I'm using Mediawiki for a online textbook of sorts, with a page representing a chapter. I have returned on section numbering for all users to mimic the way the chapters are numbered in the book; works great. However, it doesn't make sense in my context to have the numbering start with "1" for each chapter. Ideally there would be a way to start the numbering at any number. Or at least be able to change the leading "1" - no chapter is structured with multiple h2s. I've kludged a fix with javascript, but it is too slow for my liking.

Are there plug-ins available with this functionality? How hard would it to be to add a magic word that performs this functionality? Where in the php should I start messing around?