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Requests for comment/Copy editors' tab

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The following request for comments is closed. Failed to gain any traction, stale since 2010 and with the current VisualEditor deployment, it will do part of the functionalities that were asked for here. Snowolf How can I help? 05:45, 21 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

In the edit box, just text would be shown for editing, after clicking on the "copyedit" arrow/tab. After a preview, the page would appear normally, with ref's, pics, wikilinks etc (assuming they did not delete a wikilink or change the word itself and things along those lines). In this case, the editor would only like to correct the spelling of a word, and not have to worry about all other code editable in regular editing mode.

This is a proposal for creating an editing tab in Wikimedia (mainly Wikipedia) articles for the ease of casual editors.

Problem

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In real life, I have had a handful of people that have expressed interest in editing on Wikipedia, but have felt reservations about "messing up the article." How they have described this issue, is that upon bravely clicking the "Edit" tab on an article, they are quickly discouraged by seeing a whole mess of wiki-code: lines of reference and website jargon, apostrophes, tables, images, etc. Their goal is, simply to maybe re-word or re-phrase, maybe even punctuation or spelling, yet upon seeing all the "code", they back out for fear of deleting something.
On a similar note, I believe that even for confident, regular editors, this may prove to be helpful for quick edits.

Solution

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I.

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I am proposing that either a separate tab, or possibly a tab within the edit tab, that shows nothing more than the text as it appears in the article that allows for new or seasoned editors to quickly make a grammar, spelling, or rewording correction. I believe that this will cut back time minimally for regular users who want to make a quick edit, but more importantly, allow for new users to experience easier editing, and instead of deterring them from making any edits because of the difficult look of wiki-code, it would give them a safer feeling environment to work in. I think that instead of an instant immersion into all of the tough looking code, this will provide a more effective progression into editing on Wikipedia as well, which will hopefully, in turn, make them come back for more and be more willing to learn the "code" at a pace they desire.

II.(update)

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After some consideration, and after reading through the emails listed below, I believe that I have another solution. In essence, it would be a second row along the bottom of the editing tab, that could be accessed via a hide/show code. When shown, it would give the editor the option to show which markup would be included in the edit box below. In other words, upon selecting bold in the checkbox, all current text ac change in the editing box would appear like this:

(unchecked boldbox) - This is an example
(checked boldbox) - This '''is''' an example

If the ref checkbox were selected, the refs would fully show up, like this:

(unchecked refbox) - This example has a reference, and there it was.
(checked refbox) - This example has a reference, <ref>Theornamentalist (2010). [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Copy_editors'_tab "Copyeditors' tab." ''Meta-Wiki.'' Retrieved 2010-07-18.</ref>
and there it was.

and so on.
I believe that this may be easy to implement, only because upon clicking each box, some code would simply remove all '' '', and not the text within it, or <ref> </ref> and anything within it. This could extend into the advanced tab and whats in in it as well.

Anyway, let me know what you think!

See also

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