Alternative ways For The last Three

I bring up here in the general tinWiki forum a post by Fox:

Howdy Fox here. Now i don't know about you but the last three things i always do are See Also, Relevant Topics On AboveTopSecret,Com and External Links. Now we do have a current way of doing then which is the == == way which is good, but what about instead of that we use the column coding ? Its simple enough it turns the bog standard list into this...



Now does that look better ? What are your thoughts about this change ? Fox 13:58, 31 July 2008 (CDT)

Optimist

Any views on this ? I thought that for big lists for certain articles we could start doing lists like that instead of one after the other.

Fox

This method is a great layout 'trick', I do agree. If, for example, a list is really long, and each list item isn't a very long line, making columns looks much more sensible in the page, in my opinion. Plus, if there's still a lot of text there and it takes up much space, reducing the font size helps, too. Perhaps especially if the list is footnotes or such, and more a reference list than actual article text. The much more experienced, so to say, wiki called Wikipedia uses this in many articles, I've seen.

I tried doing this type of thing in the ATS article, where there was a fairly long list of staff members. By arranging the in three columns, it got much more compact and took what looked like a more reasonable amount of space in the article. So I definitely support this suggestion as far as long lists are concerned. The "See also" list, however, maybe doesn't necessarily belong together with "External links" list, as I see it. Leaving the site and staying in the site is somwhat difference. Maybe it's also good to try and 'brag' a bit about the internal content? Something like that is how I think about it. About the discussion threads, I could however agree. I would claim I've thought to myself that those might belong as a sub section under "External links", and I actually have seen someone list them as just that. (I think I thought of it before I saw that, but I can't prove it... :-)

Anyway, making a table is still a little bit complicated for those who have no experience with wiki code, so if the lists are fairly short, I think it could be alright to just keep one column. If the list starts to look 'unreasonably' long, columns should definitely be used. Actually, I think I did that some place, not sure where though.

Optimist



P.S. How I personally list the last sections of lists is totally 'stolen' from Wikipedia. They seem to use this order:
See also
Notes (a.k.a. Footnotes)
References
Further reading (a.k.a. Bibliography)
External links


edit: maybe this is what I thought about...

[edit on 2-8-2008 by Optimist]

I also think that making long lists into columns makes sense. It definitely makes the page look neater. However my one concern, as has already been stated by Optimist, is that new users to tinWiki will be confused how to add to the list. I will be the first to admit it took me a few tries before I got the hang of making tables in wiki code, and too be honest I still need to look at how it's done when the tables get a little more complicated, such as on the main page. However if we just make a simple table, with 2 or 3 columns, I absolutely think it is a good idea. But then again, how many items in the list does it take before creating a table makes sense? I think that different people, using different screen resolutions, with different browsers, are not going to see the same thing.

Indeed you are correct. the code for the new propossed list is a little complex but nothing that people cant get used to. I think that if we just do it for the long ones like Optimist posted on the UFO bit, that would be helpful, instead of having a list 30 long having two lists side by side 15 long makes sence to me.

Foix