Author: drobbins

Description:
Currently, any edits to a page will create a new page with no annotations, which makes this extension very difficult to use. You must look at the page history, and look at each revision for potential annotations that people may have added, and there is no icon or other indication that a revision actually *has* annotations. So they are likely to be lost or ignored.

Ideally, annotations would be preserved through wiki edits and apply to newer revisions of pages. This would likely require updates to the editor.

I realize that this may be technically challenging to implement. However, the preservations of annotations across edits does seem to be essential for really ensuring that this extension is useful (In fact, I wouldn't consider this annotation feature actually fully implemented until this is supported.)

The true ideal implementation would be to display annotations in the editor, and like a true word processor, track changes to the underlying text to ensure that the annotation still existed even if the underlying text was modified in some way, as is how annotations work in word processors. This would have the added benefit of allowing editors to view annotations in real-time as they are editing a document, which would be extremely handy as many annotations deal with changes to the document that need to be made (or at least, should be addressed in some way during an edit cycle.

Proposed design:

[ editor window top ]

[ Highlighted yellow: Editing this line in the editor.... ]

[ editor window bottom ]

[ Annotation: Display annotation(s) related to cursor position here. ]
[ Button: add comment ] <-- editor would use this to add comment to existing annotation, related to any edits.

I don't know if that is helpful for conveying how annotations could work in the editor, or not. I think this should be added to the default editor, and VisualEditor can add its own support. I don't think this feature should be VE-only.

A possible work-around to make things a bit more bearable in the mean-time would be to add some kind of icon in the page history to indicate revisions that have annotations, so that the maintainer of the page can go through the page's history and look for annotations from people.

Version: master
Severity: normal