I'm pleased by all the comments and ideas.
On 6/26/07, Jens Frank jf@mormo.org wrote:
I'll ask some colleagues who aren't wiki editors and will tell you tonight about the results.
And I'll ask some non-wiki editors too.
Different behaviour for different wikis is a very bad idea. That would be confusing. The edit link should be placed in the same way on all WMF wikis.
That's an issue for the Foundation to decide, if it wants to. I suspect it will maintain its usual attitude of deference to the communities' wishes unless *maybe* some community decides their Wikipedia should be hot pink and loaded with animated background-images.
On 6/26/07, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
If you are going to change this anyway (though I would not think it necessary), I think it would be esthetically more pleasing to use the German Wikipedia method rather than to go all the way to the left as you propose.
I actually agree, but it is kind of annoying how it jumps around, at least if you aren't used to it, and it would require a reordering of the document structure. I guess I'd narrowly prefer this option.
On 6/26/07, Jim Wilson wilson.jim.r@gmail.com wrote:
Does this discussion include a modification of Monobook's main.css for MediaWiki distribution world-wide? or is it limited to how WMF sites operate?
There is no difference in terms of stylesheets for WMF sites and other MediaWiki sites, and I am in fact a MediaWiki developer, not anything specifically related to Wikimedia wikis. The point is to increase usability of MediaWiki out of the box. It will be applied to the CSS of all skins, if it is applied (I'd still like to specifically ask Brion to sign off on it).
On 6/26/07, Danny B. Wikipedia.Danny.B@email.cz wrote:
- The current way of inserting of editlinks to page is against semantics (it's being
inserted inside the header tag).
I know, that was my stupidity. I tried to fix it later, but that broke styles/scripts and got reverted. :( I still hope to restore it to a more sensible state at some point, maybe in a one-time general document structure cleanup (making TOCs non-tables, changing the <h5>/<h6> sidebar headers so headings nest properly, . . .).
So I've been playing with that regarding to what's been said above and got to some proposal how to deal with editlinks. The playground is on http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Danny_B./Edit_links_comparsion and the final proposal is on http://tools.wikimedia.de/~danny_b/demos/editlinks.html , since it requires some changes in MediaWiki code which renders the page (check the xhtml source).
Hmm . . . I don't know. It uses up vertical space, which isn't great. Also, I would put the edit link under the section title, not above it. It does have the advantage that it's pretty clearly related to the section, not just the section title, but overall I'm not sure I like it. I do agree with most of the rest of your points, except that I don't see anything aesthetically displeasing with the German positioning of the links. They could be made a bit smaller, perhaps, and some kind of top-section edit link would be good. The latter would be easily doable in the German style, with just [edit top] after the page name . . . but that might be too prominent and confusing to new users, plus we don't have the automatic /* summaries */, so I don't know if it would be useful overall. So overall I'd be conservative and just go with what the Germans have.