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In some older skins, a navigable table of contents appears automatically just after the lead if an article has at least four section headings. If the topic of a section is covered in more detail in a dedicated article (see Wikipedia:Summary style), insert {{main|Article name}} or {{further|Article name}} immediately under the section heading.
I also personally prefer to begin with the h2 section heading—when outlining in English (as in preparation for an academic paper or work of fiction), one does not start with an "A" (the equivalent of an h3 heading), but with the Roman numeral "I" (the top level/h2 heading). DocWatson42 05:30, 2 October 2007 (UTC) Agreed.
The section headings in the article start at the second level (==Heading 2==), with subsections at the third level (===Heading 3===), and so on. Sections should not skip levels from sections to sub-subsections (e.g., a fourth-level subsection heading immediately after a second-level heading). See also. Introduction to formatting (Wiki markup)
The Manual of Style, under "Section headings" , states: "Headings should not refer redundantly to the subject of the article, or to higher-level headings, unless doing so is shorter or clearer." Well, for outlines, for the reasons presented above, doing so makes outlines clearer and less likely to trip up section-hopping readers.
A well-done table of contents is a godsend. It appears high on the page, giving readers a quick overview of the article, as well as a quick route to an interesting part of the article. Best of all, Wikipedia's software generates the table of contents automatically from the section headings (see the section about your first edit). If you get ...
Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Self-references to avoid (MOS:SELF) How to avoid mentioning Wikipedia itself, or the fact the article is a webpage. Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Spelling (MOS:SPELLING) Not a guideline per se, but a handy guide to national varieties of English. Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Stand-alone lists (WP:STANDALONE)
The lead section may contain optional elements presented in the following order: short description, disambiguation links (dablinks/hatnotes), maintenance tags, infoboxes, special character warning box, images, navigational boxes (navigational templates), introductory text, and table of contents, moving to the heading of the first section.
In Wikipedia, such a section is called summary style, and should be a few paragraphs long. Immediately below the heading of the section is a link to the main article, which contains all the sources. Figure 2-2 shows a section of an article that demonstrates summary style. Figure 2-2. Shown is the "Law" section of the Wikipedia article titled ...