List of Dragons: A

Abraxas

Persian serpent with symbolic significance in Gnosticism. Also spelt Anbraxas or Abrasax.

Abraxas Information

Table of contents (TOC)

Template:Shortcut Template:For For each page with more than three headings, a table of contents (TOC) is automatically generated from the section headings, unless:

• (for a user) preferences are set to turn it off
• (for an article) the magic word __NOTOC__ (with two underscores on either side of the word) is added to the article

Section editing

Sections can be separately edited by clicking special edit links labeled "[edit]" by the heading or by right clicking on the section heading, depending on the preferences set. This is called "section editing feature" (Preferences -> Editing -> "Enable section editing via [edit] links"). Section editing feature will take you to an edit page by a URL such as

https://allaboutdragons.com/dragons/index.php?title=Help:Section&action=edit&section=2

Note that here section numbers are used, not section titles; subsections have a single number, e.g. section 2.1 may be numbered 3, section 3 is then numbered 4, etc. You can also directly type in such URLs in the address bar of your browser.

This is convenient if the edit does not involve other sections and one needs not have the text of other sections at hand during the edit (or if one needs it, open the section edit link in a new window, or during section editing, open the main page in a different window). Section editing alleviates some problems of large pages.

"__NOEDITSECTION__" anywhere on the page will remove the edit links. It will not disable section editing itself; the url and right-clicking on the section heading still work.

Inserting a section can be done by editing either the section before or after it, merging with the previous section by deleting the heading. Note that in these cases the preloaded section name in the edit summary is not correct, and has to be changed or deleted.

Missing "Edit" links

If the edit links are missing, click the "Edit" tab at the top of the page and then click "Save" without making any changes. See Wikipedia:Purge#How to purge.

Adding a section at the end

Template:Shortcut Navigation on pages from "talk" namespaces provides a special link labeled "+" or "+", used to create a new section to the end of the page. Pages having the code __NEWSECTIONLINK__ in wikitext also display this link, regardless of the namespace.

The URL for such an action looks like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox?action=edit&section=new.

In this case, a text box having as title "Subject:", will appear and the content you type in it will become the name of the new section heading. There is no inputbox for the edit summary; it is automatically created. Do not edit the last existing section to create a new one, because it will result in misleading edit summary which conceal creation of the section and may also attract one's attention to the previous section in vain.

See also linking in an edit summary to a section, "Post a comment" feature.

Editing before the first section

By default, there is no link to edit the lead section of a page, so the entire page must edited. Lead section editing can be enabled through Template:Myprefs.

Preview

The preview in section editing does not always show the same as the corresponding part of the full page, e.g. if on the full page an image in the previous section intrudes into the section concerned. Also, <ref>s usually become hidden; see #Editing a footnote for a solution.

The edit page shows the list of templates used on the whole page, i.e. also the templates used in other sections.

Subsections

Subsections are included in the part of the section that is edited. Section numbering is relative to the part that is edited, so on the relative top level there is always just number 1, relative subsections all have numbers starting with 1: 1.1., 1.2, etc.; e.g., when editing subsection 3.2, sub-subsection 3.2.4 is numbered 1.4. However, the heading format is according to the absolute level.

Editing a footnote

To edit a footnote rendered in a section containing the code <references />, edit the section with the footnote mark referring to it, see Help:Footnotes. However, the resulting text of the footnote is not shown in a preview of the section via "Show preview", so any mistake made by the editor will not be discovered until after the section edit is saved via "Save page". A workaround is to temporarily add a <references /> or {{reflist}} tag at the end of the section prior to previewing it. But after you are satisfied with the text of the reference shown in the preview, this temporary tag must be removed before the edit is saved.

Editing a page with large sections

If a page has very large sections, or is very large and has no division into sections, and one's browser or connection does not allow editing of such a large section, then one can still:

• append a section by specifying a large section number (too large does not matter); however, one has to start with a blank line before the new section heading
• append content to the last section by not starting with a section heading; however, with the limitations of one's browser or connection, one cannot revert this, or edit one's new text.

If one can view the wikitext of a large section, one can divide the page into smaller sections by step by step appending one, and finally deleting the original content (this can be done one large section at a time). Thus temporarily there is partial duplication of the content, so it is useful to put an explanation in the edit summary.

Sections within parser functions

When conditionally (using a parser function) transcluding a template with sections, edit links of this and subsequent sections will edit the wrong section or give the error message that the section does not exist (although the page (including TOC) is correctly displayed and the TOC links correctly). This is because for the targets of the edit links the content of conditionally included templates is considered part of the page itself, and the sections are counted after expansion.

Thus the edit links of the sections of the included template link to the page itself instead of the template, and the edit links after the included template link to the correct page but the wrong section number.

More generally conditional sections give such a complication.

The problem does not occur when transcluding a template with a conditional name (which has more advantages). Use Template:Tim for the template to transclude to produce nothing.

Sections vs. separate pages vs. transclusion

Advantages of separate pages:

1. what links here feature
2. separate edit histories
3. some template limits apply per page
4. automatic redirect on renaming
5. loading one small page is faster than loading one large page – but are readers more likely to want to use just one section or to browse many of the sections of the topic? – see advantages of combined pages
6. can separately be put in categories (however, see also below)
7. with Semantic MediaWiki: have separate annotations

Advantages of one combined page with sections:

1. loading one combined page is faster and more convenient than loading several divided ones
2. searching within one large page or its wikitext with a local search function is faster and has advantages over searching several pages using the site search engine or a web search engine
3. the TOC provides for convenient navigation.
4. more likelihood of editorial cohesion of a concept compared to having several definitions likely to be independently edited
5. duplication of items relevant to each section, such as navigation templates and infoboxes is avoided

An alternative is composing a page of other pages using the template feature (creating a compound document by Transclusion). This allows easy searching within the combined rendered page, but not in the combined wikitext. As a disadvantage, a title for each page has to be provided. For the pre-expand include size limit this is disadvantageous even compared with one large page: the pre-expand include size is the sum of the pre-expand include sizes of the components plus the sum of sizes of the wikitexts of the components.

Headings

Section headings are styled with the HTML tags <h1> through <h6> as defined in the MediaWiki CSS. The styles are:

• <h1>: font size 188%; bottom border
• <h2>: font size 150%; bottom border
• <h3>: font size 132%; bold
• <h4>: font size 116%; bold
• <h5>: font size 100%; bold
• <h6>: font size 80%; bold

Some readers may have issues differentiating between <h1>, <h2> and <h3>. To make <h1> and <h2> bold, add this to Special:MyPage/skin.css or Special:MyPage/common.css:

<source lang="css">/* Bold h1 and h2 */ h1, h2 { font-weight: bold; } .editsection { font-weight: normal; }</source>

Sections for demo above

Demo http://a

This section is linked to from #Section linking.

See also

• mw:Extension:Auto-Anchor
• Template:sections

Manual of style

• Wikipedia:Manual of Style (layout)
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style (lead section)
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style (accessibility)
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style (summary style)