On 10/22/06, Sebastian Moleski <sebmol(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Please test your changes very carefully before
committing them. There has
been a lot of irritation at various projects when the user interface
changed. Please also remember that individual projects use their own global
javascript to manipulate MediaWiki pages (e.g. German Wikipedia which had a
script that moves the edit-links from the far right of the page to right
next to the heading). If you do decide to make such changes, please make
sure it's widely announced. For reasons somewhat outside understanding,
users seem to react more allergic to cosmetic changes to the user interface
than actual functionality.
I did test my changes carefully before committing them. I just don't
have access to a screenreader, so I tested them carefully in visual
browsers. I dropped a note at the German and French Wikipedias'
Monobook.js talk page informing them of the upcoming change.
And the changes were not merely cosmetic; a usability study posted to
this list a while back found that of the two participants who tried
using section edit links, both thought they belonged to the section
above due to their misplacement, and both blanked the unexpected
sections. This is obviously quite undesirable.