Interface barriers

Sorry for the late input, but comments from my side trickle in slowly due to time constraints. So, I want to share some of my experience back not so long ago when I was still a novice editor. Here we go.

Welcome message: To start with, I never got a welcome message introducing me to the basic concepts of wiki editing. This may very well be because I usurped my user name, but I consider this a mistake that needs to be corrected in the future. Nonetheless, such basic information would be crucial for non-registered contributors as well, and a link to such information could be added to the sidebar. Edit links could even be added to the head of every edit page when contributing anonymously.

Toolbars: I found it very confusing that there are tool bars on the top (for your account), on the bottom (info box on user contributions page), and in the left sidebar (e.g., the toolbox). It took me ages to find the darn toolbox! This non-consistency is also present when editing a page, as there is a toolbar on the top of the edit box, containing a special characters menu, but then there is also a toolbar on the bottom, which also allows me to insert special characters, but in difference to the top one, finally allows me to insert math symbols, which I was also looking for for ages! Remove the lower toolbar, and integrate it into the top one!!!

Syntax checking: It would be very handy if wiki, upon saving the site, would first check for any wiki (especially table or math) syntax errors, and instead of saving warn the user about the broken site! It is far too common that non-experienced editors break up more complex tables, and others continue editing the article text, making intermediate reverts (without manual intervention) sometimes impossible.

Minor edits: These are utterly useless, as some people don't use them at all, while others have all their edits configured as minor edits.

Templates: There is a myriad of templates, but again it took me ages to find a list of these. Granted, one can find such list upon reading thoroughly through the welcome message references (which I didn't receive). Instead, there should be a drop-down menu in the edit toolbar that allows you selecting and inserting common templates (and refer you to the wiki article for more information).

WP:QWEPOX: WTF? It is absolutely frustrating for beginners to see unintelligible wiki abbreviations all over. WP:AGF? WP:MOS? Huh? Experienced editors love to use them in their edit summaries. :) Maybe the wiki site backend could automatically grep such expressions and reference them properly, e.g., replace WP:AGF by Assume good faith.

Watchlist: It would be very convenient if each line in the watch list could additionally either

• list the number of intermediate edits since the last login, and/or provide a diff to that last edit, or
• list the number of intermediate edits since the last personal edit (if available), and/or provide a diff to that last edit.

I usually want to see all the changes between my last edit and the current top edit.

Diffs: It would make looking up differences between revision so much easier if the line numbers given were clickable, allowing one to jump straight to a line/paragraph affected by changes.

Hm, sorry, I wrote this rather hastily. Anyway, comments welcome. Nageh 15:53, 6 February 2010 (UTC)