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:
|
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:
Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Line 4.
And it does work with wikimarkup ":" indentation, unlike the failed test cases above:
- Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Line 4.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:
Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Line 4.They are indentable:
Template documentation