On 25/08/06, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
Enough chit chat, where's my Person 1? I want concrete features and I want them now. The feature is a simple one, if we can assemble the right skills, just a few hours' work each. But to get us started, someone needs to make that UI mockup.
Tim wants his person one and he wants him/her now! But he's failed to factor in the importance of promising cookies and fame. Oh, and the fact that being brisk and abrupt and snappish to a bunch of volunteers is a bad idea...
You know what "want" did, don't you?
Any road, snotty sarcasm over; I can see this feature enjoying use by a wide variety of users; there's those who make long cleanup edits to a page (and you don't really want to duplicate cleanup effort), recent changes patrol, etc. Unfortunately, my UI skills are still pretty crap; anything decent I've output is sheer chaos, luck and swearing at Dreamweaver. One idea, though, might be to shove it all in a nice box parallel to the top of the edit form; using a not-too-ridiculous font size (the default, or a few points shaved off it, should do), and positioning it in a sensible location (it'll be seen there, before the text is, and will be in the user's view for the first few seconds of editing, at least) will, hopefully, cause it to be considered useful, not intrusive.
Is it worth making this a (default on) preference? I can think of cases or wikis where I wouldn't want to use it, and being able to switch it off for a few edits would be useful. Should we also, perhaps, indicate whether the user in question is adding a section (discussion pages, etc.)?
Rob Church