Editing Transaction costs/Brainstorming (section)

=== Wiki Contributions: Per-Section Editing ===

There's been a huge amount of effort in the Mediawiki community that has gone into creating and tweaking per-section editing. Most wikis provide a simple edit button that allows users to edit just one page. Per section editing lowers the cost by placing edits buttons throughout the page and letting users edit only a subsection of the page. This reduces the costs associated with finding the edit buttons and then with finding the correct location to make the change in the resulting wikitext.

General thoughts:

* The per-edit reduction in cost is not going to be constant. Some edits (e.g., edits in small pages) are likely to be as easy with per-section editing.

* There's been a lot of experimentation with different placement of edit buttons on both Wikimedia wikis and in a variety of other places and there is probably good data that can be taken. Different placement of buttons may have different costs associated with it.

* Logged-in users use different skins which change or override the placement of these buttons. This is probably small and should be detectable.

* The cost is in usability. To determine and quantify the cost, we'd need to run a usability study but this could probably be done.

* An experiment could be run by that employed different skins that place edit buttons in different places and then watch how contributions happen or do not happen. However, comparing different articles seems slightly risky and the edit count for any particular article is going to be different. Perhaps on aggregate this could work.