In some kinds of documents (particularly legal documents), it is important to have section numbers. MediaWiki does reflect this in one respect: the auto-generated Table of Contents lists each line with a corresponding section number. However, the header itself -- within the body of the document -- does not display the section number.
In the document linked (Wikimedia's proposed new Terms of Use), each section has been *manually* numbered. This leads to unsightly duplicate numbering within the Table of Contents.
There are probably a number of technical approaches that could resolve this. I suggest one here, but it may or may not be the right one:
Proposed solution: Introduce a new Magic Word, DISPLAYSECTIONNUMBERS, which will cause the numbers already included in the Table of Contents to be included within the document. Thus, the following lines:
== Section 1 == Text text text == Section 2 == Text text text === Sectino 2.1 === Text text text
Would be displayed as (and here I'm using all-caps to represent larger typeface etc.):
1. SECTION 1 Text text text 2. SECTION 2 Text text text 2.1 SECTION 2.1 Text text text
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
URL: http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Terms_of_use&action=historysubmit&diff=2992938&oldid=2992569
See also:
T4366: Use CSS counter properties for numbering sections, reducing parser cache fragmentation