/"On the previews: I'm actually trying to keep the guides themselves as uncluttered as possible where extra indicators are concerned. That's because one look at the detailed wikipedia base tiles convinced me that they're more confusing than helpful." /
I agree that the wallpaper descriptions in Wikipedia are cluttered and hard to follow. Makes me a little crosseyed actually.
I also agree that displaying the symmetry information should be optional.
After playing around with the descriptions in wikipedia, I think the main reason they are so cluttered (and therefore hard to follow) is because they indicate every type of symmetry in the pattern. There are several symmetries which are related. For example, a vertical reflection followed by a horizontal reflection will result in a 180 degree rotation. In the Wikipedia entry, all of these symmetry properties are represented by a symbol or a line.
Just displaying the minimum symmetry operations necessary to create the pattern, greatly reduces the information you need to display. Of course, the minimum number of operations is not necessarily unique. There may be several ways to create the pattern from the base tile. Sticking to the operations that are easy to perform mentally is maybe a good guideline.
I have made a first stab at doing this for the 17 wallpaper patterns. These may not be the best representations and there are a few patterns where I think the design could be made simpler (pgg and p2 for example) but the picture gives the basic idea.
http://inkscape.13.n6.nabble.com/file/n4642287/symmetry3.png
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