Template:Blockquote paragraphs

Due to the utterly intractable MediaWiki bug reported at Bugzilla: 6200, and still unfixed as of February 2012, block quoting on Wikipedia, with or without a template, cannot handle freeform linebreaking for paragraphs and poems and the like, unless formatted one very specific (and annoying) way. It's not a problem of blockquote templates, but all uses of <blockquote>.

As of February 2012, the only solution for the problem is to use unbroken markup with <p></p> or <br/> elements (or others, like nested blockquotes and lists):

{{bq|Line 1<br/>Line 2<br/>Line 3<br/>Line 4.}}

which, while hard to read, especially for long content, results in the expected:

Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Line 4.

And it does work with wikimarkup ":" indentation, unlike the failed test cases above:

Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Line 4.

Happily, there is an HTML-comment workaround for readability that lets you do whatever you want:

{{bq|1=<!--


-->Line 1<br/><!--
-->Line 2<br/><!--
-->Line 3<br/><!--
-->Line 4.}}

or even:

{{bq|1=<!--


-->Line 1<br/><!--

-->Line 2<br/><!--

-->Line 3<br/><!--

-->Line 4.}}

which results in the expected:

Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Line 4.

They are indentable:

Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Line 4.

Template documentation

Usage

This is a documentation subtemplate transcluded into the /doc pages of block quotation templates on how to work around a MediaWiki bug that affects all of them.

Use it like so:

== Paragraphs ==
{{blockquote paragraphs}}