Brion-
It's also mysteriously in a table and there are no line breaks. :)
I think it looks nicer in a table, but that's easy to change in Skin.php.
I notice that duplicate headings (which is not unlikely to occur with subheadings) are marked with a numbered suffix after the first one. Better than nothing, but this is fragile for linking; if the major sections are rearranged in order, the numbers for the minor sections will change.
So what else do you suggest?
Indeed. If we're adding features to make it easier to edit, I'm not sure it makes sense to hide them from new users...
My reasoning for this was that Wikipedia has two uses: - a work of reference - a collaborative editing system used by us.
We need to find the right balance between making editing easy and making reading Wikipedia unobtrusive. Some work on this is being done in the Skin department, for example, where we will probably end up with a Skin preferred by editors, and one that is more friendly to non-editing users.
On the other hand, I do (of course) believe that the section editing feature is very useful, and can save us substantial bandwidth, so that every signed in user should get it by default. Perhaps a better long term solution is to show users the preferences screen when they sign in for the first time.
Another minor suggestion I made to Erik earlier but which would apparently be "hard" with his regexps :) would be to have the section editing separate on horizontal rules as well as headings.
While this would complicate matters indeed, it is not the only reason I oppose it. One problem is that on many pages we have both section headings and horizontal rules used to separate different parts of the article, i.e.
== foo ==
bar
-----
== baz ==
bam
-----
So you would end up with duplicate links (or if you eliminate the dupes, you surprise the user by not showing them the edit link). Moreover, it is unclear what an edit link next to the ruler would refer to; the part above or below the ruler? You would have to place the link above or below, which would look ugly.
But the most important reason not to do this is that horizontal rules are evil. Not only are they ugly, they provide no information whatsoever about the sections that follow or precede them. That's what section headers are for: to separate different parts of a page. When the different parts of a page are so separate that a new section would not be enough, they should be moved to separate pages.
By having the neat "edit this section" feature only for headings, we encourage people to create headings for their own editing benefit. They will reorganize talk pages to have them to be able to respond quicker in the future. We provide no such incentive if we also implement the feature for rules.
Regards,
Erik