The Poem extension allows easy formatting of poems and similar material within Wikitext. Once the extension is enabled, you can put any block of text within tags, which has the following effects:
All newlines are preserved by converting them into
tags
The block of text is enclosed in tags (as well as a div of class "poem")
Colons at the beginning of a line are converted into 1 em indentation
Spaces at the beginning of a line are preserved and no longer invoke the tag
The extension preserves wikilinks, bolding, etc. if they are present in the poem.
Nikola Smolenski made the extension in order to practice working on extensions, after an idea by Yann Forget.[1]
It was activated on Wikisource and tested on 2006-06-23, and on the rest of the project sites on 2007-02-07.