Section Editing

Section Editing is a feature not found in many engines but is very useful for editing large pages. It allows a user to edit only a small section of the whole page, by clicking a small 'edit' link alongside a section heading. This opens only that section's text into the edit textbox. For major page refactoring, or adding new sections, users can still edit the whole page, but this feature is very useful when making small typo corrections etc. on a large page. It makes it easier to find the wiki text corresponding to the page text.

Another benefit (or potential benefit) of section editing, is a reduction in multiuser problems such as edit conflicts / edit locking. Good wiki software has some form of conflict handling (either locking a page to other users, or merging differences). Bad wiki software will simply overwrite one user's change with another's. See Conflict Handling for more information on this. With section editing, all such issues are lessened. In the case of page locking, the software might intelligently lock only the section which a user is editing, so that other users can edit other sections (unfortunately DokuWiki doesn't do this. It always locks the whole page). For software which takes the merging approach, the server will have less merging to do, since submitted wiki-text will often be for different sections. Merging can be viewed as 'risky', and so less merging is good, if only from a peace-of-mind point of view.

To illustrate the benefits of section editing, consider the Wikipedia:Village pump discussion page. This is a very long page, and many users try to edit it at the same time. Arguably it's not a good use of wiki technology anyway, to have big discussion forums in this format, but the section editing feature makes it considerably more useable and robust.