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Wikipedia has two features to make readers' lives easier—sections and tables of contents. Without these, most Wikipedia articles would be a mass of text, unbroken except for images and infoboxes. Getting a quick overview could cause eyestrain as well as mouse cramp.
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 those right, then the TOC is going to be in good shape.
This chapter starts out showing you how to effectively use sections in an article. From there, you can tweak the automatic table of contents to make it even better.