On 6/26/07, Daniel Cannon cannon.danielc@gmail.com wrote:
What the usability study found, to my understanding, was that MediaWiki was not particularly newbie-friendly; that is, its usability among new users was low. That said, MediaWiki surely has a steeper learning curve than most webware; however, it has a large group of power users who have found the various "oddities" of the software that confuse new users to be quite useful in increasing their productivity.
There are certainly a number of features for power users that other Web software packages generally don't have, like bot interfaces, custom CSS and JS, a powerful templating system, and access to almost all HTML tags/attributes. But nobody is contemplating their removal, and in fact when it comes to interface changes those very power-user tools will allow power users to change the interface however they want (in particular with custom JS), so I fail to see how this is at all relevant.
Furthermore, editing should truly always be second to the content produced through that editing--that is, _readability_ should take precedence over _usability_ (in the sense of its usability to editors). I would find this to be a change that, though it may make certain elements of editing more clear to users, would cause a major aesthetic "hiccup" in the appearance and flow of pages, lending nothing more than a distraction from the content.
To the contrary, production of more and better content (which is to say, editing) should always take precedence over minor aesthetic quibbles with how the content is presented. Besides, I think the German style of edit links looks just as good, and apparently our second-largest wiki agrees.
If you could perchance provide some samples of this change, preferably on complex pages with multiple images, tables, and templates intermingled with text,
large, breaking changes
The change is minor, not large, and it should not break anything.
On 6/26/07, Danny B. Wikipedia.Danny.B@email.cz wrote:
German way isn't visually bad, but it has one big disadvantage: I am 99 % sure, this rendering can't be done together with correct semantics.
Works fine like this:
<div class="mw-h2"> <h2>Page title</h2> <span class="editsection">[edit]</span> </div>
You just use display: inline; for the h2, supported even by IE5 (Windows and Mac!). (Floating would also be possible, but I'd prefer to avoid that due to the tendency of floats to interfere with each other, amply demonstrated by the current edit-link-bunching bug.)