I posted a comment regarding this already here but I'm afraid it was overlooked. However I think this could be a very important design decision, so I think it deserves it's own thread.
I was asking if there will be only one unstructured edit section per talk page or if there will be multiple (e.g. per thread). Actually I think it would be useful to have
- one large unstructured edit section on the top of the page for design purposes (e.g. to put inproject page headers or to customize user talk pages)
- one unstructured section per thread into which thread specific examples go that require Wikitext and templates to be working.
I'd even go further and not have a completely unstructured design of 2), but allow some sort form of dividing the edit section into distinct "test cases" that can easily be reference from within the discussion and a common section. For example:
- The common section can contain an example of what is discussed in the section, e.g. an existing template, some images, whatever.
- User 1 creates "test case 1" in the unstructured section (that gets a nice border around it, and a label, e.g. "Figure 1" beneath it)
- User 1 writes something like "see [[fig:1]]" (I'm still thinking in Wikitext here, it should be easy to implement something similar in the VisualEditor) in a comment, which get's rendered as a section link with the testcases name as link text.
- User 2 can create a second testcase, independently of what user 1 created, which will get a nice box and label in the not-so -unstructured section, too, which he can easily link to and explain to user 1 why his design might be better.
- Those sections should still be editable by everyone, but I'm quite sure It will be necessary to reference different examples and distinguish between them when there is no possibility to put Wikitext directly into comments.