Comments

Hi. Just spotted the editor tool and played with it a bit. I find the interface a bit jarring and inconsistent.

The pencil changes the layout of the page by adding indentation – can it be outdented in the left margin, or moved to the end of the line?

But I don't see the reason for a brand-new interface at all. Why not make it consistent with editing in all wikis by changing it to a familiar “[edit]” or “[e]” link on the right? Why change the wording of the standard “(Save page) (Show preview) (Show changes) Cancel” form? The text and bold colours of the buttons are inconsistent with everything else in MediaWiki, and the triangle in “(Preview Changes ▶)” makes it look like a drop-down menu at first glance. I expect “Discard Changes” to be a “Cancel” button that hides the new editing controls, but the “+Add...” links seem to become a permanent part of the page once they appear.

And it took about 45 seconds of consternation before I found the “Page Editing” control in the corner of the window – can it not appear below the edit field? Having action buttons in two places is confusing. I expect the X link to cancel the whole operation, but it only hides the one set of action buttons, and, unexpectedly, does an “undo” operation on the contents of the edit field (which was impossible to realize in most of my test edits, because I was adding text at the end of a long line in a short text field).

And if I click a second edit-pencil on the page, then it's unclear what effect any of the “Page Editing” buttons will have. It might be best if a second pencil-edit would completely cancel and restore other pending pencil-edits. Alternately, when a pencil-edit field is activated, perhaps other pencil buttons on the page should become greyed out and inactive.

The “Redo” button is active by default, but doesn't seem to do anything. The Undo and Redo, associated with Save Changes, look like they will undo a saved change. But instead, they are either a copy of my browser's standard text-editing undo/redo function, or a substitute for my browser's forward/back buttons in the standard edit field, or a strange combination of both.

Sorry to be so critical, but this editing process is confusing. It's neither the familiar, window-context editing routine, nor an AJAX-style field-context or pop-up box-context editing routine (like we've started to get used to in Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, etc), but some strange hybrid with unpredictable behaviour. —Michael Z. 2011-08-18 17:16 z