On 9/16/14, 12:22 AM, Jan Ainali wrote:
2014-09-15 23:54 GMT+02:00 James Salsman
<jsalsman(a)gmail.com>om>:
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