[Wikipedia-l] Intro for readers of this list (Was: "Edit this section", TOC implemented)

[Brion Vibber]

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>brion vibber wrote:
>  
>
>>We have allowed such links since nearly 
>>a year ago, but you had to make an anchor 
>>yourself by putting in some HTML tag with 
>>an 'id="anchorname"' attribute.
>>    
>>
>
>Sounds cool. But why not just make another article?
>
A good question. Opposition to having a standard wiki syntax for 
creating anchors was and remains driven by opposition to overlong 
articles, which are difficult to edit and maintain.

Erik has also created a feature whereby you can edit particular 
subsections of a page more easily, so this may be less of a factor.

Of course, there are plenty of times when we do have long pages, which 
aren't necessarily articles; among others, the Village Pump and many 
popular talk pages become HUUUGE as many discussions bump on through. 
It's sometimes useful to point people to specific elements of 
discussion. Or, we could be more vigilant about breaking them up -- into 
subpages. :)

>>The discussion is whether to automatically 
>>_create_ anchors from headers, which is 
>>needed for Erik's proposed automatic table 
>>of contents generation for pages with more 
>>than three headers.
>>    
>>
>
>Heavens no! That would be ugly and non-standard and should not be a default 
>setting (in the same way as the almost as ugly auto header numbering is not 
>the default). 
>
Do you not like the anchors (which are invisible), or the table of contents?

I think a tasteful, small, off in the corner table of contents might be 
nice, though the present one is hideous. :)  I don't know what 
"non-standard" is supposed to mean, but last I checked the W3C 
recommended including such links (certainly they have table-of-contents 
links on most of their long specs pages).

A live example might be helpful. I'm having trouble getting at the CVS 
server right now, but I've copied over my work tree from yesterday, 
which is more or less up to date, onto test.wikipedia.org.

Note that this does _not_ include the categories & other stuff Magnus is 
working on that isn't in CVS. Magnus, you'll have to merge those back 
in; I left the files in a backup directory.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)