Thread:VisualEditor/Feedback/Intention NOT to allow editing of only a single section?!?

I'm getting the distinct impression, per this - http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Thread:VisualEditor/Feedback/3_comments - that the developers have decided that editors don't need to edit single sections of a page - that VE needs ONLY to be able to edit entire pages. If that's true, I want to make two points:


 * This is NOT just a technical decision - it's a decision that impacts how editors work, and as such, it should be formally proposed to the community. It may well be that the advantages of section editing (see below) are outweighed by the technical difficulties of getting VE to handle section edits, or other considerations, but that should be the decision of the community, not of the developers.


 * There ARE advantages to editing single sections. As has been pointed out (and I've tested this; it's true), Mediawiki software is now smart enough to handle two editors simultaneously editing whole pages, as long as they don't edit the same section: there is no edit conflict when the second editor goes to save his/her edit. (It's unfortunate that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Edit_conflict#Prevention hasn't been updated, but that's another matter). Still, there are advantages to single-section editing, including:
 * It's faster to load, and faster to save. On mobile devices and other situations with limited resources (bandwidth or device memory), that can be critical.
 * For articles getting lots of edits (a current event, for example), it's still a better way to edit, since it encourages editors to stay within a single section. (By contrast, an editor who edits several sections and then tries to save the changes is almost guaranteed to have an edit conflict.)
 * It's a better way to resolve an edit conflict, when this happens. An editor can copy his/her proposed text for a section, go into that section again (new editing session), paste the proposed text on top of what is shown, then click "Show changes" to see what the other editor(s) have done. Such changes can then be incorporated into the proposed text, and another attempt made to change the section. By contrast, "Show changes" for an entire article could result in the display of a lot of changes outside of the section of interest, causing a much slower resolution of the edit conflict.
 * It puts the section heading into the edit summary, which makes it easier for other editors to see what's going on. For example, if they're concerned only with certain sections, they can ignore edits that are clearly to other sections.

I realize that previewing is no longer needed with VE, which removes one advantage of editing a single section, and that with regard to footnotes, it's preferable to edit an entire article rather than just a section. So perhaps the advantages of forcing editors to always edit entire articles do outweigh the disadvantages. But, to repeat myself, this is NOT a technical decision, it's a decision about how editors work. As such, simply dropping it on the community ("VE is going to be this way; if you don't like it, you can lump it") isn't a good idea. (If the VE team feels as if there is no need to publicize this issue/decision, I'll be happy to post about htis to various Wikipedia discussion boards, so that the community is made aware of this rather large planned change.)