lcrocker@nupedia.com wrote:
Level-three headers (===) are well established as the standard header on Wikipedia. If you hate this so much, better to simply redefine it to pump out ideologically correct H2 tags instead of H3 rather than to prescribe the change of thousands of pages and demand a change in markup behavior.
I don't think it's "well established" at all. I always use == for my first subheads, and many others do as well.
Well, let's take a look:
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM cur WHERE cur_text REGEXP '[^=]== [^=]+ ==[^=]' Articles that use ==: 1430
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM cur WHERE cur_text REGEXP '[^=]=== [^=]+ ===[^=]' Articles that use ===: 4260
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM cur WHERE cur_text REGEXP '[^=]==== [^=]+ ====[^=]' Articles that use ====: 1008
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM cur WHERE cur_text REGEXP '[^=]===== [^=]+ =====[^=]' Articles that use =====: 1
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM cur WHERE cur_text REGEXP '[^=]====== [^=]+ ======[^=]' Articles that use ======: 1
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM cur WHERE cur_text REGEXP '[^=]== [^=]+ ==[^=]' and cur_text REGEXP '[^=]=== [^=]+ ===[^=]' Articles that use both == and ===: 376
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM cur WHERE (NOT (cur_text REGEXP '[^=]== [^=]+ ==[^=]')) and cur_text REGEXP '[^=]=== [^=]+ ===[^=]' Articles that use ===, but not ==: 3883
So there are more than twice as many pages using === as there are using ==, and more than *ten times as many* pages using === but not == as there are using both == and === (and that would thus need to be changed). That's what I call "well established".
There's a nice simple correspondence between ==/H2, ===/H3, etc. H1 is reserved for the article title. If we shifted === to produce H2 as you suggest, then what whould == produce?
We already discarded the = header entirely (which used to work in Usemod days) to little weeping, requiring anyone who might have used it to change to == or ===. The exact correspondence between level numbers isn't particularly relevant as long as they're supposed to be hierarchical.
I have heard complaints that people think H2 is rendered too large; that can be fixed with stylesheet changes, and I'm certainly open to doing that.
Certainly.
But let's settle on a standard for reasons other than mere inertia.
Got something against inertia? That Wikipedia has it is good; it keeps the project going. :)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)