Formatting a ???????? article
is a bit different from writing on a standard
word processor
. Instead of a strict
WYSIWYG
approach ("What You See Is What You Get"), ???????? uses text codes to create particular elements of the page (e.g., headings). This
markup 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
begins:
- Elizabeth II
(Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, born 21 April 1926) is the reigning queen and head of state of 16 independent sovereign states known as the Commonwealth realms: ...
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 italic
is used.
For more information about using
bold
and
italics
, see
Wikipedia:Manual of Style
.
Headings and subheadings
Headings and subheadings are a way to improve the organization of an article. If you can see two or more distinct topics being discussed, with more than a couple paragraphs for each, you can make the article more readable by inserting a heading for each topic - that is, making each into its own
section
.
Headings are 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
Wikitext contains all the features required to follow Wikipedia's formatting conventions and knowledge of
HTML
code is not necessary, although it is often used for more specific formatting such as using colors, text and paragraph styles, and page layout.
Test what you have learned in the
sandbox