[Wikipedia-l] Please help test new features

[David Friedland]

Erik Moeller wrote:

>  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 think I was unclear about what I meant by stub sections. I meant only 
a section that has just one or two sentences. Some types of articles fit 
into a category and there is a standard set of sections for each article 
in that category, like elements or countries. When creating a new 
article for one of those categories, an author should copy the template 
for that type of article and try to fill in as much as much as possible. 
However, that person may not know much about some subsection, and so 
just puts in a sentence or two of overview of that topic. In the case of 
such an article, where a few of the sections are filled out, but most 
are just short one or two sentence 'stubs' a TOC would be in the way, as 
most of the headings would be visible within one or two screenfuls of 
the top.

> > 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.


If there is an article that has a long first section and a short section 
at the end, say an external links section,  a TOC would be very valuable 
to someone looking for that information. You are probably right that the 
long first section should be broken up, but it is conceivable that there 
could be a long section that is best left intact, like a long quotation 
(say a poem) or a narrative. In fact, it seems that as articles become 
more in-depth articles, longer sections of prose that can't be easily 
broken up will become more common. It seems arbitrary to say "TOCs are 
only for articles with 4 or more headings."

Additionally, we don't want to encourage people to delete or add 
sections unnecessarily just to get a particular desired TOC behavior. I 
just can't believe that all articles with fewer than 4 sections should 
never have a TOC and all articles with 4 or more sections should always 
have a TOC. The world is not so easily quantized: there have to be 
exceptions on either side. Why not leave it up to individual articles' 
authors/editors?

> > 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 (OK, saving usually takes a while
>  because of terrible code in that area).
>
>  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.

>
>  Regards,
>
>  Erik


I agree that putting the TOC before the first heading is good. That and 
having them on by default satisfy two of the concerns I had.

As for my proposal, perhaps indeed it is an unnecessary additional 
burden for every article of significant length to specify whether or not 
it should have a TOC, and where. I also think having a default of a TOC 
in articles with 4 or more headings and not for articles with fewer is, 
generally, an excellent default. I only think there should be some way 
to override the default, not necessarily for any reason we can think of 
now, but because there might be a reason we can't think of. I think it 
is much more in keeping with wiki to allow the default to be overridden 
than not. Perhaps when exceptions come up, a policy of when it should be 
overridden could be discussed and then agreed upon. I am very doubtful 
that most would agree upon a policy that was: if an article has more 
than 3 sections, it gets a TOC, otherwise not. No exceptions.

There are _always_ exceptions.

Cheers!

- David