[Wikipedia-l] Please help test new features

[Ray Saintonge]

Erik Moeller wrote:

>A growing article with many stub sections should have those stubs
>removed then, so the TOC doesn't get in their way?
>
>
>Stub sections are evil. They are a form of meta comment like "is this  
>really true?" insertions in articles and should be avoided whenever  
>possible. Wiki is a means to an end, not an end in itself -- Wikipedia is  
>first and foremost an encyclopedia, not a scratchpad. If you want to talk  
>about an article's potential future structure, use the talk page.
>
>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 was pleasantly surprised to return from vacation to see that a TOC 
system had sprung up out of nowhere.  It looks great.  

As for the stub, or at least the empty sections, could they not be made 
to appear in red?  This behaviour would parallel the use of coulour in 
our links to other articles.

>>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.
>
A long article that can't be sectioned is probably badly written with no 
sense of organization to the author's thoughts.  After some copyediting 
the sectioning should fall into place naturally.

>>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 
>
>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.
>
I agree fully with Erik on this.  One benefit may be to encourage the 
consolidation of overly fragmented subjects.  Thus, for example, where 
there are now separate articles to list the contents of each of a band's 
albums it will be more convenient to have these together on a single page.

Ec