Thread:Gilgameshkun/@comment-93957-20190731013807/@comment-995426-20190731162712

I edit entirely in raw source mode. These edits help neaten and "normalize" the layout of the source markup so that it's more readable in raw mode. Paragraph starts here. ...becomes this: Paragraph starts here. But sometimes, as a case-by-case judgment call, when a single template argument is made up of a list of named text separated by  line breaks, it is actually less visually disruptive to the markup source to put them all one one line, where the   tag separates the items of source text in a fashion more similar to that of a comma on one line, so that this: |arg=Item 1 Item 2 Item 3|nextarg=... ...becomes this:
 * I replace the underscores in link names (including template names) with spaces, for consistency. MediaWiki treats them as the same anyway.
 * I change "Image:" embeds to "File:", also for consistency. "Image:" is a legacy prefix used earlier in Wikipedia's history, but "File:" for all embedded file formats is conventional now.
 * With long template embeds with a large number of arguments, it tends to be neatest to embed them in a way that resembles this, where every argument has its own separate line:
 * That much I suspect you already know. And if there is more than one argument per line of source, I break them up into multiple lines, so that this:

|arg=Item 1 Item 2 Item 3 |nextarg=... I'm already a computer programmer knowledgeable in several programming languages, and how source code text is structured is an important consideration to ensure that the code remains readable in the future, whether to other programmers, or to myself when I revisit the code after a long time. The same is true of wiki markup. Even if an edit does not necessarily change the article's rendered appearance, these kinds of edits help keep the format tidy for other raw mode editors like (and including) myself.

The visual editor may be easy for casual or novice editors to use, but it can also alter the raw wiki markup in ways that are actually quite sloppy in raw mode. For some articles, these untidy artifacts accumulate to the point where the raw source can become very difficult or visually noisy to read, and you may sometimes find me cleaning up an article with the edit message, "the visual editor is evil". If I'm doing truly elaborate edits, I'll use preview and other steps to test my code, but I never use the visual editor.