Ref: <http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1629>,
<http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Usability/Test_Februar_2006>
From the latter, we have
"Two users who started their first-time editing with a paragraph
instead of the whole page were not confused by the syntax. However,
they were faced with another problem: The location of the "Edit" links
seemed to relate them with the paragraph above, not the one below.
Therefore, when clicking the "Edit" link below "Geschichte", they
expected to see the heading "Geschichte" and its contents. . . .
"This expectation was not met, instead "Weblinks" appeared in the
editor window. They were confused, did not know what to do. Finally,
both participants deleted (!) the existing and valid text, and started
to add their own text."
We've known for well over a year now that this is a problem. I would
like to finally fix it. Specifically, I intend to remove the
editsection float style, so it's at the beginning of the section line,
to the left. The alternative is to have it as the German Wikipedia
does, with the section edit link on the right of the header; however,
this a) is kind of annoying as the link jumps around, and b) requires
a change to the document structure (admittedly just a reordering of
elements, but it may well break some fragile stuff regardless). It
does arguably look better, though, and that could be done instead
(opinions?). A comparison of the three styles is available at
<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Simetrical/Edit_links_comparison>.
Before this goes into effect, it would be only courteous to inform
existing wikis about it and the reasons for doing it. I'll prepare a
little message and get someone with bots everywhere (Yurik?) to post
it on all the wikis' MediaWiki talk:Common.css pages, I think, before
I commit it, and so well before it goes live, along with instructions
on how to reverse it preemptively if desired.
Are there any objections to this?