Thread:Forum:Tech Wishlist And Bug Reports/Indentations formatted incorrectly/reply (4)

Again, this is where MediaWiki's quirks rear their ugly head, but these quirks are again a design choice.

IRL, it is considered proper formatting to use numbered lists without indents while bulleted lists can have indents, and the wiki software defaults to this assumption. As for the column spacing, this is again a design choice, but with a different intention in mind.

Since MediaWiki allows for certain parts of a page to be scripted or run as blocks of code, the spacing defaults depending on whether the text is meant as code block or raw text.

On certain MediaWiki namespace pages, it adds a space before all lines of text are displayed, since it assumes all text is a code block if the page ends with JS or CSS and automatically formats the text to 80 column print to prevent code block text from escaping the text area (since the normal auto spacing is disabled on code block sections). On main pages or pages where it usually expects normally autospaced text, it tries to default to autospacing, but when it sees bullet points and 80 column text, it gets confused and doesn't know whether you are trying to execute code on that page or if you are trying to write something, so it tries to guess what you want and usually looks like crap.

BTW, I'll fix the pages in question to correct the errors, but I hope this explains things.