[Wikipedia-l] Please help test new features

[David Friedland]

This copied from my post to wikitech-l:

The Table of Contents feature could potentially suffer from the 
following problems, as it is currently implemented:

1. An article with many short sections would inappropriately get a TOC 
that would waste space.
2. An article with just two very long sections wouldn't get a TOC but 
would be appreciably helped by one.
3. Sometimes a TOC would be best located not at the top of an article, 
but after a short introductory paragraph. I think some dead tree 
encyclopedias use this method.
4. If displaying TOCs is off by default, most users won't appreciate 
their utility, as most users won't change preferences. It seems a TOC is 
most useful to readers of an encyclopedia, and as many readers won't 
even be logged in, they won't see the potentially helpful TOCs.

I propose that whether and and where a TOC appears should be specified 
by each article using a wiki tag indicating where the TOC should appear. 
This would allow articles with many short sections to not have a TOC, 
long articles with just a few sections have a TOC, and allow article 
authors/editors to specify the best location for the TOC without relying 
upon the wiki software to presume the very top of an article is the best 
place.

I think keeping the option of having automatically-generated TOCs as a 
user preference is desirable, as at first, most articles won't have a 
TOC. Maybe they should be a different color, so editors can easily 
identify articles that would benefit from a TOC and insert the wiki tag 
for one, and perhaps identify articles that suffer from a TOC and insert 
a wiki tag to exclude one.

- David Friedland (Nohat)