Table of Contents behavior

[franzeska]

It looks like Fanlore tables of contents should behave like Wikipedia ones: in other words, after the opening paragraph(s) and directly before the first header. Putting in "__TOC__" should force the table of contents to appear at that point. But that doesn't seem to be what's happening. It looks, or at least it looks to me, like the table of contents is stuck to the end of whatever template is in the article. Is there any way to change this? I think articles would be a lot easier to read if we could split the two.

Here's an example of a Wikipedia page with a huge template and a huge table of contents that's still pretty readable because of how they're positioned.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_history

Is this just a problem with the skin I'm using? (Monobook--more or less the same as the Wikipedia default, right?) Is there some editing trick I'm missing?

ETA: The issue is the inclusion of "__TOC__" in some templates. I really think it shouldn't be there. Anyone have reasons it should? The templates that contain this are:

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:FandombyText
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:FandombyText-RPF
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:Fanwork
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:GlossaryTerm
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:OrganizationCorporation
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:PolicyInfobox
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:Site


http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:ArchiveProfile
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:AwardsProfile
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:CharacterProfile
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:Commentary
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:CommunityProfile
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:ConventionProfile
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:EventProfile
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:FanProfile
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:PairingProfile
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:PersonProfile
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:UsenetProfile
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:ZineAnthology
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:ZineNovel
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:ZinePublisherProfile

Comments

[lian]

You'd need to edit the resp. templates to exclude __TOC__, since (I assume) that overrides the magic word (seems to be a "one single TOC to rule the article rule" which is, sensible)

(cf. http://fanlore.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Fanwork&action=edit

-- __TOC__ nested at the end of the infobox table)


ETA: and by "you", I do of course mean admins with template-editing powers, egh.

[franzeska]

Doh! I should have thought to look there. Ok, I'm off to figure out which ones are affected.

[ratcreature]

Well, with it being in the side box, the text can run to the left of it. I mean, for example on http://fanlore.org/wiki/First_Time_%28Star_Trek:_TOS_zine%29
if the TOC was an extra box with the text only starting below it, that would be a lot of scrolling.

Also on pages that have a TOC on its own, the formatting often sucks for me, like on http://fanlore.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series/Fanzines
I get weird overlapping effects as the first table is partly over the blue TOC thing on the right.

[franzeska]

Heh. That's precisely what I'm trying to avoid! I see this discussion really needs screenshots. On the left is what the first page looks like in MonoBook (the default Wikipedia skin and my preferred one). On the right is WordPress (Fanlore's default).



Here's the second link in MonoBook and Wordpress:


And on MonoBook and Wordpress with a much smaller screen size:

[ratcreature]

I use the default layout, so I don't know about mono. What I meant with overlapping is like on this screenshot I took of the second link, and I hate that:
http://www.ratcreature.net/tmp/snap6.jpg

[franzeska]

Blech! Oh dear!

[ratcreature]

Yeah.

Another thing I don't understand is why some pages get a toc when they have headers, but others don't. Like
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series/Fanzines
has a toc but
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation/Fanzines
doesn't.

[christycorr]

TOCs are automatically generated for every page with more than three headings :)

[franzeska]

My issue is that wiki markup has tons and tons of nice ways to customize the TOC. You can move where it is and make it have more and less detail (useful for those pages with 8 billion subheadings for zines). The default behavior is to have it after the introductory paragraph, so you don't start the article with scrolling. But you can't change where it is on an article-by-article basis if it's included in a template.

[christycorr]

I have no idea why people chose to have the TOC nested in the infoboxes, but it is indeed so for all the templates linked up there.

I can certainly edit it out, but I have no idea if I should wait for other committee members to authorise that (they made infoboxes long before my time), so I'll email them. If they say it's okay, I'll remove the magic word from the templates. I'll let you know!

(I'm all for having regular TOCs—I don't think many articles will have a relocated TOC or anything, but long infoboxes aren't pretty, and they're the main issue with using Monobook with Fanlore, which I do whenever I can :D)

[franzeska]

Awesome! I could be wrong, but it looks to me like this change would leave the default Fanlore pages looking about the same (since the default TOC behavior in WordPress is a bit different from what it is in MonoBook).

I've been poking around Wikipedia's TOC templates, and it seems like, if there are specific issues that the current infobox+TOC style was intended to fix, we could probably do the same thing more flexibly by just having multiple TOC templates.

[franzeska]

Err... default skin I mean. *sigh*

[christycorr]

I don't think the TOC was put inside the infoboxes to fix any issues. They probably just thought it looked pretty! :D

I created a {{CategoryTOC}} the day I joined Fanlore, I think *g* What other templates do you think might be useful?

[franzeska]

Maybe something like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:TOC_nest_right

Or those ones where you can specify how many levels of headers to use in the TOC?

I mean, it's not urgent or anything, but it seems like being able to fiddle with TOC behavior on some of the longer pages might be useful in the future.

[christycorr]

*nods* Sure. I have no idea if {{TOC nest right}} (or {{TOC right}}, for that matter) will play well with fanlore's WordPress skin. We'll have to create them and see! *grins*