As discussed in Chapter 1, headings are easy to create and format—just add the right number of equal signs on either side (???). This section focuses on what to put between the equal signs.
Sometimes headings violate one of Wikipedia’s rules. You may not get a warning on your user talk page if you make an error, but by following a few simple rules, you can create excellent headings every time.
Many of the guidelines for headings are the same as for article titles, as discussed on Common Naming Mistakes. The top seven rules are the most important (and the most common opportunities for error):
Capitalize only the first letter of the first word, letters in acronyms, and the first letter of proper nouns. All other letters are in lower case. Thus: “Funding of projects,” not “Funding of Projects.”
Don’t restate the article title or a higher level heading. For example, the article Greta Garbo has a section called “Later career”. “Her later career” or “Garbo’s later career” would be wrong.
Keep headings short. You can sum up almost any subject in 10 words. Thus: “Housing boom in the early 1990s”, not “Housing boom in the early 1990s lasts for only a few years”. Long headings, as in this example, tend to reveal the storyline. The goal of a heading is to invite readers to read the section and find out what happened.
Long headings are also a problem when a different article links to that section heading. Not only is the link longer, but the likelihood of the heading being changed—damaging the link—is much higher because of the length.
Stick with nouns or noun phrases. “Effects of the wild” is a good heading. “About the effects of the wild” or “Effects of the wild can be serious” are not. (This principle ties back to the goal of shorter headings.)
Don’t use “a”, “an” or “the” as the first word in a section title (unless it’s part of a proper noun). Thus, “Condition of the frescos,” not “The condition of the frescos.”
Don’t use boldface or italic text for emphasis. The only time you can use italics is for the rare occasions when a book, magazine, or similar title occurs within a heading.
Note
Don’t use boldface and italics for emphasis in the body of articles as well. They’re not consistent with Wikipedia’s neutral point of view.
Avoid “loaded” or controversial wording. For example, if the term “terrorist” is disputed in a given setting, don’t use “Terrorist attacks” as a heading. Content within a section can be used to explain, fairly, the controversy over a word or phrase, but a heading lacks necessary nuance.
Don’t have two sections or subsections with the same heading. Though this won’t bother the software that handles the links that make up the table of contents, it will confuse editors looking at edit summaries, which include the section name being edited. Matching headings also make it problematical to link from another article to the second (same-named) section or subsection.
Links and footnotes have no place in headings, but some editors put them there anyway. If you see these problems, fix them:
Links never go inside headings. Even if the heading is (or contains) the title of another Wikipedia article, don’t wikilink it. Instead, the first paragraph of the section should mention—and link to—that article. (Links in headings also cause accessibility problems for visually impaired readers using special software to read Wikipedia articles.)
Don’t put a footnote into a section heading. It looks ugly, and since a heading should be a noun clause, not a sentence, it shouldn’t require a source. If you’re using a single source for an entire section, add a footnote at the end of each paragraph in the section, not in the section heading.
Just as your English teacher told you, if section 2 has a subsection 2.1, there’d better be a section 2.2 as well. If you see a section with a single subsection, you have three choices:
If there’s a lot of text in the section, followed by the subsection, you ought to be able to carve out a good subsection from the initial material, or even two, to create multiple subsections.
If most of the section’s material is in the subsection, you may not need a subsection. Just combine the two.
If the content of at the top of the section is short and substantially different from what’s in the subsection, you might be able to promote the subsection (for example, change the heading from level 3 to level 4). On other hand, if the subsection covers something relatively unimportant, then don’t promote it to a level 2 (top-level) heading.
If you find errors in section headings, like those just described, fix them. But occasionally fixing a section heading (changing or even deleting it) can cause a problem—when another article links to that section heading. Wikilinks from one article to another are very common; wikilinks from an article to a section of another article are rare. When they do occur, these links are also very brittle, meaning that if a single character of a section heading is changed, the link breaks. (When that happens, Wikipedia sends the reader to the top of the article page, rather than displaying an error message, so a damaged link isn’t fatal, just irritating.)
The guideline Wikipedia:Manual of Style (shortcut WP:MOS) suggests that you “change a heading only after careful consideration, because this will break section links to it from the same and other articles. If changing a heading, try to locate and fix broken links.” In this case, the guideline is giving you questionable advice. First, since incoming links to article sections are rare, changing a heading isn’t as dangerous as WP:MOS would have you believe. Second, trying to “locate and fix broken links” can be a wild goose chase. Unless a section heading is unusually worded, a search for that phrase could yield hundreds of Wikipedia articles. You can try "What links here”, but if there are more than a couple of articles linking to the one you’re looking at, you’re still facing a lot of effort that’s unlikely to pay off.
Instead, tell other editors when you create a link to section in an article. That way, they know to avoid changing the heading (or adjust the link if they do). By the same token, check whether there’s such an indication on a section heading you’re changing or deleting, so you can keep the link functional. Here’s how to do these things:
After you create a link to a section in an article, leave an editor’s note (a comment that’s visible only in edit mode) to tell other editors what you’ve done. Let’s say you’re linking to a section called “Evolutionary implications”, and that you’re linking from the article Richard Dawkins. Here’s what the section heading should look like after you’ve posted your note:
==Evolutionary implications== <!-- The article [[Richard Dawkins]] links to this heading -->
Coming from the other direction, suppose you want to change the section heading “Evolutionary implications” to “Evolutionary and other implications”. You see the editor’s note, and realize that changing the heading will damage the wikilink in the Richard Dawkins article. Go ahead and change the section heading, and then go to the Dawkins article and find the wikilink, which will include the following text:
Somearticlename#Evolutionary implications
The “#” indicates the start of a section heading. Edit that wikilink so it reads:
Somearticlename#Evolutionary and other implications
Now the link will continue to take the reader directly to the desired section.