Nicholas Michalowski <nmichalo <at> gmail.com> writes:
I am an editor over at wikibooks and I was have found myself wishing for a better way to number things in wikimarkup. Mainly my activity has been focused on mathematics texts, and I wished for a way to automatically generate numbers for theorems & exercises. Similar to what is done in LaTeX. Basically so I could have a template that would increment say a theorem number from something like 2.1.1 to 2.1.2. (I could imagine 2 and 1 being inputs to the template That something like {{Theorem|2|1}} display 2.1.1, 2.1.2, ... etc.)
This page: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/generate.html#counters made me hopeful something like this might be possible in HTML/CSS, but to be honest I am not technically savvy enough to figure out if I am correct.
CSS counters are very flexible, but they are not supported in IE6/7 (nor IE8 with default settings which tends to fall back to IE7 compatility mode on Wikimedia sites). You could probably force the Cite extension to do something like that, but that would be a rather ugly hack. You can use javascript if the lack of numbering is not an accessibility problem, or pywikipediabot if you don't mind littering the page history.