Erik Moeller wrote:
- An article with many short sections would inappropriately get a TOC
that would waste space.
Then remove some sections.
A growing article with many stub sections should have those stubs removed then, so the TOC doesn't get in their way?
- An article with just two very long sections wouldn't get a TOC but
would be appreciably helped by one.
Then add some sections.
What if there is no good way to break up a few long sections into shorter ones? Should such an article be doomed to suffer without a TOC?
I surmise you supporting the notion that some wiki-algorithm is better at determining whether an article merits a TOC than each article's author. I disagree, as it seems that an aspect of articles that is so intimately married to the content as a TOC should be modifyable by editors and not arbitrarily imposed by the wiki software.
I agree than in an ideal Wikipedia, every article would have exactly the right number of sections of exactly the right length, and the TOC algorithm would word perfectly. But in the meantime, with a non-ideal Wikipedia, how can you defend the TOC feature's exacerbating the situation by disallowing TOCs where they might be useful and forcing them to be included where they are extraneous?
- David