Awa improvement 2

I find the section headings like "RFD discussion: February–March 2014" too long. Would it be possible to have "RFD discussion 1", "RFD discussion 2", etc.? That would require that the script inspects the existing headings on the talk page. Alternatively, I would prefer "RFD discussion 2014" or even "RFD discussion", since section headings can get repeated on a talk page, after all. What do you think? Do you have a strong preference for the long section heading?

Not really. I do have a preference for meaningful headings, though, which makes "RFD discussion 1" somewhat less attractive for me. How about something like "RFD: 02–03/2014"? Shorter and carries the same information. Though in fact, I am not sure what the issue is — I guess these titles are usually copy-pasted anyway (or not even that), which makes their length less of a concern.

Also, I would rather avoid inspecting existing talk pages — it would make the script slower and/or more complicated, even/especially if I did some clever trick to grab all the section titles in a single API request.

What is the value of providing both the month and the year of the discussion? If you want to avoid ambiguity of headings, providing the year should suffice for an overwhelming majority of cases. On another note, I think colons in headings should be avoided unless there is a strong overriding reason. So "RFD 2014" is something I could perfectly live with. In general, if a piece of information is dispensable in a heading, it should not be there, IMHO.

It may be of use to those who remember what policies/users were around while the discussion took place. Say, in June we vote to change the CFI. Or we have a huge influx of Wikipedians who skew RFDs in an inclusionist direction. Or we get an upgrade to MediaWiki, which makes some template, Lua or JavaScript hacks obsolete. Or some other "huge thing" happens: from my experience, these tend to have a timeframe of months or quarters rather than years. Now you can learn that the discussion took place before that happened just by looking at the header. A minor utility, but utility nevertheless.

I explained myself. How short do you want the section titles and why? Do you frequently type these manually?

Long section headings make the table of contents harder to overview, and make it look messy. The prevalent archiving practice for RFD and RFV was to not provide year and month and it served us well, as far as I know. The year and month information in available in the RFD discussion itself and does not need to be in the section heading, IMHO. The practice has shown that the month and year is not needed; anything else is speculation, IMHO. But I do not think I am going to convince you.