Erik Moeller wrote:
A growing article with many stub sections should have
those stubs
removed then, so the TOC doesn't get in their way?
Stub sections are evil. They are a form of meta comment like "is this
really true?" insertions in articles and should be avoided whenever
possible. Wiki is a means to an end, not an end in itself -- Wikipedia is
first and foremost an encyclopedia, not a scratchpad. If you want to talk
about an article's potential future structure, use the talk page.
Articles should always be in a consistent state. Encarta or Britannica
have many stubs, but they don't have "stub sections". In any case, I fail
to see how the TOC can get in the way if there is no content it can get in
the way of.
I was pleasantly surprised to return from vacation to see that a TOC
system had sprung up out of nowhere. It looks great.
As for the stub, or at least the empty sections, could they not be made
to appear in red? This behaviour would parallel the use of coulour in
our links to other articles.
What if there
is no good way to break up a few long sections into
shorter ones?
Show me such a case and I will show you how it could be broken up. In any
case, a TOC of 2 or 3 sections would only look out of place, and be of
little help in navigating the article.
A long article that can't be sectioned is probably badly written with no
sense of organization to the author's thoughts. After some copyediting
the sectioning should fall into place naturally.
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
Articles that have improper sections will be fixed sooner as the problems
become more apparent. For example, I already noticed several articles that
use colons in the headings. This looks very ugly, and the TOC makes it
easy to detect such stylistic errors. Then, with the section editing
enabled, you just select the heading, edit it, and save in a matter of a
few seconds
Hiding our problems, on the other hand, will not make them go away. Those
who are annoyed by the TOC can turn it off easily. But its current
implementation should work well for articles that are reasonably
structured.
I agree fully with Erik on this. One benefit may be to encourage the
consolidation of overly fragmented subjects. Thus, for example, where
there are now separate articles to list the contents of each of a band's
albums it will be more convenient to have these together on a single page.
Ec