments from the Word document into the wiki table will be a small chore. The wiki table pastes easily into Word with highlighting and formatting intact, but not vice versa. (I've also asked at Village pump (technical).)
Any thoughts on making this easier or smarter would be much appreciated.
Anthony Cole
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