2007/4/28, Patrick Hall pathall@gmail.com:
I can't imagine what a brand new user's first impression is when they click "edit" for the first time... I suspect it's often something along the lines of "eek, I don't want to break this."
I'm certainly not trying to disparage the fine work that's been done to create the Mediawiki software, I'm just trying to simulate the POV of a newbie here (I imagine there aren't many on this list).
An idea to improve this: How about the following - it requires an extra piece of markup, but it would still I think simplify matters for newbies:
Create an extra piece of markup, or maybe a template, with the following effect (I will choose ((..)) as my markup, probably not ideal, but if there is interest in it, we can think of something better):
Starting from a page:
blablabla {{some ingenious but complicated template}} blablabla
we change to:
blablabla ((template|{{some ingenious but complicated template}})) blablabla
This has no effect on the page as it is shown normally, but when one checks the edit page, one sees:
blablabla ((template)) blablabla
and below the edit field there is a second edit field, with a header 'template:' and content
{{some ingenious but complicated template}}
That way, the starting user, when editing the page does not need to bother with complicated or boring stuff like tables, templates and interwikis, but can just work in the top screen, where there is much more content and simple makeup, and much less complicated makeup to worry about screwing up.
For experienced editors and especially for bots it would be useful to have an alternative 'raw' input screen, where the normal edit text can be found.
Advantages: * easier editing by newbies * less searching for the correct place to edit
Disadvantages: * creating an edit page will require a (small) amount of parsing * if one goes wrong, the results will probably be larger (removing the complicated markup rather than just making a mess of it) * yet another addition to MediaWiki markup