[Wikipedia-l] Please help test new features

Sat Jul 5 06:35:53 UTC 2003

The Cunctator wrote:
[in objection to table of contents display]

>The content of the Wikipedia pages below the title and above the links at
>the bottom has always been entirely user-configurable. To change that
>summarily is not something to be taken lightly. 
>
An admirable sentiment, perhaps, but it doesn't make sense here.

1) The TOC is created only by the addition of headings to an article by 
human hands. (Even Ram-bot articles are based on a template written by a 
human!) If the TOC is unmanageable, it's because a human has gone mad 
with the headings, and any human can fix it by refactoring the page.

2) An article long enough for multiple headings to be appropriate would 
benefit from a table of contents in usability improvements. While some 
people may well like to read every article from beginning to end, many 
people are actually searching for specific information, and would be 
better able to find it in long articles by getting an overview of 
section headings.

Vision-impaired users using text-to-speech software, with less ability 
to scroll-n-skim, should certainly benefit from the up-front TOC and 
ability to jump directly to relevent sections of the text. (Some 
browsers support jumping directly from heading to heading, but I gather 
not all. I'd appreciate if any accessibility experts lurking around 
might be able to shine more light on this.)

3) Anyone mortally offended by it can disable it in their preferences.

Separately, the present implementation does look dreadful in my opinion. 
It takes up too much space and is rather distracting, and I'm offended 
by the markup used to render it. ;) However this is an implementation 
detail, and does not discredit the concept.

Thoughts:

* It would be fairly trivial to add a JavaScript goodie to hide the 
table of contents with a click in most modern browsers. Where JavaScript 
is disabled or unavailable, or for the wackos running Netscape 4 or 
something ;) well, they'll just have to log in won't they?

* It would be less trivial, but not impossible, to have some support for 
display preferences stored in a browser-local cookie instead of a 
logged-in user account. I don't know if this is desirable or not.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)