Can anybody explain policy on whitespace? Specifically:
1) 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?
I seem to have done a lot of contributions related to whitespace recently (see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=R... and previous pages) and I'm wondering whether I am indeed making correct changes.
Thanks, Tomer Chachamu
--- 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
___________________________________________________________ ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun! http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 17:18:07 +0000, 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?
- In headings (===Text===) should there be spaces, as in "=== Text ==="?
- Should there be blank lines before/after these headings?
- 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?
I can't speak for anyone else, but removing spaces will really tick me off. Spaces after list heading characters and spaces in titles do not change the visual appearance of anything, and in some peoples' opinion improve the readability.
There should be blank lines before and after headings, IMO. There does not seem to be consensus for the after, but there is definitely consensus for the before.
Current MediaWiki handling of vertical whitespace is a bug, plain and simple. Someday it'll bug me enough to learn PHP to fix it. Multiple blank lines in the source should not mean multiple blank lines in the output. I support hacks to fix really ugly cases, but I think here the solution is to fix the code, not make the articles an ugly mess to work around it.
-Matt
Current MediaWiki handling of vertical whitespace is a bug, plain and simple. Someday it'll bug me enough to learn PHP to fix it. Multiple blank lines in the source should not mean multiple blank lines in the output. I support hacks to fix really ugly cases, but I think here the solution is to fix the code, not make the articles an ugly mess to work around it.
As far as the extra blanks line for each category line, there is a very simple patch that seems to correct this available at bugzilla.wikipedia.org, only waiting for someone with access to implement it.
-Rich Holton (en.wikipedia:User:Rholton)
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - now with 250MB free storage. Learn more. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250
It doesn't matter whether the editor puts a space after * or #, since the decoding will insert one regardless of whether there is one, none, or several.
RickK
Tomer Chachamu the.r3m0t@gmail.com wrote: Can anybody explain policy on whitespace? Specifically:
1) 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?
I seem to have done a lot of contributions related to whitespace recently (see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=R... and previous pages) and I'm wondering whether I am indeed making correct changes.
Thanks, Tomer Chachamu _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
Tomer Chachamu wrote:
- When and why were interwiki and category links moved to one a line?
I think this is a personal style thing, but I should note that issues similar to this have been argued over for years in programming circles. General consensus from programming applied here would tend to advise interwiki and category links be one per line. It limits visual clutter and eases editing.