Sorry for crossposting this. It felt wikisource-l was the most appropriate list, but since the topic has been discussed a lot in wikitech-l it seemed reasonable to post it there, too. I agree the poem-tag makes life easier on wikisource, it saves loads of time when putting poems there. I wonder if it would be a good idea to add another semantic tag - that for the "intro" text, before the actual poem. Sometimes there is none but usually there is the name of the poem and/or the name of the author, and sometimes a little extra info. Att small wikisources, this little intro - like most texts on the wikis - are often in plain text. When the poem tag is applied, it does not look so good. The result is like this http://sv.wikisource.org/wiki/Till_min_far With no difference in indentation or font, it is kind of difficult to see where the intro text ends and the poem starts especially if we imagine a very short intro. It is not appealing to the eye. One could add extra blank lines, that would work, but on most wikis that method seems to be frowned upon. English wikisource has a set of templates for fomatting the "intro" part - here is an example. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/That_Day So now, at least at Swedish Wikisource experiments with similar templates have been started. That is an option, but adding a semantic tag resulting in the need of templates seems a bit awkward to me. What is the solution here, for the wikis that do not already have these elaborate templates? One could do some wiki-specific adaptation to the poem tag, so that it adds blank spaces above the poem - that is however not so nifty when there actually is no "intro". Should we ask to get another semantic tag for the intro? Or is templates, like at English Wikisource, the major solution? /habj

So now, at least at Swedish Wikisource experiments with similar templates have been started. That is an option, but adding a semantic tag resulting in the need of templates seems a bit awkward to me.

What is the solution here, for the wikis that do not already have these elaborate templates? One could do some wiki-specific adaptation to the poem tag, so that it adds blank spaces above the poem - that is however not so nifty when there actually is no "intro". Should we ask to get another semantic tag for the intro? Or is templates, like at English Wikisource, the major solution?

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.