I came across a discussion at User talk:Bold Clone#Cold Star and User talk:Skittles the hog#Cold Star which requires wider discussion here. Bold Clone has been intentionally adding blank space to the bottom of articles. When Skittles called him on it, BC replied "Is it against policy?" meaning that we apparently have to formally legislate on matters that have heretofore been simply assumed "the right thing to do".
Fine.
I propose the following be added to the Tardis:Manual of Style:
- Editors shall not intentionally add spaces (that is blank carriage returns), to the end of articles, as it a} visually unbalances that part of the page; b) prevents certain bot processes from consistently finding the bottom of the page; and c) simply isn't the norm on the wiki, thus leading to visual inconsistency across pages.
- Unnecessary carriage returns are disruptive elsewhere in articles, too. Thus, no more than one blank carriage return shall occur between sections and paragraphs. Additionally, there shall be no space between an infobox and the first word of an article's lead, except in those cases where a disambiguation note need intervene.
- Because
infobox|} '''Topic name''' is the <body of lead>
- will have the effect of preventing the lead sentence from vertically aligning with the top of the infobox or any tags on the page
infobox|}'''Topic name''' is <body of lead>
- is the preferred coding without a disambiguation note and
infobox:} :''You may be looking for <another article> '''Topic name''' is the <body of lead>
- is the preferred coding with a disambiguation note.
Please place your opinions on this codification of what has heretofore been accepted as common sense, below. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 16:03, January 8, 2011 (UTC)
- Is there anything else, of the wiki standard/logical thing to do that we think should go into the MoS, just asking as I'm thinking of a sub-page for stuff that's "assumed wiki knowledge"/stuff you learn from editing/reading a wiki. That way the sub-page would be where we could add "stuff" like this without it being a massive amount of text on the MoS main page, sort of stuff you learn by doing but might be helpful before you start a massive line of edits (changing something perceived to be 'wrong'), or something like that.
- Maybe an intro something like "remember, a wiki is used by a multitude of people on a variety of platforms, what may look okay to you may drastically affect the experience of another user." be enough to sort of set the idea?
- Most of the sort of logical stuff to do with spacing and formatting is in the Tardis:Manual of Style#Spacing and formatting part of the MoS. --Tangerineduel / talk 15:52, January 9, 2011 (UTC)
Discussion
Pro
- --Skittles the hog--Talk 14:35, January 9, 2011 (UTC)
Pro, with objections to certain parts, as noted
Against
Archivist's notes
This proposal is deemed passed and has been incorporated into T:SPACING.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ <span style="">15:38: Sun 06 Nov 2011