Template:Blockquote paragraphs
Due to the utterly intractable MediaWiki bug reported at Bugzilla: 6200, and still unfixed as of February 2012[update], block quoting on Wikipedia, with or without a template, cannot handle freeform linebreaking for paragraphs and poems and the like, unless formatted one very specific (and annoying) way. It's not a problem of blockquote templates, but all uses of <blockquote>.
| The problem in action: test cases that seem like they should work but fail |
|---|
The intuitive choice:
results in the mangled: Blank lines seem to work at first:
though with quite tall spacing between the content blocks (lines, in our test cases): Yet this markup fails with wiki ":" indentation: Just trying to use
results in odd spacing, with the middle blocks too close together: Meanwhile this version seems okay at first:
but again can't be indented: |
As of February 2012[update], the only solution for the problem is to use unbroken markup with <p>...</p> or <br /> elements (or others, like nested blockquotes and lists):
- {{bq|Line 1<br/>Line 2<br/>Line 3<br/>Line 4.}}
which, while hard to read, especially for long content, results in the expected:
And it does work with wikimarkup ":" indentation, unlike the failed test cases above:
Happily, there is an HTML-comment workaround for readability that lets you do whatever you want:
{{bq|1=<!--
-->Line 1<br/><!--
-->Line 2<br/><!--
-->Line 3<br/><!--
-->Line 4.}}
or even:
{{bq|1=<!--
-->Line 1<br/><!--
-->Line 2<br/><!--
-->Line 3<br/><!--
-->Line 4.}}
which results in the expected:
They are indentable:
Template documentation| Editors can experiment in this template's sandbox (create | mirror) and testcases (create) pages. Please add categories and interwikis to the /doc subpage. Subpages of this template. |