Forum: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. --Nyktimos 21:56, January 3, 2011 (UTC)
4. --Tardis1963 00:09, January 4, 2011 (UTC)
5. --Joshoedit 00:15, January 4, 2011 (UTC)
6. --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)

1. 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
2. It looks better with the TOC on the left; clogging the right side of the pages is a bad idea (even if you rearrange the pages) and there is no need to move the TOCs in the first place; big white spaces are not a big deal. Ultimately, I would dismiss this entire concept, as there is no issue to be fixed. --Bold Clone 16:02, January 4, 2011 (UTC)
3. Now that I have thought about it, it's not really needed. I agree with the above posts, it just clods up the right side of the page. There was nothing wrong with where it was before, bar some white space. Which is not really much of a problem. If a page is really long (which references can make it) it make the contents page long, and looks ridiculous down the side of a page in my opinion. Also, if we are to be consistent with this, that will mean rolling this onto every page that has a contents page on this wiki, even though that have two of three things, and will look out of place at the bottom of the infobox in the text does not come down pass the infobox of TOC. Instead of thinking how to clear put white space, which is some case is minimal or non existent, we should be focusing our efforts into trying to reduce the number of stubs on this wiki. But I'm sure whatever happens, the right decision will be made. Mini-mitch 16:08, January 4, 2011 (UTC)

Unsure

If the TOC is to function as a TOC then it should be at the top of the page. I think many regular editors (myself initially also) are fine with it being off to the right because we're all very familiar with how the pages are laid out. It is more a case of how a new reader will interpret the page, looking for a specific section, glancing through the page or reading the page top to bottom.

As it is at the moment, on pages with some sort of intro, the intro is read, followed by the TOC and then the rest of the content, with the infobox balanced to the right with summary information, which is a fairly good format for a new reader. With the TOC pushed below the infobox we're making the reader get through the intro and synopsis to get to the TOC.

I do agree with General MDG 109 that when the TOC is placed to the below right amongst a lot of text it can be somewhat overwhelming for the reader, when you're bombarded with a lot of textual information, all the long articles showcase this.

I'm also concerned for a consistent reader experience, that shifting the TOC around between articles could bring. --Tangerineduel / talk 13:31, January 4, 2011 (UTC)

If it's not broken, don't fix it

I belive that the table of contents should stay where it is. I have been to other wikis where this has been changed and I have been left beffuddled and it takes me ages to find what I was looking for. Also it will make our wiki stand out, as we will not conform with the other wikis, but I'm sure that Tangerine duel and the admins will make the right choice. Son of Icthar 11:49, January 4, 2011 (UTC)

Agreed. Ultimately, it is unnecessary to move the TOC to the right, because there is not a need to do so in the first place. --Bold Clone 15:59, January 4, 2011 (UTC)

Judging by votes for, I'd say there does seem to be a consensus for there being a problem.--Skittles the hog--Talk 16:11, January 4, 2011 (UTC)

Well, as of now, the option with the most votes is pro-right-TOC, so I'm not quite sure how you've arrived at the notion that there's a "consensus for there being a problem". Though consensus is not always the same thing as a majority, the majority of respondents so far are in support of the change. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 17:22, January 4, 2011 (UTC)

There's a more votes for right-TOC, consensus that there is still a problem...or something like that. --Bold Clone 17:23, January 4, 2011 (UTC)

I agree with this more than moving all ToC's to the right, they are meant for ease of access and under the infobox is harder to get to than next to it (roughly). Only if the ToC is causing a problem should it be moved to the right. Revanvolatrelundar 17:25, January 4, 2011 (UTC)

I think you misunderstood Czech, I was saying there was a problem before in comparison to now. As you can see above, I'm pro-right. :)--Skittles the hog--Talk 17:31, January 4, 2011 (UTC)