Wiki Providers Come Together to Offer Universal Edit Button
Leave it to people in the wiki market to know how to collaborate. Nearly 20 different wiki providers have teamed up to offer a new Firefox extension that will notify users whenever they are on a page that is publicly editable, using a standard icon that sits in the same place the RSS autodiscovery icon appears. Clicking on the icon (img. on the left) will take you to that page's editing interface.
It's a great little idea that could help breath new life into the wiki community. We would love to see the extension become a standard part of Firefox.
From the very first wiki built by wiki inventor Ward Cunningham to Wikipedia, how-to megawiki Wikihow, the Creative Commons wiki and a number of wiki software installations, the support for the initiative is fairly broad. Other wikis are working on full support, SocialText sites require that a user be logged-in before the button appears right now and the fast proliferating DekiWiki software will support the extension soon. WordPress support is also said to be forthcoming.
The group says that the Universal Edit Button "will be a convenience to web surfers who are already inclined to contribute, and an invitation to those who have yet to discover the thrill of building a common resource."
"As this kind of public editing becomes more commonplace," they say, "the button may become regarded as a badge of honor. It may serve as an incentive to encourage companies and site developers to add publicly-editable components to their sites, in order to have the UEB displayed for their sites. We hope that this button catalyzes the acceleration of the editable web, and helps accelerate society's trend toward building valued common resources."
We do wonder how many people notice the RSS icon in the browser toolbar, and thus how many people will notice the Universal Edit Button - but we love the idea. The fact is, the world is full of people who don't even know the difference between the address bar and the search bar of their browsers.
Installing this extension is a no-brainer though and could help any of us remember to edit the pages we knew we could but perhaps didn't think about. Seeing all these wiki providers come together to build a common standard is particularly inspiring.
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roy2k: martincleaver: thanks for the heads-up; i've checked it in and pushed it live to wiki.developer.mindtouch.com
Really neat idea, I think. May the internet become even more interactive.
I just watched the speech of Clay Shirky where he mentions a four-year-old girl asking "Where is a mouse?" on a TV because for her screens already mean interactivity and traditional TV-watching seems like a waste of time.
This button has the chance to make us ask "Where is the edit button" on mainstream sites. Web 2.0 for the masses!
This is a good idea.
What would make it a great one would be if they'd support a standard user-friendly approach to Wiki editing.
Editing Wiki pages is pure geekery for most people. Imagine the shift that would happen, if clicking that Universal Edit Button would open up a Universal User-Friendly Editor.
Hi James, great points - self-organization is hard! :-)
Not sure if you have heard of WikiCreole - http://www.wikicreole.org/
They are trying to make at least some common markup language, I think that is one step in the direction you are speaking of.
Best, Mark
I think this is a great idea as well. But, I have a little picky issue with this icon (I know it's VERY picky) but in a world where everything is pretty much done online, instant collaboration, syncing of files, etc are common practice...why must we continue to create icons for "editing" something that have a pencil on them? OK, I know the argument is that it's a common design for things that can be edited. But it's not paper...therefore it shouldn't be a pencil. It's digital. Is there something that can represent "digital editing?" Maybe an icon that has the side of a keyboard showing with a pressed down ENTER key? I don't know. I think the icon should represent what the action is. Maybe I'm just crazy...or being too picky :)
@govy: The pencil is a (pretty much) universally recognizable image for "editing." Don't fix what's not broken.
As of about two minutes ago, the Universal Edit Button is now live on the roughly half a million wikis hosted on Wikispaces.com.
Offer Universal Edit Button, Great!
I am a regular user of wiki. I jump into it when ever I want to fetch any information or update any info if I come across anything. Any way I am looking to contribute more to it.
-Deepa (dooyt.com)
Great idea.. learn from the success of RSS!
This is such an awesome idea. Would love to see this integrated into the browser someday.
Live on PBwiki as well!
http://blog.pbwiki.com/2008/06/20/the-universal-edit-button/
Why stop at wikis?
It would be great to have an edit button which could be used to create user generated content on any page. Like the RSS button, where there was an option to create more than one piece of content on a given page (reviews vs. comment threads, perhaps), the button could lead to a drop down with the various options each available.
It's an ugly hack based on misusing the type attribute in HTML. This has to change - until then, please don't implement it on wikis.