Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipack Africa Content/Help:How to format a page

Formatting a Wikipedia article in Wiki Markup is different from writing in a standard word processor or in Wikipedia's VisualEditor. Instead of a strict "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) approach, Wikipedia uses text codes called wiki tags 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. See the resources page for a cheatsheet that provides a quick reference list of wikitext codes. Complicated articles may be best modelled on the layout of an existing article of appropriate structure and topic.

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 ('):

A tutorial video explaining how to make bold text and wikilinks

Wiki markup quick reference (PDF download)

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 constitutional monarch of 16 sovereign states, known as the Commonwealth realms, and their territories and dependencies, and head of the 53-member Commonwealth of Nations. ...

Italics may be used for the names of books, movies, albums, and computer or 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.

Headings and subheadings

Headings and subheadings are a way to organise an article. If an article discusses several topics and dedicates more than a couple of paragraphs to each, you can make the article more readable by inserting a heading for each topic — that is, creating a section for each topic.

You can also create sections within sections (i.e., subsections) by using subheadings:

This is a subheading

You create headings surrounding the heading text with several '=' wiki tags. The more '=' symbols in the wiki tag, the more nested the heading is:

You type	You get
== Elizabeth II hats ==	Elizabeth II hats
=== Straw hats ===	Straw hats

If an article has at least four headings, a table of contents is automatically generated.

Subscript and superscript

To use the subscript format you type an opening <sub> tag before the text and a closing </sub> tag after it. The tags for superscript are <sup> and </sup>. Example:

The code H<sub>2</sub>SO<sub>4</sub> &amp;rarr; 2 H<sup>+</sup> + SO<sub>4</sub><sup>2&amp;minus;</sup>

displays: H₂SO₄ → 2 H⁺ + SO₄²⁻

HTML

Wikitext contains all the features required to follow Wikipedia's formatting conventions. However, its formatting capabilities are limited. If you want to have more control of the formatting, such as using colors, text and paragraph styles, and page layout you can use HTML. HTML is the language used to format web pages in the Internet. It is more powerful than wikitext, but it's also more complex and harder to use.

Editor toolbars

The Wikipedia editor has two toolbars with buttons that help with the use of wiki tags. For instance, if you want to type a text in bold, instead of manually typing the ''' tags, you can just press the Bold button and then type the text in bold directly.

Enhanced toolbar: main selections

Icon	Function	What it shows when editing	What it shows on the page
	Bold	'''Bold text'''	Bold text
	Italic	''Italic text''	Italic text
	External link	[http://www.example.com link title]	link title
	Internal link	[[Link title]]	Link title
	Insert image	[[File:Example.jpg|thumbnail]]
	Insert a footnote	<ref>Insert footnote text here</ref>
	Sign talk comments (with time stamp)	--~~~~	Username (talk) 20:44, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

See also

• Help:How to write your first article
• Help:How to edit a page