On 9/16/14, 12:22 AM, Jan Ainali wrote:
2014-09-15 23:54 GMT+02:00 James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com:
In the recent discussion of editor engagement effectiveness on wiki-research-l, the question of Flow's affect on talk page wikitext practice arose. I would like to know whether anyone shares my concern that eliminating wikitext talk pages will remove what has, for the past few terabytes of edits, served the same purpose as the "sandbox" pages which we encourage new editors to practice with.
Is that just enwp? On svwp we do not encourage people to use the talk pages as sandboxes. Instead we have a default-on gadget with a link to [[Special:MyPage/Sandbox]].
It's not very common to use it as a pure sandbox on enwiki, but it is fairly common (or at least, not rare) to use it as a place to propose/draft/revise edits, mainly for controversial articles and/or where the person is not 100% sure about the edit they're proposing, so wants to discuss it first. Having the talk page render wikitext does make this part easier. It's not strictly required, but it lets you write comments like,
=== I think there's a problem with the section 'blah', and I'd propose starting by replacing the 3rd paragraph with this completely rewritten one:
:Draft of the rewritten paragraph is here.
Any thoughts on this change before I go ahead and make it? --~~~~ ===
-Mark