On 5/21/06, William Allen Simpson <william.allen.simpson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I have never found it hard to edit at the beginning of
the section,
the PageUp key works just fine.
It's not intuitive though - at least, it wasn't to me for a very long
time. Why? Probably because you think in terms of adding something to
the bottom of the section. "Oh, I'll just add a sentence down the end
there" - counterintuitive to scroll back up to the top, to click edit,
to then scroll down again. However, if there was a marker at the end
of the section, there would be an ambiguity - do you want to edit the
section, subsection, subsubsection etc.
The problem I've had is the edit box sometimes
cannot be found, as it is
in some incongruous place after having been moved by floating images. As
the section header can be very short (the edit link away on the right is
easy to miss), or very long with multiple lines (the edit link can appear
disassociated with the section heading).
This mostly seems to happen when images are "stacked" rather than
spread out throughout the article. That is:
Image
Image
Image
Text
Text
Text
Rather than:
Image
Text
Image
Text
Image
Text
See [[Marseille]] for a current example. The "culture" section has 5
stacked images, which leads to 6 [edit] links appearing on the same
line.
An icon with alt text might be nice, but it should be
placed at the *left*
of the section header, where it is quite firmly attached.
That would seem to solve a lot of problems. Particularly if it was
outside the left margin.
All in all, the current practice is not perfect, but
it's hard to come up
with something universally better....
We don't need anything universal. It'd be good to have some more
advanced interfaces for editing Wikipedia with, though. Someone must
have come up with something WYSIWYG by now, right?
Steve