WikiWealth

This is a big claim, especially as I am writing this from a Wikidot site, and am a regular contributor to the Wikidot community. So why am I claiming this?

Edit sections. That's why.

When I have another look at a recent article that I was reading on Wikipedia, I notice one thing immediately. Have a look at the image below and see if you can find the most inviting, contributor-friendly feature of the Wikimedia platform. Hint: It's inside the orange circle!

wikipedia-battlefield3.png

All of those edit links all over the place just beg for someone to click them. They invite anyone and everyone to contribute. They are what makes Wikimedia sites, particularly Wikipedia, so popular.

A study into Wikipedia's reliability found that most of the wiki's valid content was contributed by anonymous users1:

Surprisingly, however, we find the highest quality from the vast numbers of anonymous "Good Samaritans" who contribute only once.

You can open your Wikidot site up to editing by anonymous users, and you can place edit or edit-sections buttons all over the place in your sidebar, topbar and live templates… but you can't enable edit-sections by default.

To me, this makes a wiki hosted on Wikidot less approachable by anyone that is new to Wikidot. It makes sites look like real websites, not like a wiki.

Sure, I admit that 19/20 of my site are intended to appear as an actual website, and what people can edit is pretty limited. But when I get to that 20th site that I want to turn into a real, true, fully-functional and easily-approachable wiki, Wikidot falls down.

Perhaps it isn't the best example, as the contents of this wiki are about a piece of software that only Wikidot users are likely to install, but as I admitted above I rarely create a real wiki. wiki.wdeditor.com has permissions set so that anyone can edit, and when something needs content I manually add another edit button.

But really, I feel that a wiki like this would really benefit from having edit links automatically appended to the end of each heading.

If you agree with me, spread the word. Rate up the wish, list examples in the comments of your own sites where having edit-sections enabled by default would be a huge benefit.

Because at the moment, Wikimedia is a better wiki hosting platform than Wikidot.2