User talk:109.78.196.114

revert restored a typo

Thank  you for working to improve Wikipedia.

i understand you and i disagree about whether the asterisks/bullets in a list on Wikipedia should or should not have a space after them. (More on that later.) However, when you reverted my edit and said i did not explain changes with an edit summary, you restored the typo i explained in my edit summary: There should not be a space before that full stop.

Regarding the WP:SIMPLE rules you mentioned, i skimmed them and used CTRL+F to search one at a time for "space", "asterisk", "bullet", "star", or "list": "space", "asterisk", and "bullet" are not on the page, "star" only appears as part of "start", and none of the "list"s seems to say anything about including or excluding a space between the star and the text.

You say "Stripping indentation is not an improvement", but in this case i think it is, as i explained in a past post, which was ignored and deleted:

Sorry to make extra work for you. i was actually trying to make less work for future editors.

When the viewed source shows no space after the asterisk, or one space, or even two or three spaces, like:

*this

&

* this

&

* this

i don't see any difference between the results:

• this

&

• this

&

• this

Assuming some editors will learn to edit Wikipedia the same way i learned, and continue to learn (find an article that does things the way you want, then mimic it), i try to model the shortest, easiest, or least confusing way of doing things. Someone learning to make a list might wonder how many spaces they should put after the asterisk; i like to remove that confusion by demonstrating that none are necessary in order for a list to look like other lists on other pages. Omitting the space is also shorter, and therefore easier.

i think Wiktionary's manual of style specifically calls for a space after the asterisk, but from what i can tell, the Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lists no recommendation one way or the other. (Observed consensus seems to be "Who cares?", with some lists using asterisk-space, some using asterisk-no-space, and many including a mix of asterisks with and without spaces.) i recommend no space, and try to lead by example, using Wikipedia:boldly. If you have a reason to recommend a space after the asterisk, i'm willing to hear and consider it.

If you are not willing to revert your revert, please reply here or on Talk:Harsh Realm.

Wishing you happy and productive editing.

--173.67.42.107 (talk) 15:15, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

The WP:SIMPLE rules point out a few simple rules and guidelines even experienced editors would do well to remember. I mention them because they stress the importance of providing a meaningful edit summary. "typo" was a minimalist edit summary that failed to explain why the edit also stripped out spaces from the lists.

Help:List shows how lists should be formatted.

If you post on someone's user talk page they are allowed to delete it after reading. (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=1014545116). If you post a relevant comment on the article talk page editors are generally not supposed to delete it. Walter is likely to ignore you or revert you if you don't get an account.

Wikipedia used what is supposed to be _human readable_ markup. Including spaces is to keep the markup clear and readable for human readers using the wiki source directly. If the markup was supposed to be ugly and hard to read they would have never used wiki markup and gone with XML (or god help us Perl). Clearer easier to read markup is hopefully also easier to spot and avoid mistakes. I do not care to force you or any other editors to format their contributions in a particular way but when someone does later make it tidier and pretty print it to make it easier to read I do hope other editors will leave it tidy and very much do care about the markup being easy to read.

Something is usually written once, but read many times. Any small efficiencies in the writing are almost always outweighted many times by the benefits of making it more easier for others to read. IcouldwritewithoutanyspacingbutthatwouldbeannoyingandI'mnottryingtosavemoneybyusinglesswritingpaper.

(Some editors think not including spaces in wiki markup is somehow more efficient, there is little evidence to support that theory, and pages are compressed anyway at various stages of transmission by the web server. See also WP:DWAP.)

The article Harsh Realm already contains 2 other lists, formatted with spaces. It does not make sense to format lists inconsistently within one article. If all the lists had been formatted consistently I might have left them alone, as editors are generally expected to follow the style of the article as it exists. Also bots will eventually get around to tidying the markup and will probably put the spaces back in. -- 109.78.194.85 (talk) 04:12, 10 February 2024 (UTC)

In that article specifically the list formatting was badly incorrect. You'd need to read Help:List in full, and understand a bit of HTML to fully realise just how bad it was. As I mentioned in the edit summary it was essentially creating many lists with only item in each list. Since I was correcting something full of mistakes, it seemed appropriate to be extra strict with my spacing in the corrected version. Spaces are option but clarity is more important than brevity. (Especially in an encyclopedia.) -- 109.78.194.85 (talk) 04:19, 10 February 2024 (UTC)

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