Wikipedia talk:Use line breaks

• Justfred - "Don't put in arbitrary line breaks where they don't belong."
• Rotem Dan (very strongly, I think the markup text should look as close as possible to the text displayed, this eases on finding a specific point in the text by looking at the rendred paragraphs.)
• Eloquence, [use line breaks] makes no sense (see below)
• Martin (after swinging back and forth, I think I'm generally against this now)
• Tannin Extra line breaks make editing painful.
• Zoe (also very strongly.)
• Hephaestos [single, manually entered line breaks] leave minor changes floating completely out of context with the rest of the material.
• Patrick Changing text into list elements or indenting it becomes cumbersome, the line breaks have to be removed.
• John Owens hates cleaning up when a line break ends up in the middle of a would-be wikilink. (But I'll usually leave them be if they're at least at ends of sentences instead of every 80 characters or less.)
• Camembert (if line breaks are added, the result is awful to read in the edit window, makes some editing trickier, and if anything makes the diff function less useful, not more, because diffs are shown out of context, making them harder to find in the article)
• Oliver P. (Yes, what he said. And what Martin said below. I can't come up with anything original, sorry.)

Supporters of the rule "Use (single, manually entered) line breaks" include:

• tbc,
• Damian Yerrick (strongly; whenever I go through an article, every paragraph I touch becomes "diff-friendly" with a soft line break after),
• LDC,
• Bryan Derksen
• Eclecticology
• Kowloonese (strongly; it is silly to spend timing doing what the browser does for you, i.e. the formatting. So my main concern left is the quality of the "diff" result.)
  • "it is silly to spend timing doing what the browser does for you" sounds like an argument against this rule, not for it --Camembert

• ...

Now, I agree fully with this guideline and all (even though I keep forgetting to practice it :), but I do have one possible objection/question; isn't a soft line break one of those line breaks inserted automatically by word wrapping and a hard line break one of those line breaks inserted by hitting the enter/return key? If that's indeed the case, we want to use hard line breaks and not soft line breaks. If it isn't the case, then never mind. Bryan Derksen

Maybe the word "soft" should be removed from the rule; many people (myself included) may not have a clear view of the difference between soft and hard breaks. This is really about nice formatting in general. One principle in that would be to avoid excessively long paragraphs; if that's done the "diff"'s will fall into place. Eclecticology

(Justfred) Force users to edit their text in a specific way because the diff function doesn't support sentances, only paragraphs? And use the fact that the formatter ignores single soft line breaks? This seems wrong to me. A paragraph is a paragraph. Don't put in arbitrary line breaks where they don't belong. For that matter, I'd like it if the formatter understood single-linebreak-separated lists without needing br tags. I'd prefer if it were as close to WYSIWYG as possible. --justfred

I guess this is just a recommendation. The user can write any way they want to if they don't care about the extra burden on the systems and other users. It is a courtesy not a mandate. The diff function needs to work harder and slow down the server if it needs to process a long paragraph versus a short sentence. Other users can read the diff report easier if the context is narrowed down to just one sentence. The download time of the diff page is faster if the diff blocks are smaller by eliminating all the unchanged sentences around the changes. Yes, I agree that if the diff function is smart enough, we can do away with this workaround. But given the situation, this is a good compromise. -- 63.192.137.21

This policy is perhaps obsolete now Wikipedia has spiffy side-by-side diff output. -- Tarquin 12:47 Jul 30, 2002 (PDT)

What it all comes down to is "write short paragraphs for ease of online reading", but that sound point is pretty well hidden in all the verbiage, ironically. Ortolan88

No, that wasn't the intent of the rule at all. What we wanted to encourage is frequent hard breaks in the source text (that is, the text in the edit box), which make no difference at all in how the article is displayed, but make it easier to edit in many ways: First, some editors (particularly in the Unix world) don't handle long lines well. It makes diffs faster and smaller and easier to read, even with the new features. And it makes it easier to find sentences within a paragraph, and to rearrange sentences. --LDC

It makes editing extremely tedious and the text becomes difficult to read unless your edit box width happens to be set to the same size as the person who edited the text before you. Often when the text is edited, the extra bits are added without adjusting the lengths of the rest of the lines. This leads to some lines being much longer than other, and this is really difficult to read. It's only a problem for editors, but that is important enough to me. Don't you think? Of course you could ask everyone when adding a few words to re-edit the entire paragraph so as to maintain the arbitrary maximum line size typically of 80 chars. But this is tedious. Note that while a few editors don't deal well with long lines all editors deal badly with this kind of short line as used here: it ends up taking a whole bunch of extra space and you end up with a bunch of wasted white space on the right hand side. This happens to me with LDC's edit above - and wasted space is bad UI design. That's why we should write like, well, normal people. This is one of those instances where just because you can do something, doesn't mean that you should. Martin 00:27 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)

As an example - the above response is mis-indented (it should be at a single level of indentation, as a reply to LDC. However, fixing this is hideously tedious, and it's the single manual line-breaks that make it so. I could solve the problem by indenting LDC's comment instead.... but that's got the same problem. Remind me again how manual line breaks make pages easier to edit? Martin