Frank Ralf writes:
... the advice Daniel J. Barrett is giving in his "MediaWiki - Wikipedia and Beyond" (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596519681, p. 65) for komplex numbered lists is not using wiki syntax but pure HTML tags.
That's right. Numbered lists are (in my opinion) the #1 weakness of wikitext. (#2 is the difficulty for novice users to create tables.)
Trust me, I love the MediaWiki software, but numbered lists are just implemented badly. (Granted, they are difficult things to implement well.) I recommend either using HTML <ol> & <ul> or using bulleted lists instead, which are implemented just fine in wikitext and in 90% of cases can replace a numbered list.
DanB