[Wikipedia-l] Please use

Sat Mar 1 04:16:54 UTC 2003

Tables are death to a living article.  Except for standardized tables
for a few routine situations, lists of the state bird, flower, motto,
the taxoboxes for animals, etc., I believe tables should be assiduosly
avoided.  The more coding there is in an article, the less chance that
people will edit it.  I usually don't bother with any article that has
a table in it on the theory that I can accomplish more elsewhere where
there are none, which is identical to my policy on trolls and edit
wars.  

Tom P.

|From: Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca>
|X-Sender: bryan.derksen at shawmail
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 18:30:02 -0700
|
|There is at least one area of wikipedia work that I do which I think HTML 
|comments will come in very handy; HTML tables.  HTML tables can get quite 
|complicated and messy, and being able to leave notes for future editors to 
|help them add to the table is something I just don't see the talk: page as 
|being very good for. Very complicated lines of TeX might also benefit from 
|an HMTL comment or two, though I imagine math equations aren't as likely to 
|be modified by future contributors.
|
|In a closely related vein, there are a lot of articles which use 
|standardized "templates"; for example the planetary data sheets or the 
|tatobox for biological species. Filling the template with HTML comments 
|describing what sorts of stuff goes where, and what the preferred formats 
|are, will help to keep these things consistent when new people use the 
|templates.
|
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