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)
(I'm not sure if this is more appropriate discussion for Wikipedia-l, as
it might involve policy, so I erred on the conservative side and have
posted on wikitech-l)