--- Tomer Chachamu the.r3m0t@gmail.com wrote:
Can anybody explain policy on whitespace? Specifically:
- On lists (* and #) should there be spaces after
those stars and hashes? 2) In headings (===Text===) should there be spaces, as in "=== Text ==="? 3) Should there be blank lines before/after these headings? 4) Should there be blank lines at the end of articles, i.e. before and after interwiki links and category inclusions? This often causes an (IMO) unsightly amount of blank space at the end of an article. 5) When and why were interwiki and category links moved to one a line?
1) It doesn't matter. 2) It doesn't matter. 3) It doesn't matter. 4) It doesn't matter. 5) It doe... oh :) I'm not sure, but it's been the usual way for some time now.
Basically, there aren't any hard and fast rules on these sorts of things, because they get in the way of what's important (which is writing an encylopedia). If you want to trim whitespace as you go through, then that's fine, but making wholesale changes seems like a lot of effort for very little reward. But there's no rules against it either :)
A better solution to the excessive space at the bottom of articles would be a tweak to MediaWiki to supress the extra "<p><br /></p>" it seems to create in place of each category link (although this is probably a long way down the priority for the developers).
-- sjorford
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