[WikiEN-l] Whitespace in articles

Tue Feb 15 17:47:27 UTC 2005

On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 17:18:07 +0000, 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?

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