Micro Design Improvements

This is a list of some low hanging fruit that I would like to address via staff and community collaboration. UX improvements that are meant to fix areas where interactions dont make a lot of sense or user behavior is not well supported.

Status quo
There is a need to make the guidance and actions more cohesive and easy to understand when the user edits an article. At the moment:
 * Relevant instructions on how to make useful edits appear below the edit window and "save" action;
 * Guidance for the user is scattered and repetitive;
 * Formatting toolbars appear below the save action;
 * The infrequently-used "Templates" and "Categories" elements add a lot of visual noise and distract from a focussed editing experience.

Changes
The mockup to the right suggest how guidance and actions will be streamlined so they appear correctly in the workflow and intuitively support a user's mental model. Briefly summarised, the changes and the thinking behind them are:



Working Special:Recentchanges
Just Make enhanced recentchanges the default, very easy.

Email notifications making sense
Two configuration changes:
 * Set "E-mail me when a page or file on my watchlist is changed" (enotifwatchlistpages) to true by default for new users
 * Set "Add pages I edit to my watchlist" to true by default (for users who didn't set it explicitly)

Special query pages
Users surely don't expect to be presented years-old results in the special pages they happen to see. Periodical run of currently disabled special pages is trivial and needs only some coordination between ops to decide how often and which.

Missing User Page Red Link
Red Link for a missing user page when a users name appears in the format John (Talk | Contribs) Should these take you to John's contributions page (like for unregistered users) instead of the missing user page? You really shouldn't be posting anything there unless you are John. Red links follow traditional behavior today, but does it make sense in this case given the user intention.

Back to Beginning
What are the reasons a back to top button has not been built, im sure it has been considered. Some Wikipedia articles are fairly dense and manually scrolling all the way to the top is fairly difficult. Although the Table of contents (hide show) helps, the problem of back to the beginning quickly still exists.

Change the word Move to Rename
Understand better what purpose Move serves and make it more intuitive. Its key usage is renaming an article. Propose changing tooltip to 'Change article title' (when in main namespace); or, in this wiki, 'Change title'.

Grouping for User Contributions
Currently there is no grouping to see what topics users have edited. This feels important for new users to have a sense of activity and contribution. This is also a core part of a user's identity.

Edit Conflict Workflow
Fix the Edit conflict workflow. Currently a use has no idea that someone else is editing this page and the edit conflict solution is confusing.

Show me if someone is editing this article
A simple real time notification that shows you if other people are editing this page.

Streamline edit templates

 * ''Note: en.wiki-specific

Any user editing while logged out is currently shown this message, which can dovetail with two or three more (a BLP warning message, a pagenotice, so on, so forth). The effect is to push the edit window itself a long way down the page. As part of streamlining edit mode, we should look at simplifying and cutting down templates such as this. I have spoken to Swalling and he has confirmed that doing so won't muck up the registration experiments E3 are performing. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:19, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

Annotations
The editor workflow would be greatly improved by the ability to annotate articles while you're reading, and toggle annotations on/off. Permitted or encouraged annotations would be suggestions for how articles could be improved in a very specific context (e.g. by highlighting a sentence and suggesting that someone find a reference for it). This accomplishes several things, especially in a Visual Editor context:
 * It would let editors mark annotations and then resolve them, rather than having to recall the issues they wanted to fix
 * Readers would be encouraged to participate in the editing process on a basic level by providing annotations
 * Readers could be drawn into making basic edits if the annotations are clearly instructive