Forum:Moving the tables of content to the right

Index → Panopticon → Moving the tables of content to the right

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The issue

On many of our pages, such as Aliases of the Doctor, the Doctor's TARDIS, the articles have grown so long and so sectionalised that the tables of content have likewise become unwieldy. In my view, they sit there between the lead and the first section, sometimes stretching two or three browser window lengths. Because of this, they can make navigation harder, rather than easier, especially if you want to compare information in the article's lead to that in the article's first main paragraph. Heck, you can see the problem in its nascent form right above this paragraph. Who wants to start reading when they're immediately faced with a big ol' table of contents?

The solution

Thus I created template:big toc, an extraordinarily basic "template", whose function is to move the table of contents to the right of the page, allowing the first section of the article to appear directly underneath the lead. To examine how it changes the appearance of an article, please see United States of America. Look at that article both with and without big toc to see which you think looks cleaner and better.

I then implemented big toc as a part of episode infoboxes, because, in my view, the tables of content on these pages also presented a big wedge of white space right at the start of these articles. If these articles didn't have a lead, which was the case with many less-visited episodes and serial pages (like, for instance, Paradise Towers (TV story)), then the page began with a huge TOC crawl. By stowing the TOC under the infobox, the text flow is much improved.

A problem with the solution — or is it an opportunity for improvement?

There is one nominal disadvantage to this method, however. Because of the need to code a "clear" command into big toc in order to get it to sit under the infobox, pictures are prevented from appearing to the immediate left of the infobox. In almost every case, this is not a problem. See, for instance, The Tenth Planet, Children of Earth: Day One, and The Unicorn and the Wasp. None of these pages have been altered to accommodate the movement of the TOC, and they all look much improved by the change, to my eye.

In my study of the effects of this change, two page defects have revealed themselves as problematic. Neither of these defects would be best solved by removing this change; rather they are problems in the writing of the page that this TOC shift have revealed. The best solution is to edit the page, not remove the TOC shift.

• CASE ONE: The underwritten page. In these cases, the page has no, or inadequately short, leads and synopses. If a picture is placed right at the start of the "Plot" section on such an underwritten page, the infobox will push it down. This can cause it to appear at a place other than where the editor intended. An example of such a page is The Happiness Patrol. The solution here is easy: give the article a good and meaningful lead and a reasonable synopsis.
• CASE TWO: Weird whitespace. Because the TOC/infobox forms a long block on the right side of the page, any extra whitespace within the first few paragraphs of the article will be exaggerated. Two cases in point are The Aztecs and Something Borrowed. The TOC shift isn't making that whitespace. It was already there. It's merely highlighting it. The whitespace shouldn't be there, so the solution is to edit it out.
• CASE THREE: When the first picture is put on the right. If the first picture is placed at the right, and it is on an underwritten page, this can force that first picture to appear all the way at the bottom of the TOC. Just to keep us in Hartnell territory, such an example is at The Edge of Destruction. The simple solution is merely to edit the picture so that it's on the left. The effects of this can be seen at The Daleks or Fragments. In terms of standard design theory, the first picture in the body should never have been placed at the right, anyway, because it should be "balancing out" the infobox.

All of these problems are easily corrected by improving the article. Thus they are not, in my view, reasonable objections barring the permanent implementation of the TOC-at-right.

What about tags?

A couple of people have noted that the right-TOC means that certain tags, like TV stub, Semi-protect, and Current, are now pushed down under the TOC. And that's true. You'll have to decide for yourself whether that's a deal-breaker. I don't personally think it matters. Semi-protection isn't dependent on the presence of the tag. And I don't know if we should be making decisions about the way a page looks based upon impermanent tags. Our goal is to get rid of stub tags. And, anyway, most of the TV story pages that are labelled "stub" aren't actually stubs at this point. Most of them bear the tag because no one has bothered to take them off.

[The tag issue is perhaps one we could settle separately, because we haven't really developed a set policy on where the tags should go. I know some editors have gradually been pulling them up under the infobox, but you'll still find plenty of pages where the stub tag is at the bottom. I think we need to review the issue, anyway, as they make it impossible to correctly place section cleanup tags on sections early in the article. We could put the stub tags at the bottom left of the article, as at Wikipedia, or across the top-center of the article, as at Wookieepedia. Or, if you want to see something I think is truly ugly, try putting a current stub tag before the infobox on any classic serial page. You can't currently do it on any other type of infobox, cause I haven't coded them for it yet.]

Apology

I should also at this juncture apologize to anyone "freaked out" over the past few days by this sudden change to the various story pages. Because big toc isn't really a template, I can't just put it on a sandbox and then direct people to the sandbox to view. On its own, it produces nothing. It has to have been placed on live pages, because each page has a different table of contents, and each page has its own unique mix of pictures and text. Only by looking at every page could I assess its impact, and indeed offer you the opportunity to fairly assess it.

Proposal

I therefore propose we keep the TOC to the right on TV story pages, and simply work to improve the articles such that the always-non-illustrated sections of articles extend down past the bottom of the infobox, and the first picture in the body of the article is always on the left. In most cases, this will require no editing at all; the vast majority of articles already meet this standard. In other cases, it will require hardly any work at all. At the end of the day, the end user will have a better experience fo the page, uninterrupted by the long, awkward expanses of whitespace that accompany TOCs.

I hope that as you adjudicate whether this is a good move for the wiki, you will take the time to peruse a number of different pages and honestly assess whether you like it. You may wish to assess it on pages that haven't been a part of this initial study. Thus, you may want to manually place big toc on something like DWA Issue 123, The Widow's Curse, or The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith, and see which you like better. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 20:51, January 3, 2011 (UTC)

Comments

For right-TOCs

1. --Skittles the hog--Talk 21:00, January 3, 2011 (UTC)
2. --Revanvolatrelundar 21:07, January 3, 2011 (UTC)
3. --Mini-mitch 21:13, January 3, 2011 (UTC)
4. --Nyktimos 21:56, January 3, 2011 (UTC)
5. --Tardis1963 00:09, January 4, 2011 (UTC)
6. --Joshoedit 00:15, January 4, 2011 (UTC)
7. --Gousha 07:44, January 4, 2011 (UTC)

I like the look, and I'm all in favor of it! I have a slight concern about the potential balances between the left text, the right (center, actually) infobox and ToC, and the rightmost column of ads. With three full columns there (thanks to the recent layout changes by Wikia) the content can feel a bit compressed. I'm not sure if there's really any good solution to this aspect, since ToCs are inherently narrow.

Also, are there any circumstances where the combination of a long infobox and a long TOC overstretch the content? Some of the articles you refer to come pretty close... I'd guess that these could be dealt with as part of Case One: either the individual sections need more text, or the article needs fewer sections.

Against right-TOCs

1. --Azes13 21:59, January 3, 2011 (UTC)

It may be because of the display settings on the computer or something, but the Table of Contents doesn't look annoyingly large on the left, whereas clogging up the right side with the Table of Contents, the Infobox and any Tags does look bad.

I'd be really interested to know what sort of browser/version you're using. The page seems to wok pretty well in most modern versions, but no page on this site works well with most versions of Internet Explorer. MSIE interprets the "clear" command different than just about any other browser, so every time we use a template that has a "clear" command in it — which is almost every time we use a tag like "stub" or "semi-protect" or the like —we're changing, at least fractionally, how a page looks in MSIE. At this point, though, we've embedded the "clear" command so liberally, that we have, by default almost, decided that we don't really care what our site looks like in MSIE. (I myself don't even have MSIE on my machine, and common wisdom says that MSIE is far too hacked/hackable to be anyone's primary browser anymore.) If you go to the following page, you'll see what The Brain of Morbius —a page that hasn't been altered to work with the right-TOC — looks like in a variety of browsers. Click here for a browser-by-browser comparison. I can't see that it looks bad with Chrome, FireFox, Safari, SeaMonkey, Opera, Iceape, Shiretoko or Epiphany. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 23:47, January 3, 2011 (UTC)

I agree with the two above me, it looked better before, clogging up the right side though with everything, looks to crowded, also I never had any complaints about long TOCs the always tell you what the page has, as soon as you get there, and thus know (or atleast have some idea) if your be interested in this page, its moved form, I find it doesn'y seem to have the same effect. General MDG 109 7.55, January 4th, 2011