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 ('):

You type	You get
''italic''	italic
'''bold'''	bold
'''''bold italic'''''	bold italic

On Wikipedia, the names of an article's subject are written in bold 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.

Italics may be used for the names of books, movies, albums, 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 more information about when to use bold and italics, see Wikipedia:Manual of style

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:

You type	You get
== Heading ==	Heading
=== Subheading ===	Subheading

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.

See How to edit a page or the Cheatsheet for more on editing a page.
You can also check out an annotated example page.

Test what you have learned in the sandbox

Continue the tutorial with Wikipedia links →