Template talk:Mid4
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talk pages for the 3 templates all redirect to here
The 3 templates {{Top4}}, {{Mid4}} and {{Bottom}} are the Wikipedia equivalents of the Wiktionary templates Wiktionary:Template:top4, Wiktionary:Template:mid4 and Wiktionary:Template:bottom. The three templates work together to form a 4 column borderless, 100% wide table with equal sized columns without the explicit inclusion of WikiTable pipe-syntax. The result is used to good effect in the Names appendices in Wiktionary.
The syntax for use is as follows:
{{Top4}}
:item 1
:item 2
{{Mid4}}
:item 3
:item 4
{{Mid4}}
:item 5
:item 6
{{Mid4}}
:item 7
:item 8
{{Bottom}}
The above syntax produces the format shown below:
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I personally find this solution to be more elegant than that presented by WikiMedia Pipe Syntax, but it is also less flexible and produces a particular type of table. Nonetheless, I believe it likely that this trio of templates make it easier for editors to produce tabular list, which can subsequently be revised by replacement of contents with Pipe Syntax. This conversion is not as straightforward as it would seem, though, as a transposition of rows and columns is required; in the top/mid/bottom format, items appearing in one column are listed sequentially, whle in Pipe Syntax items appearing in one row are listed sequentially. One method for doing the transposition is to use the "Paste Special: Transpose" function in latter day versions of Microsoft Excel (see for instance [1] for a description of this function).
templates created Courtland 02:39, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
