2006/7/25, Brion Vibber <brion@pobox.com>:

To my eyes, the simplest thing is to adjust the style for the <poem> tag to make
it more distinct. The default doesn't enforce any special appearance, but in
most cases people probably would want them.

For instance, in MediaWiki:Common.css one could add:

.poem {
  margin-left: 1in;
}

which will indent all <poem> sections. Borders, backgrounds, font styles etc
could also be used here. Even just indentation should be plenty to set off poem
text from surrounding intro text pretty well.

Putting automatic indentation in the poem tag automatically takes care of the poem pages where no template for styling has been added so far, but does not destroy the possibility to add such styling templates later. So yeah, for a wiki that has not yet put styling templates on all the "intro" sections adding indention to the poem tag makes a lot of sense.

IMHO further formatting of the poem itself would not be desirable. The texts put on Wikisource are usually not formatted very much - not on svsource, at least. Making the poems look much different than the rest of the texts does not make sense to me. However, not only poems have such intros. Most of the texts do. Adding an "intro" tag would IMHO be the easy way to make sure these all get the same formatting, throughout the wiki - in a wiki that has not yet put templates in the majority of the pages, that is. (I am not at all sure that most of the users at svsource would agree with me here, though.)

/habj