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Review of increased wikitable padding
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Description

In gerrit 188311, the padding for all wikitable cells were increased from 0.2em (all sides) to 0.3em 0.4em. Discussion regarding this change is virtually non-existent. I raised concern in this diffusion ticket, but to raise more awareness I created this task; an action that should have been done before the change was submitted. There is also discussion on the English village pump.

The actual change increases the spacing in wikitable cells. Table real estate is already tight and increasing the padding makes tables even bigger in height and width. Templates that rely on standard wikitable metrics ase affected. Editors seeking to minimize the padding are forced to do so with inline CSS in every table cell.

I'm seeking to revert this change, or otherwise at least discuss this change as if it were proposed here. It that would result in approval, then so be it. My biggest concern is that a change like this which has major visual impact was merged with minimum review.

Event Timeline

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It had review. We didn't even remotely agree on how much to change which things, but overall there did seem to be consensus that increasing it somehow was an improvement.

Aside from looking better in the base case (wikis with a lot of hacks tend to have exceptions to this), basically it seems to boil down to issues with scanability due to the density of the text, especially in tables with very consistent amounts of text per cell. Less padding means all the text is much closer together, which means it becomes potentially significantly more difficult to quickly scan through a table and find individual cells, even if you already know what you're looking for. Even with isolated cells, having a left/right borders right next to the text, because it messes up with how we scan text based on the shapes of words; the nearby lines look like they're part of the words, changing the shape.