Last modified: 2008-05-21 16:29:22 UTC
This is somewhat related to Bug 13981 Right now when there is a more recent draft version a user looking at the most recent sighted revision will not get section edit links. My experience with real users is that many newbies are completely unaware of the edit link at the top of the page, so the loss of inline edit links can be expected to cause many inexperienced people to not know that they can edit the article. Since one of the apocalyptic predictions is that this feature will reduce people's incentive to edit unnecessary changes in behavior which should be expected to have that result should be avoided. I see two possible ways of resolving this. The easy way is to simply make the section edit links take the use to the full article edit. This might be somewhat surprising but the same thing can already happen on edit conflicts. It would be a clear improvement over the current behavior. The harder way would be to encode the section title into the edit link in addition to the number and only perform a section edit if both the title and the number match. Title changes or page restructuring would be preferable but take more work. I'm perfectly willing to commit a change that does the first but I haven't looked to see how much work the second would be. I'm primarily creating this bug to get comments before I do so, since I have no desire to step on anyone's toes.
Done in r35142
