[WikiEN-l] Whitespace in articles

Tue Feb 15 17:34:08 UTC 2005

 --- Tomer Chachamu <the.r3m0t at 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?

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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