Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

From the Village Pump:

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Often when I'm reading through an article I will find the odd misspelling or
two, but I'm too lazy to click the Edit button, change the text and save it,
just to correct one word, so the typo stays there until someone more motivated
than me comes along.

Now, in DOM compliant browsers, it should be possible to make it so that, e.g.,
when you double-click on a word, it puts that word in an edit box and lets you
edit just that one word which then gets saved when you press ENTER,
transparently to the user. I got the idea from the way Flickr lets you change
the title, description, etc., of your own photos.
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I guess doing strictly one-word edits may not be entirely feasible in practice,
but the technique could be used at, e.g., the paragraph level (one of the
smallest units of text which would be generally addressable in the DOM). One
could bind a double-click event to the document which would trigger an action
that would retrieve the Wikitext for the paragraph in question (this might
require some sort of indexing) via an HTTPRequest, then replace the paragraph's
DOM node by a new one containing the Wikisource in an edit box, plus a
"Save"/"Cancel" button group. If cancelled, the original DOM node is restored
and nothing else happens. If saved, an HTTPRequest sends the new Wikitext and if
successful retrieves the resulting HTML from the server--in case of error, the
server may send HTML indicating the situation and the fact that the change was
not saved. In either case, the returned HTML replaces the edit box and completes
the edit process. Edit summary could be filled in automatically, perhaps using
the /* Section */ convention already in use, or an input box could be provided
as well.

Please excuse any mistakes in the description above, I'm a little rusty on the
technical side of things and it's nearly 03:00am and I really should be sleeping
by now :)

It is my belief that a feature like that would have the following benefits:

* Improve usability for the population of users with DOM capable browsers. Other
would continue using the current method with no negative impact to them.

* Encourage editing as a result of the above, thus raising the overall quality
of the Wikipedia.

* Reduce bandwidth use by not requiring that whole pages of Wikitext/HTML be
transferred when one is only going to modify a very minor part of it. This
should increase responsiveness of the Wikipedia and lower operating costs.