Uwe Brauer:
1 When adding a new contribution the user is
forced to use a
header, that is the construct == == is automatically
inserted. Right now I have to press the button *+*. But
couldn't that functionality be on the button *edit*?
I changed the "Click on a red talk page link" behavior a while ago to
use the "+" feature rather than "edit" by default. Brion reverted it
because some users complained that they found the new behavior
confusing. I think that some initial confusion is inevitable, and that
the changed behavior would be the right thing to do.
Because the change was imperfect in other ways (you could no longer call
the regular edit page even when requesting it explicitly, and it should
filter the ==..== when templates are inserted into the subject) I left
it for now, but I still intend to work on that issue again.
Making these headers mandatory is not a good idea (for one thing, some
user message templates which are frequently subst:ed include the headers
already), but giving the user the comment interface when they are
typically adding comments encourages proper sectioning on talk pages
(the change already led to many better-structured talk pages in a few
hours). Renaming "+" to something more intuitive would also help; on
Wikinews we use "add comment".
2 then when the user wants to reply to a
contribution by using the
`local' *edit* button, automatically a subheader would be
inserted, in this case === ===, then the reply to that
would get a ==== ==== header and so on and so on.
That would look terribly ugly, but some hack to produce a "reply" link
would certainly be useful (it's harder than it sounds though).
Erik