John Lee wrote:
One thing I've found even more perplexing than the prevalence of Headings Like This is the prevalence of level-three headings where level-2 headings ought to be; I keep running into them far more often than I feel I should; [[Vanilla Ice]] is one such article. I have a feeling this is because people find level-2 headings are too big (the same reason in the early days of HTML a lot of people used <h3> instead of <h1>), but I really don't have any actual idea why this is happening.
The most straightforward explanation is that most editors have never even heard of the MoS, let alone read it, and just choose styles randomly, a la myspace. Many don't even try to mimic the style already found in an article, they just start typing away. Fortunately, they rarely if ever fight to keep the stylistic randomness, so fixing is an easy way for gnomes to rack up edits. :-)
Stan