Help:FAQ/Questions about contributions/Why the extra blank line?

Why the extra blank line?

"I did an edit on a section of one of the pages, then after I'd done so, someone else came in and edited the page just to add an extra blank line at the end of the section. Isn't that a bit pointlessly silly?"

The house style is such that the sections on the pages are spread out more than usual. This is a deliberate design decision: research has shown that information is taken from a webpage with greater ease when it is spread out more widely than it is on printed material. I have no intention of searching for documentary info on the web to back this up - it's just something I learned when I had an involvement in professional web design.

To that end, two blank lines are inserted in every page (with a few specialised exceptions where breaking the rule improves the presentation) at the end of every section before the next (sub)header. This needs to be done deliberately by hand.

Unfortunately MediaWiki software, when you edit an individual section, not the full page, removes any extra blank lines at the end of that section, making it necessary to go back and edit that whole page again to add the line it removed.

As a consequence, editing an individual section of a page is discouraged. It should not matter too much, because the policy of this site is to keep pages small. There are few pages over ten thousand characters, and many of those have been flagged as candidates for refactoring anyway. --prime mover (talk) 10:51, 21 December 2012 (UTC)