I'm pleased by all the comments and ideas.
On 6/26/07, Jens Frank <jf(a)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(a)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(a)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(a)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.