[Wikipedia-l] Why is MediaWiki so low-tech?

[gwern branwen]

On 1/6/07, Virgil Ierubino <virgil.ierubino at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why is MediaWiki so low-tech?
....
> The kind of MediaWiki advanced features I'm talking about could be something
> like instant editing. Think about if you're reading a long section of an
> article, and midway down there's a spelling error. There are so many reasons
> to not fix it: you'd have to scroll up to click the edit link on that
> section, you'd have to wait for it to load, you'd have to find the place
> again in the edit box, you'd have to wait for it to load again, and all this
> time you won't be able to continue reading your article, and you'll have
> lost your place. What if you could just click next to the relevant
> paragraph, turning it into an edit box on the same page - no loading - edit
> it, save it, and never once have to switch page. Something similar to the
> way you can edit posts in vBulletin without having to change pages. I know
> for sure that a feature like this would double the speed at which (and the
> likelihood of which) articles are improved.
>
> Obviously once you accept the usage of advanced elements like this there's
> no stopping how much easier you can make the site, and how user friendly. If
> the only grounds to not include this kind of feature are accessibility, just
> put each feature on a switch in user preferences.

You may be interested in ASM's QuickEdit Javascript program; it edits
in-frame by section and is very fast and nice. See
<http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Benutzer:ASM/quickedit.js>.

I've enabled it in my monobook.js thusly:
	/////Edit-in-frame. fast and fun!
	    document.write('<script src="'
	 + 'http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Benutzer:ASM/quickedit.js'
         +  '&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript"></script>');
         var qeEnabled          = true;  // Activate Script?
         var qeEnableSection0   = false;  // Enable QuickEdit link for
section 0 (introduction)?

--Gwern