Forum:White space elimination

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Over the past few months, I've been trying to eliminate white space found at the top of article pages that is caused by people inadvertently adding line breaks which make an article easier for editors to read. But this has a deleterious impact upon our general readers.

For instance, one will commonly find:

{{infobox whatever
}}
{{semi-protect}}
{{another template}}
'''Subject''' was . . . 

Well, for every time you hit "enter", you get a line break, meaning that by the end of all that you've put in three line spaces at the top of the article. All this white space can be eliminated by typing:

{{infobox whatever
}}{{semi-protect}}{{another template}}'''Subject was . . . 

Can we add an example of this superior coding practice to the various Tardis:Layout guides, so as to establish that we do not want this extra space at the top of articles? CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 00:00, May 13, 2010 (UTC)

I'm 99% sure there's a bot that fixes this up in use on other wikis, probably including Wikipedia. Of course it's worth putting this in the guide, but it's probably worth running the bot as well, because not every editor is going to read the guides and do things perfectly. --Falcotron 11:09, May 18, 2010 (UTC)

To be perfectly honest, it's better to fix this with CSS code rather than making the pages harder to read for editors. That way, you get the best of both worlds, you don't have to create some arbitrarily random "edit the pages like this" policy, and the source is still legible and easy to comprehend. -- sulfur 11:50, May 18, 2010 (UTC)

I would of course prefer a solution as you describe, Sulfur. But how, specifically, can it be done? CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 16:03, May 18, 2010 (UTC)

From a discussion we had on this on Memory Alpha, specifically about the sidebars, "in MediaWiki:Common.css, you will, for example, see that the formatting definitions for a sidebar table ("table.wiki-sidebar", right at the top) contain margin definitions like "margin-bottom:1em". Similar definitions exist for many other "table" or "div" classes. This definition means that, wherever a sidebar is added to a page, it will be followed by a "gap" of 1em height (where "em" is a unit relating to font size)"

Yah, I got lazy and quoted, but that's the general gist of it. -- sulfur 16:17, May 19, 2010 (UTC)

One other thing... I'm not sure that I really see this excessive white space on these articles. Take The Big Bang for example. The whitespace there, on my FireFox browser using Monaco, is minimal, and just enough to separate the templates/tables. The source for that page is of this style too:

{{infobox whatever
}}
{{semi-protect}}
{{another template}}
'''Subject''' was . . . 

Which pages are you seeing this excessive white space issue on? Is it possible that the template itself is carrying extra blank space inside itself? -- sulfur 16:56, May 19, 2010 (UTC)

Archivist's notes

This discussion has resulted in changes to the design theory underpinning this wiki. Though it has not been fully implemented as of 18:08, May 24, 2011 (UTC), it will be soon.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 18:08:44 Tue 24 May 2011