Sequence numbers are a distraction to readers. The titles are already in a sequence, so the numbers are not useful to the reader. We need a mechanism of ordering topics that doesn't show the dirty laundry to the user.

I don't mean putting numbers in the titles; that would be distracting. If you edit one of your help topics, you'll see a field labelled "Order" that takes a number. That's the number I'm talking about.

I like your suggestion of dispensing with the categories and auto-numbering and letting mods edit a main help page with outbound links. I was writing my answer at the same time. If we do yours, then sequence numbers don't matter at all. If there's some barrier to doing yours, we can at least make ordering less tedious for mods.

Ah, sorry, it's been a while since I wrote help topics. I forgot about sequence number and that they are hidden. I remember now that one of the problems is that there is no way to show hierarchy. The best I could find was putting a leading dash in a title name to sortof show it is subordinate to the previous topic. I think that's ugly, and not particularly clear.

What would be most useful in terms of hierarchy?

I can imagine a single link that goes to a page containing more specific links.

I can also imagine a single link that shows those more specific links below it (perhaps as indented bullet points) so you don't have to follow the first link to find out what is below it in the hierarchy.

The first way has less clutter on the initial page, whereas the second way makes it easier to find things if you're not certain which part of the hierarchy they would be in.

Is one of those your preference, or would you want to be able to have both for different purposes?

The second way would require the ability to have help articles which do not show on the initial help page. I can personally imagine this being useful, particularly if the hierarchy has more than 2 levels.

trichoplax‭ Help pages should definitely be in a separate directory, not necessarily related to links from the top level help. Let me create a pile of pages, then have them link to each other as I like.

As for showing tree structure, I'd want something that uses different font characteristics for deeper levels, like the Hx tags, plus the ability to indent. Allowing a non-breaking space as the leading characters of a title would work for the indentation.