May be a partial solution to the constant battles between deletionists and inclusionists, as well as appealing to structurists.
Copy of a post I tried to make in the Wikitech newsgroup (but failed). (Is this the right place to make such suggestions ?) Any comments, advice, info ? If anyone thinks this is a good idea, please promote it to the right people in the right place. Copy it, plagiarise it, whatever.
Hi, a newbie to Wikitech, and only occasional visitor to Wikipedia, so apologise if
a) don't get things right first time
b) being bold enough to make suggestion for improvement before I really know much about Wikitech.
For the great majority of pages on Wikipedia and Wiktionary, they can be very long, with lots you want to skip over (probably more so in Wiktionary) and there is very little help in navigating through the long page.
At best there is a Table of Contents at the top. Which, as soon as you click on it, disappears as you drop down the page. Great !
1. Make the article collapsible by levels.
2. Find a way to keep the Table of Contents visible on the screen at all times
3. Both of the above
4. Both the above, plus have the Table of Contents also collapsible in the same way.
1. Firstly, and most importantly, users do not have to write their articles differently.
2. Maybe users could choose, by profile, to start either with articles fully expanded, or fully collapsed.
3. The default for low-tech users would be fully expanded, so no different from now (except for the + and - signs and the -All-, -1, -2- tabs being there if they want to click on them
4. The general concept of little + and - signs against headings is already widely used, and would need no introduction for many, even most users to be able to make use of it straightaway without any notification or education effort. For those who are very unsavvy, then they would just continue as now.
5. The collapsing / expanding by clicking on + and - signs is everywhere. I'm sure even early versions of Front Page had it, Microsoft has it within it's web site, it's used in Excel, used within the document map of Word etc etc etc. Must be pretty easy to find out how it was done for these.
6. It impacts only the display of a page. There is nothing different going on elsewhere in the background, in the infrastructure of the off screen processes. I'm not sure how this impacts style sheets, since I have never really bothered to grasp those.
OK. Hope this suggestion is food for thought in improving the user experience of the fantastic MediaWiki software.
Richardb of Wiktionary. --Richardb 14:12, 5 April 2006 (UTC)