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Section link in summary is sometimes incorrect/unhelpful (Community Wishlist/W269)

Long-term opportunity
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Description

Section links in summaries (/* foo */) can be incorrect (unless manually corrected) if the page contains multiple sections with the same name, the section heading includes a template, or the heading was changed in the edit. Also, if a user opens the editing page for a large section (or the whole page) but modifies only a (sub)section, the section link will not be very informative (or not present at all)—again unless manually corrected/inserted. If section links were automatically/asynchronously generated based on which lines were modified after the page was saved and parsed (IOW if they were not part of the summary input), we would have none of these problems.

They tried tackling this before, but IMHO the mistake was to still treat the section link as part of the summary instead of switching all section link generation to server-side/asynchronous (which admittedly would be a big change).

Previous wishlist surveys: 2015, 2016

Assigned focus area

Unassigned

Type of wish
Feature request
Tags
Affected users

Editors, patrollers

Phabricator tasks
Other details
  • Created: 10:14, 21 August 2024
  • Last updated: 12:52, 3 March 2026
  • Author: Nardog (talk)
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This wish currently has 1 supporter. Voting for this wish is open until it is completed.

Supporters of this wish
Support Nardog (talk) 10:14, 21 August 2024