User:Miropolitan

About

Miropolitan lives in Adelaide, South Australia.

M was born in 1961 and is a graduate of two local universities (UniSA and Adelaide).

M's Wikipedia-editing efforts to date (2010-4) have been ad hoc - addressing problems encountered while reading (correcting messy sentences and filling in small fact-holes). M intends to work more systematically in future, focusing on particular topics.

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Intra-section, local headings

(M 2010-4)

Suggestion: Use bold, separate line, normal text-size, to create intra-section, local headings.

Purpose: To improve readability.

Bold, separate line, normal text-size

A bold sentence, in normal text-size, which occupies its own line can be created in wikitext by:

• wrapping a line with a triple apostrophe (''') at each end.
• beginning the line with a semi-colon. (On the resulting web-page, this creates a definition list, with said line as the definition title, which happens to be marked up in bold)

Suggested usage - intra-section, local headings

A phrase or statement in bold, normal-text-size, on a separate line, can be used to create a heading that is:

• discrete - not too loud on the page;
• intra-section - doesn't appear in the TOC (table of contents);
• local - appropriate as a heading for a single paragraph.

See page WikiProject Council Guide for example usage.

Use local headings to break up slabs of text

Suggestion: Use local, discrete headings to break up text into small bite-sized pieces. Such headings could be statements or instructions, not just (dry) topic names (more appropriate for section headings).

- to improve readability

Local headings improve readability, because they:

• provide text handles to allow readers to more easily scan down the text, paragraph by paragraph, to find the bits that interest them, then dropping down into the (normal-text) paragraph level for more detail.
• provide a specification for the associated text, to remind authors what content they should put where, in a well-structured (sub)section.
• create intra-section structure - at a level between the (sub)section (above) and the paragraph (below). To get the benefits of article structure (navigation, organisation) at a more local scale.

Bold

Web writers, with control of mark-up, can distinguish, highlight, emphasise text in a variety of ways, ie with various fonts and colors (text and background). But keeping to Wikipedia "vanilla" (standard appearance), let's see how much functionality we can get out of bold (in conjunction with other vanilla features).

Appearance and function

Note the distinction here between appearance (bold, separate-line, normal text-size) and function (heading, handle, specification). What matters is providing the functions, using bold or otherwise.

Imaginative presentation versus slab-of-plain-text

The point is to use available resources imaginatively to effectively present content to the reader. In this case to avoid the "slab of plain text" approach that has been imported, with little modification, from paper to web by many web pages. In the case of non-fiction web pages - to their detriment, typically.