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)