Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-24038546-20131011151245/@comment-5643552-20131011213326

Here are several reasons why indenting pages is a bad idea and will never be standardized, just off the top of my head:


 * 1) Indenting is not standard MediaWiki formatting.
 * 2) It would require unnecessarily complex HTML code and   (paragraph) tags to accomplish, which we don't need to apply to every page because MediaWiki software already has wiki markup for making paragraphs (putting one blank space between two lines of text achieves the same effect as enclosing each line of text in   tags).
 * 3) No one, and I mean NO ONE would know to use the (relatively) complex HTML syntax required to indent pages. Most people just copy and paste their story from whatever document they used to write it, and even then, hardly anyone knows to switch out of visual mode so they won't accidentally transfer the original formatting of the page to the editor when transferring the text.
 * 4) It would make this place an absolute nightmare to maintain. We, as a wiki, need at least some level of consistency/uniformity across the project. Using standard MediaWiki formatting will ensure that it stays that way.
 * 5) This is how most people indent: put a few spaces before each paragraph. This is bad because MediaWiki renders any line of text that starts with a blank space (i.e. before the first word of the paragraph) as if it was wrapped in   tags. Observe:

No indent

Indent done wrong

...And that's all I can think of off the top of my head.

TL;DR: Indenting pages is unnecessary and would overcomplicate things if made commonplace. Far more trouble than it's worth, if you ask me.