Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Wiki Syntax

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Archive from Nov 2004 to end of July 2005.

Succession boxes

I just went over some of the triple quote items, and a lot of them are missing quotes in the {{succession box}} template. What seems to happen is that the fields are bolded by the template itself. However, sometimes someone wants to give further information about the person in the field that should not be bolded. So people have been added closing triple quotes, which are being found as errors because the opening quotes come from the template. (Of course, there really is an error: the original closing quotes in the template become opening quotes without closing quotes.) I've been fixing these by adding '''  to the end of the field. (See [1] for an exmaple of this.) The   is because otherwise transclusion yields a string of six quotes which the wiki parser does not interpret as wanted, and the fields seem to have extreme whitespace characters truncated, so we have to use this.

Anyway, I'd like to encourage everyone to use this solution. If anybody thinks of another way to handle this that might be better, please mention it here. Eric119 05:39, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Eek, what a complicated mess the page authors have created! Hmmm... so to recap, the succession box authors have tried to be helpful by opening and closing the bolding, but the users have overridden that to close the bolding in order to have plain or italics text after the person's name - except they have stuffed it up, in that they haven't then closed their overidding, which means that the quotes are unbalanced. Given this, I don't know what else can be done other than what you have done; Maybe it would be marginally better if they had two succession box templates - one that works like the current one, and one that takes an extra argument for the stuff that the user wants in plain text or italics, which is just printed as-is on a new line after the name without any extra formatting. Then again, it might not be worth it, I'm honestly not sure. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 04:53, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]