Help talk:Editing/Archive 1

New approach to section headings example

Upon reading the following in Wikipedia:Section:

Sections in a template do not appear in the TOC of the referring page. The automatic section numbering restarts with 1 at the beginning of a template, and continues with the section numbering of the referring page itself after the template.

I hit on this idea to display the section headings example in the table:

What I typed in the page source	What's displayed
{{Section headings example}}	Template:Section headings example

Benefits:

Shows section headings exactly as normally rendered (no kludges).
TOC not screwed up.
Template can be used anywhere this example appears (as in Wikipedia:Section).

Drawbacks:

Looks a little weird.
If Template:Section headings example changes, still need to edit the "what you type" column in Wikipedia:How to edit a page (and any other page containing similar instructions).

The last drawback could be fixed (I assume) by using a second template containing <nowiki>.

- dcljr 20:22, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

With the template, just as with the bare wiki-style ==Headings==, the TOC included references to the example headings. With the template, the section edit links were messed up even worse than with the wiki-style headings. So I converted it to use font changes and bolding instead of real headings. —AlanBarrett 20:39, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

By the way, {{msgnw:Template:Whatever}} includes the content of a template, and wraps that in a nowiki context. —AlanBarrett 20:39, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)