TiddlyWiki and MediaWiki: meditating on the noticeable differences in apparent ease of editing

The miniature single-file javascript Wiki TiddlyWiki is deservedly popular on Habrahabr: at least three good blog posts were dedicated to it long ago ( May 25, July 19 and December 20, 2008).

Why was TiddlyWiki so attractive? I think it’s about the same reason why Twitter is attractive. We are attracted by its miniature, its simplicity. This wiki does not consist of articles like Wikipedia (or like another encyclopedia on the MediaWiki engine), but of small pieces of text (so-called tiddlerov ), each of which in the encyclopedia would draw, at best, in subsection. And to edit a tiddler, you do not need to go to a separate page: the tiddler editing window opens immediately and in the same place where the tiddler text has just been created - and after editing replaces this text with a new one.

In the courtyard of 2011, browsers are rapidly developing, many sites (including some, if not all, of Wikipedia skins) have got built-in jQuery and are running AJAX-requests with might and main . TiddlyWiki has been around for more than six years. It is clear that subsections of MediaWiki articles will never become tiddlers on dynamic organization in space (and in mind), they will forever remain part of a strict order of articles - but in terms of volume they are approximately equal to tiddlers, so why shouldn’t the TiddlyWiki tiddlers even catch up and ease of editing? It seems to be something simpler: using AJAX to pull the entire editor off the subsection's edit page, and stick it in place of the subsection itself (into the article).
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Nevertheless, in the complete list of MediaWiki extensions there is not one that ensures the appearance of a form for editing a subsection of an article at the place of this subsection - within the article. And javascript gadgets do not yet support anything even remotely similar.

I wonder why is this so?

Here is one hypothesis: it may be that the reason is that jQuery implementation in MediaWiki was not completely even, and jQuery code appeared in new skins (skins) before, for example, in the old Monobook skin. So until recently, the composing of such an in-house editor was not safe: what if you come across the gaping absence of the necessary script? But this is just a hunch.

Another guess is even more interesting: perhaps not everyone likes to edit subsections on the fly, like tiddler, but I want to have a separate editing page - it is so psychologically more reliable.

There is a third explanation: now in MediaWiki, many scripts (in particular, gadgets) are configured to work on the edit page, immediately after it is loaded. If the editor is inserted directly into the article, then all these scripts will have to "give a kick" in some other way. If the script is quite complex and powerful (some wikEd , for example), then it may turn out to be a surprise.

Time will tell which reason was more important.