It's a silly rule that I'd recommend ignoring, but the style will pick up number: e123 (where e123 is the elocator) in the extra field. You might have to remove it from the pages field, but I don't think so

Hello! Hey, thanks for the comments. Much of referencing IMO, has silly rules, however I am not in a position to "just ignore" them, for I will do so at my peril. My university has said we need to follow the rules, including that one, and if I do not, I risk failing my paper. One student did fail on her referencing last semester.
So, my question is, if it is not going to be fixed in Zotero, can someone tell me how to do it myself in the style editor. I tried looking for it, but could not find it.

No you didn't. Can you show me where you told me how to get Zotero to add the word 'Article' before e123 as locator?

I have tried adding the eLocator number to the 'extra' field down the bottom, as well as with the eLocator removed from the pages field. It does not add 'Article' to the reference.

you do need to remove everything from the pages field

@bwiernik remind me of the logic for this? I'd prefer people didn't have to remove stuff from the pages field for this to work, since that'll break most other citation styles. Why not prefer number to page for journal articles?

Ok. I'm testing by pulling the article in in the usual way, with pdf, and then manually moving the e123 number, refreshing Zotero, then trying in a Word document.

No, it wasn't clear, thanks for clarifying. So I added 'number: e123' as you suggested to the extra field, and it works doing that. It's an awful lot of faffing around though, for something that surely should just work out of the box?

well, APA is pretty much the only citation style that from one day to the next decided that what are, effectively, the electronic equivalent of page numbers (and are treated as such by most metadata schemas etc.) for some reason that has no logic in findability or intelligibility of references, require extra treatment -- so yeah, that's not working out of the box for a reason.

As bwiernik (who's a psych professor himself) points out above, even APA's own journals ignore this, so the only people actually affected by this rule change are students unfortunate enough to have instructors who believe APA to be some sort of sacred text... which I do feel bad about, but there's really only so much we can do about that.

What's the tweak you want to make though? CSL can't just look at your page field and tell that it's an e-locator (it generally can't test for details in the content of fields, FWIW), otherwise we'd already be doing this.
It's not like we're ignoring the APA rule out of principle -- we've implemented it in CSL as you can tell. It's just a rule that's so impractical that it requires separate, custom data entry in Zotero.
What you'd have to do to fix this would be to change Zotero's import, trying to import all e-locators as number: and that's a) technically quite tricky because it's not often easy to tell what you're looking at and b) would require you to modify javascript code in dozens of reasonably complicated scripts, which I'm guessing is going to take you significantly more time than years of manually adding Article in front of page numbers.

@adamsmith What if I had the style print `number` even if there are `pages` considering that this data convention isn’t something we are likely to expand more generally ?

I do not seem to undertand how to get my refetnce to be 'Article' -
I anciting the 'Law af the sea' whih has Aticlles not Paragraphs, and I need to cite
(UNCLOS, 1982, Article 91) in APA. I can only do this by adding the full reference ", Article 91" in the 'suffix field' - This thread seems to indicate another method, but I can't get it to work. I am not familiar with editing styles and it seem daunting to me, so maybe I shoudl just leave it ?

Thanks - and thank you for your patience and many useful answers.