User blog comment:DaNASCAT/Technical Update: November 26, 2013/@comment-188432-20131127222615/@comment-452-20131128064115

If you want to add a warning to editors that they shouldn't use H1 on a wiki which has a policy against it, try this: .ns-0 .WikiaArticle h1:after { content: " Invalid heading level!"; }

Firstly, I'm a "What can I achieve with this tool?" person, rather than a "What was this tool specifically designed for?" person. If it renders fine in the top 4 browsers, that's good enough for me. (Wikia doesn't pass HTML validation in the first place, so I don't need to worry about that.)

I find that using false statements to support an opinion tends to weaken the argument being made.
 * "So the reason that the TOC did not include H1s by default is because it is actually wrong to do so. "
 * "It was not a bug, and it definitely didn't need "fixing""

I am an admin on a wiki which has a detailed manual of style and has not "outlawed" H1 section headers. They are not used frequently - which is why I didn't notice it sooner - but they are used in some content pages, when it is desirable to have a heading higher than H2, while still using H2 normally. (An alternative would be to add a custom style for that page so H3 looks like H2 and H2 looks bigger, but that would be more work with no real benefit. )

In the past, I've found several bugs I actually liked. One such bug prevented videos from being adding to the wiki, including by local admins and Wikia Staff. Even though that bug helped enforce local video policies, it was obvious to me that it was an unintended bug, so I reported it rather than keeping it to myself, and thanked Wikia after it was fixed. ( Along a playful "drat, I was hoping you wouldn't fix it!" )

There are plenty of things which are possible but which are against the local policies of many wikis, so the fact that some wikis have local policies against using H1 headings is irrelevant to the fact that it was a bug created by recent TOC changes, and therefore needed to be fixed.

Incidentally, I disagree with Wikia's policy that wikis may not disable default functionality in order to enforce local policies, but their reasoning is the same as I'm using here: just because something is possible doesn't mean it's allowed. ( Like you, I wish I were allowed to disable the pop-up upload form, as it is the leading cause of poorly named files, and it does not show the correct error message when people try to use blacklisted filenames. )

I googled it, and it seems that using multiple H1s on a page is not objectively wrong, nor is there a majority agreement amongst subjective opinions. Most search results are people asking questions, to which there are varied answers. (I also found this nonsense: "Strict semanticists sometimes suggest that you should only have one h1, two h2's, 3 h3's etc.", haha.)

Some people seem to be of the opinion that it is better for SEO, but some people are also of the opinion that deliberately leaving spelling mistakes all over your website is good for SEO, so that's a weak argument.

If you inspect the Oasis source for this very page, you'll find 14 H1s, so "H1 is for the page title, only" doesn't apply on Wikia in the first place, as the developers have already decided that it's okay to use more than one per page.(Even in Monobook, the "X comments" line is even wrapped in H1, and that is definitely not a "page title" - and that's fine by me.)

w:c:wowwiki:WoWWiki:Manual of Style says that "to use further h1s would be poor semantics.", but there are 12 H1s in the source of that page (in Oasis), so they clearly don't know what they're talking about either.

The Wikipedia page you linked says that H1 is "reserved for the automatically generated top-level heading at the top of the page containing the title of the whole article." but does not explain why it is "reserved", how multiple H1s cause problems, or what the top-level heading has to do with multiple H1s in the article text.

I don't think very highly of anything, be it a manual of style or otherwise, which forbids something without even attempting an explanation.

It just seems to me that none of the monkeys know why they're not allowed to climb the stairs.

After writing all of this, it has only just occurred to me to actually read the HTML spec - none of the discussions I read even mentioned the spec! I just checked the specifications for several different HTML versions, and the only thing the specification actually specifies is that H1 is more important than H6. (Fun Fact: Early HTML specs call for H1 to be centered, so much for that.)