For many pages, especially when using the many handy macros and plugins, the wiki markup quickly gets too complex for the beginner user. Nonetheless, these pages often contain blocks of less-complex content that I would like our more beginner users to be able to contribute to. We can sometimes get around this by using 'includes' and directing our beginner users to the included sections. However, systematically creating 'includes' for every text-block on a page quickly becomes unscalable, AND the attachments of the parent page are not so easily accessible to the included children.

Suggestion:
1. Create an 'edit this section' or just 'edit' button which appears in the greyed-out header sections of h1. h2. h3. etc headers. Clicking on this 'edit' button would open up a WYSIWYG/wiki/preview editor for that section alone. Once edited and saved, this section should then be merged seamlessly back into the page. In this manner, people editing separate sections have very little chance of causing a conflict, and people are discouraged from editing (and perhaps 'locking') the entire page if they are just updating a title or paragraph.
2. allow the same sort of tag to be added to

{column}

tags, as an option.

{column:edit=true}

or the like.
3. similar for tables, add an 'edit' button along the title line which would only edit that one table. In this case, a special 'table' editor view with quick-buttons to work with the table might be useful (add/delete row/column etc)
4. defined blocks:

{editable}this text will have an 'edit' button before or after it, and be editable as a block{editable}

(or something like this
5. editing table cells (esp. for complex content) on their own might be useful. For this, a right-click item of some sort would be required, as not to clutter the table with 'edit' buttons. Alternatively, suggestion 4 might mean this is not required.
6. any other

{div}

/

{span}

or other sectional tags could have an optional

{tag:edit=true}

field that feeds thier content into the 'sub-section' editor. In fact, you could probably overload this parameter for ALL block plugins (with the default, of course, being edit=false).

This enhancement would have the added benefit to alleviate some of the rednering complaints of the WYSIWYG editor that people are reporting as plugin macros are added and are not rendered in a way which is pretty for 'end-end-users'. Instead, 'simple' users would be able to simply edit the blocks they understand and have been given the 'edit' button, while more advanced users might edit an entire section, or the entire page.

mediawiki, as seen at wikipedia, does this quite well for paragraph headers. My suggestions here abstract that to one step higher to include other types of sections.

This is related to some requests for new features where the users wants the preview / editor to 'jump' to the section being edited, but is perhaps a more elegant solution.