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

[Brion Vibber]

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Virgil Ierubino wrote:
> The kind of MediaWiki advanced features I'm talking about could be something
> like instant editing.
[snip]
> 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.
[snip]

I'd love to see this, but it's somewhat more difficult for MediaWiki
than for something like flickr or facebook where you're editing tiny
individual data fields like titles or comments.

The level of edit addressability we have currently is at the section
level (which currently runs you to another page rather than in-place but
it's still a huge improvement over searching through a 100kb
article-zilla). Even section editing, with the big easily-spotted
section lines in the source code, have has its share of bugs; it took a
year or two to shake most of them out.

Individual paragraphs, table cells, etc would be an even nicer
fine-grained level to do inline editing on, but this requires having a
reliable way to associate parts of rendered output with the parts of
source code which created them.

Not impossible, but fraught with difficulty in edge cases due to our
funky syntax, embedded HTML, template transclusions, conditional
formatting, etc.


> 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.

It's really not a question of accepting it as an idea; section editing
already *is that* at the first level. Rather, moving it to more
finely-addressable parts of text will likely end up waiting on the
much-fabled rewrite of the parser in order to accomplish it reliably.

And that's not necessarily trivial; the parser needs to maintain a
pretty good degree of compatibility with our millions of articles, *and*
fix a bunch of problems, *and* make it easier to do these future sorts
of things.

Most effort currently is going to backend changes,
performance/scalability/reliabilty work, bugfixes and maintenance,
localization and user account support improvements, and simpler
frontend/UI tweaks as we try to get some longstanding 'big issues' done
and bring new volunteer developers up to speed.

What might more realistically happen in the near term is making section
editing work 'inline' more cleanly, with AJAXy goodness. This is hard to
guarantee (due to section boundaries being potentially in strange
places), but it might be possible to make it work mostly reliably,
perhaps falling back to separate page loads in unclean cases.

If you or someone you know wants to work on this, hop on over to
wikitech-l and introduce yourself there and in the #mediawiki channel on
irc.freenode.net.

> If
> the only grounds to not include this kind of feature are accessibility, just
> put each feature on a switch in user preferences.

Rather, it should just degrade gracefully.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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