Universal Edit Button
Yesterday a new site to promote an old idea went online: universaleditbutton.org.
The idea of the Universal Edit Button came up first at RoCoCo camp 2007, there was some more talk about it at WikiSym later that year and apparently even more talk happened at the Recent Changes Camp this year.
The idea behind the Universal Edit Button is to make people more aware of the editability of wiki pages regardless of the used wiki engine or skin. Whenever you see the icon you know that you can edit the page and contribute to the content.
In the earlier stages of the project, the idea was to add the icon to the default skins1) of the various wiki engines. But adoption was slow, because there were a lot of discussion what the icon should look like and how it would fit into the style of the various themes. DokuWiki is one of the very few engines which include one version of the button in it's default template.
The idea of putting the icon into the application it self now seems to be abandoned in favor of a different approach. The icon is now shown in the address bar of your browser similar to what browsers already do for RSS feeds.
Of course this is not supported out of the box by any browser, yet. But hopes are that this will be the case in the future. Until then, you need to install a FireFox extension. Extensions for other browsers will probably follow.
Because adding support for the button is as simple as adding RSS autodetection, the list of Wikis implementing the new standard is quite impressive already and includes popular sites like Wikipedia and WikiHow.
DokuWiki' devel version has support for the new Universal Edit Button since yesterday. Users of the current stable version can simply install a plugin to add support. Please do so and more important, spread the word about the Firefox extension and bug browser developers to add native support.