Wikipedia:Tutorial (Formatting)

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Formatting Wikipedia articles is a bit different from writing on a standard word processor. Instead of a strict ("what you see is what you get") approach, Wikipedia uses text codes to create particular elements of the page (e.g. headings). This "language" is known as Wikitext (or Wiki-markup) and is designed for ease of editing.

Bold and italics

The most commonly used wiki tags are bold and italics. Bolding and italicizing are done by surrounding a word or phrase with multiple apostrophes ('):

Headings and subheadings

Headings and subheadings are an easy way to improve the organization of an article. If you can see two or more distinct topics being discussed, you can break up the article by inserting a heading for each section.

Headings can be created like this:

If an article has at least four headings, a table of contents will automatically be generated. Try creating a heading in this page's sandbox. It will be added automatically to the table of contents for the page, assuming three others already exist.

HTML

HTML code can be used in pages to produce more advanced formatting such as colors, tables, and edit page layout. However, you do not need to know HTML to use Wikipedia and follow formatting conventions.

Formatting conventions

It is a Wikipedia convention to mark in bold the names of an article's subject when they are first mentioned in the article. For example, the article Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom begins:

Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor; born 21 April 1926) is Queen of sixteen sovereign states, holding each crown and title equally.

Another Wikipedia convention is to italicize book, movie, album, and computer/video game titles. If the first mention of the subject of an article is also a book or movie title then bold italics is used. For example, the article The Lord of the Rings starts:

The Lord of the Rings is an epic high-fantasy novel written by the English academic and philologist J. R. R. Tolkien.

It is usually preferred that the names of papers (e.g. a scientific article), chapters (e.g. in a book), songs, or television episodes are mentioned "in quotes" rather than being italicized. If the first mention of the subject of an article is also one of these things, then it is "emboldened and quoted". For example, the article Out of Mind begins:

"Out of Mind" (Part 1 of 2) is the Season 2 finale episode of the science fiction television series Stargate SG-1. It is followed by the episode "Into the Fire".