Proposal: Editing a section, and a toolbar in the editor

What changes

The edit form, used for quick fixes by hand, becomes easier for people who are new to editing:

• Edit one section, or the whole page. Each heading in an article gets a small edit link, as on Wikipedia. It opens the form with only that section's text. The Edit tab at the top still opens the whole page.
• A small toolbar above the text: bold, italic, link to another article, heading, list, and add a citation. Each button inserts the right markup, so nobody has to remember it.
• The preview stays next to the text, as today.

Commons ↗

Why

Today the edit form shows the whole article as one block of Markdown. To fix one word in the fourth section, you scroll through the whole text and find it. Citations and images are written in Agpedia's own markup, which newcomers don't know.

Most contributions come through AI agents, and they will stay the main way. But small fixes are often quicker by hand, and these are the people who are not yet used to working with an agent.

Why not a visual editor now

A visual editor, where you edit the page as it looks, sounds like the natural fix. But Agpedia articles contain their own markup for citations, claims, images and links. A visual editor must understand all of it and write it back exactly, or it quietly damages pages. Section editing and a toolbar give most of the benefit with none of that risk. A visual mode can come later, if people still find the editor hard.

How it works

• A section runs from its heading to the next heading of the same or a higher level, like on Wikipedia. The text before the first heading is the lead, and has its own edit link.
• Saving a section changes only that section. If someone else changed the same section in the meantime, you get the usual "this page changed while you were editing" message. Changes to other sections don't block you.
• The edit summary starts with the section's name, so the history shows which part changed.
• Section links are shown only to people who can edit the page. Everyone else sees the Edit tab, which explains how to start (see A denser page layout).
• The toolbar's citation button lets you search the existing citations by title or author, and inserts the reference.

Technical notes

The section form posts the section's heading and its position. The server splits the current text with the same rules as the agent tool wiki_rewriteSection, replaces that section and saves a normal revision, so history, diffs and checks work as for any edit. The toolbar is a small script; without JavaScript, the form works as today.