Wikiquote:Votes for deletion/Template:Formatting

Template:Formatting
Ridiculously large, confusing and poorly made warning template that imparts no useful information on its recipients. This warning template has two main parts. The first of these requires recipients to play a game of "spot the difference" to try to figure out what the actual issue is. There are a number of problems with this section
 * 1) Many of the "issues" identified are not actually issues but are actually pointless cosmetic edits.   and   are the exact same thing, and there is no basis in the manual of style for preferring one over the other. Another example is   vs   - these produce identical HTML and output so there is no reason to swap between them.
 * 2) Some of the issues are impossible to actually recreate, e.g. how do you "reverse indent" a piece of text in an actual page?
 * 3) The issue that lead to the editor receiving this message may or may not be in the examples given, and it is going to be basically impossible for the recipient to work out what the "problem" actually is.
 * 4) Some of these issues would fundamentally break a page (e.g. unbalanced tags) and the requirement to fix them is unrelated to the manual of style that recipients are instructed to read.
 * 5) The examples have a really weird "indented" layout, which both makes the text really difficult to read and results in invalid Wikitext (you can't indent headings and list items in an actual page, so why are you doing it in an example of "correct formatting".

The second section is instructions to fix bad formatting. This instructs recipients to use regular expressions. 90%+ of editors are not going to use regular expressions in their editing and most people will not be able to understand them, so giving them as the only example of how to fix issues is rather unhelpful. There is no information as to what these regular expressions are supposed to fix, and a lot of them look like more cosmetic editing. That's not even including the fact that "copy and paste this character" is not a regular expression of any kind.

I think anyone receiving this message is going to at best be left completely confused, and at worst get the wrong idea that performing cosmetic edits like adjusting spacing in headings is useful work. This formatting warning template contains basically no information on how to actually structure or format a page. — 192.76.8.85 00:19, 19 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Keep While I agree that the message is confusing and could certainly be improved, it is useful and is based on MOS. I will be cleaning it up shortly. Improvements or suggestions would be helpful. – Ilovemydoodle (Not a sockpuppet) (talk / e-mail) 00:29, 19 July 2022 (UTC)
 * What part of the manual of style tells people that they have to format their wikitext in a specific way, even when it makes no difference at all to the final page? It isn't anywhere in Manual of style. In fact on many projects this kind of editing is actually banned. 192.76.8.85 00:35, 19 July 2022 (UTC)
 * See the section “List style”. – Ilovemydoodle (Not a sockpuppet) (talk / e-mail) 00:44, 19 July 2022 (UTC)
 * That's about leaving blank lines between list items, which results in broken HTML (because you end up with multiple lists). leaving spaces between the bullet point/number and the following text (or not) is completely acceptable and has no effect on the page output. 192.76.8.85 00:49, 19 July 2022 (UTC)
 * It also shows spaces. – Ilovemydoodle (Not a sockpuppet) (talk / e-mail) 01:24, 19 July 2022 (UTC)
 * It shows spaces because that was the personal preference of the person who wrote that section. Nowhere in the related text does it say that spaces are required. 192.76.8.85 01:28, 19 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Generally having spaces is the “consensus” as it is done on most pages. – Ilovemydoodle (Not a sockpuppet) (talk / e-mail) 01:48, 19 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Can you point out consensus for changing one of the styles to the other? User:1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk)  09:42, 19 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Thoughts? – Ilovemydoodle (Not a sockpuppet) (talk / e-mail) 01:51, 19 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete. If anything, just using welcome should be enough. If you want to make a similar message that explicitly calls out the MoS, maybe that could be helpful. I think the current template is just a bit too much and confusing. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 02:37, 19 July 2022 (UTC)
 * If I made this template into a welcome message could we keep it? – Ilovemydoodle (Not a sockpuppet) (talk / e-mail) 02:51, 19 July 2022 (UTC)
 * If it were a different template, then it may make sense to keep, but I don't know that it's really necessary. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:25, 19 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Well this is very useful to me, as I see a lot of newcomers making formatting mistakes. – Ilovemydoodle (Not a sockpuppet) (talk / e-mail) 05:27, 19 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Can you elaborate why the examples shown in the template are "mistakes"? User:1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk)  09:41, 19 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Per MOS. – Ilovemydoodle (Not a sockpuppet) (talk / e-mail) 11:23, 19 July 2022 (UTC)
 * ✅ created welcome template. – Ilovemydoodle (Not a sockpuppet) (talk / e-mail) 12:59, 20 July 2022 (UTC)

Vote closes: 01:00, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete, per the reasons cited in the nom. This appears to be another unnecessary template. ~ UDScott (talk) 14:22, 19 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom. Rubbish computer (Ping me or leave a message on my talk page) 21:34, 21 July 2022 (UTC)