Wikipedia:Manual of Style

The Manual of Style (MoS or MOS) is the style manual for all English Wikipedia articles. This primary page is supported by further detail pages, which are cross-referenced here and listed at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Contents. If any contradiction arises, this page always has precedence.[1]

The MoS presents Wikipedia's house style, to help editors write articles with consistent and precise language, layout, and formatting, making Wikipedia easier and more intuitive for users. Plain English works best. Avoid ambiguity, jargon, and vague or unnecessarily complex wording.

Style and formatting should be consistent within an article. Where more than one style is acceptable under MoS, editors should not change an article from one of those styles to another without a good reason. Edit warring over optional styles is unacceptable.[2] If a style or similar debate becomes intractable, see if a rewrite can make the issue moot.

New content added to this page should directly address a persistently recurring style issue.


Article titles, headings, and sections

Article titles

A title should be a recognizable name or description of the topic that is natural, sufficiently precise, concise, and consistent with those of related articles. If these criteria are in conflict, they should be balanced against one another.

For formatting guidance see the WP:Article titles § Article title format section, noting the following:

Subject both to the above and to WP:Article titles, the rest of the MoS, particularly § Punctuation, applies also to the title.

See also Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles, for cases where a Wikipedia article about a published work has a title that coincides with the work's title.

Section organization

An article should begin with an introductory lead section – a concise summary of the article – which is never divided into sections (see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section). The remainder of the article is typically divided into sections.



If the topic of a section is covered in more detail in a dedicated article (see Wikipedia:Summary style), insert {{main|Article name}} immediately under the section heading.

As explained in detail in WP:Manual of Style/Layout § Standard appendices and footers, optional appendix and footer sections may appear after the body of the article, in the following order:

  • categories.


Section headings

Section headings should follow all of the guidance for article titles (above), and should be presented in sentence case (Funding of UNESCO projects), not title case (Funding of UNESCO Projects).[a]

Use equals signs around a section heading: ==Title== for a primary section, ===Title=== for a subsection, and so on to ======Title======, with no level skipped. =Title= is never used.[d] Spaces around the title are optional and ignored, e.g. == Title ==.

Section headings should:

  • Not contain links, especially where only part of a heading is linked.
  • Not contain images or icons.
  • Not contain <math> markup.
  • Not contain citations or footnotes.
  • Not misuse description list markup (";") to create pseudo-headings.

These restrictions are necessary to avoid technical complications, and are not subject to override by local consensus or WP:IAR.

In addition, as a matter of consistent style section headings should:

  • Not redundantly refer back to the subject of the article, e.g. Early life, not Smith's early life or His early life.
  • Not be numbered or lettered as an outline.
  • Not be phrased as a question.
  • Avoid use of color or unusual fonts that might cause accessibility problems.
  • Do not wrap headings in markup, which may break their display and also cause additional accessibility issues.

These are broadly accepted community preferences.

An invisible comment on the same line must be inside the == == markup:[e]



<!--This comment breaks the heading completely-->==Implications==

It is more usual practice to put such comments below the heading.

Before changing a heading, consider whether you might be breaking existing links to it. If there are many links to the old title, create an anchor with that title to ensure that these still work. Similarly, when linking to a section, leave an invisible comment at the heading of the target section, naming the linking articles, so that if the heading is later altered these can be fixed. Combined example:

== {}Implications ==
<!--Section linked from [[Richard Dawkins]], [[Daniel Dennett]].)-->

which will be saved in the article as:

== <span id="Consequences"></span>Implications ==

The advantage of using {}, or simply inserting the <span> tags directly, is that when edits are made to the section in the future, the anchor will not be included in page history entries as part of the section name. When {} is used directly, that undesirable behavior does occur. Note if electing to insert the span directly, do not abbreviate it by using a self-closing tag, as in == <span id="Consequences" />Implications ==, as that XML-style syntax is only valid in HTML5 for certain tags, such as <br />.[3] See MOS:RENAMESECTION for further discussion of this.

Heading-like material

The above guidance about sentence case, redundancy, images, and questions also applies to headers of tables (and of table columns and rows). However, table headings can incorporate citations and may begin with, or be, numbers. Unlike page headings, table headers do not automatically generate link anchors. Aside from sentence case in glossaries, the heading advice also applies to the term entries in description lists. If using template-structured glossaries, terms will automatically have link anchors, but will not otherwise. Citations for description-list content go in the term or definition element, as needed.

Retaining existing styles

Sometimes the MoS provides more than one acceptable style, or gives no specific guidance. The Arbitration Committee has expressed the principle that "When either of two styles are [sic] acceptable it is inappropriate for a Wikipedia editor to change from one style to another unless there is some substantial reason for the change."[4] If you believe an alternative style would be more appropriate for a particular article, discuss this at the article's talk page or – if it raises an issue of more general application or with the MoS itself – at the MoS talk page.

Edit-warring over style, or enforcing optional style in a bot-like fashion without prior consensus, is never acceptable.[2][5]

National varieties of English

The English Wikipedia prefers no national variety of English over any other. These varieties (for example American English or British English) differ in vocabulary (elevator vs. lift), spelling (center vs. centre), date formatting ("October 22, 2019" vs. "22 October 2019"), and occasionally grammar (see § Plurals, below). Articles such as English plurals and Comparison of American and British English provide information about such differences.

Consistency within articles

Within a given article the conventions of one particular variety should be followed consistently. Exceptions include:

  • quotations, titles of works (books, films, etc.) should be as given in the source (but see § Typographic conformity, below);
  • proper names use the subject's own spelling, e.g. joint project of the United States Department of Defense and the Australian Defence Force; International Labour Organization;
  • For articles about chemistry-related topics, the international standard spellings aluminium, sulfur, caesium (and derivative terms) should be used, regardless of the national English variant employed in the article generally. See WP:Naming conventions (chemistry) § Element names.

Opportunities for commonality

For an international encyclopedia, using vocabulary common to all varieties of English is preferable.

  • Use universally accepted terms rather than those less widely distributed, especially in titles. For example, glasses is preferred to the national varieties spectacles (British English) and eyeglasses (American English); ten million is preferable to one crore (Indian English).
  • If one variant spelling appears in a title, make a redirect page to accommodate the others, as with artefact and artifact, so that all variants can be used in searches and linking.
  • Use a commonly understood word or phrase in preference to one that has a different meaning because of national differences (rather than alternate, use alternative or alternating, as appropriate).
  • When more than one variant spelling exists within a national variety of English, the most commonly used current variant should usually be preferred, except where the less common spelling has a specific usage in a specialized context e.g. connexion in Methodist connexionalism.

Strong national ties to a topic


For topics with strong ties to Commonwealth of Nations countries and other former British territory, use Commonwealth English orthography, largely indistinguishable from British English in encyclopedic writing (excepting Canada, which uses a different orthography).

Retaining the existing variety

When an English variety's consistent usage has been established in an article, maintain it in the absence of consensus to the contrary. With few exceptions (e.g., when a topic has strong national ties or the change reduces ambiguity), there is no valid reason for changing from one acceptable option to another.



Capital letters

Wikipedia article titles and section headings use sentence case, not title case; see WP:Article titles and § Section headings. For capitalization of list items, see § Bulleted and numbered lists. Other points concerning capitalization are summarized below; full information can be found at WP:Manual of Style/Capital letters.

Capitalization of "The"

Generally, do not capitalize the word the in mid-sentence: throughout the United Kingdom, not throughout The United Kingdom. Conventional exceptions include certain proper names (he visited The Hague) and most titles of creative works (Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings—but be aware that the may not be part of the title itself e.g. Homer composed the Odyssey).


Titles of works


  • Correct: An Eye for an Eye
  • Correct: Worth the Fighting For


  • Correct: "Hymnus an den heiligen Geist"

Titles of people


Religions, deities, philosophies, doctrines

  • Religious texts (scriptures) are capitalized, but often not italicized (the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran, the Talmud, the Granth Sahib, the Bible). Do not capitalize "the" when using it in this way. Some derived adjectives are capitalized by convention, and some are not (biblical, but Quranic); if unsure, check a dictionary.

Calendar items


Animals, plants, and other organisms


Cultivar and cultivar group names of plants are not italicized, and are capitalized (including the word Group in the name); cultivar names appear within single quotes (Malus domestica 'Red Delicious'), while cultivar groups do not (Cynara cardunculus Scolymus Group).

English vernacular ("common") names are given in lower case in article prose (plains zebra, mountain maple, and southwestern red-tailed hawk) and in sentence case at the start of sentences and in other places where the first letter of the first word is capitalized.[a] They are additionally capitalized where they contain proper names: Przewalski's horse, California condor, and fair-maid-of-France. This applies to species and subspecies, as in the previous examples, as well as to general names for groups or types of organism: bird of prey, oak, great apes, Bryde's whales, mountain dog, poodle, Van cat, wolfdog. When the common name coincides with a scientific taxon, do not capitalize or italicize, except where addressing the organism taxonomically: A lynx is any of the four medium-sized wild cat species within the genus Lynx. Non-English vernacular names, when relevant to include, are handled like any other foreign-language terms: italicized as such, and capitalized only if the rules of the native language require it. Non-English names that have become English-assimilated are treated as English (ayahuasca, okapi).

Standardized breeds should generally retain the capitalization used in the breed standards.[f] Examples: German Shepherd dog, Russian White goat, Berlin Short-faced Tumbler. As with plant cultivars, this applies whether or not the included noun is a proper name, in contrast to how vernacular names of species are written. However, unlike cultivars, breeds are never put in single quotation marks, and their names are never part of a scientific name. A species term appended at the end for disambiguation ("cat", "hound", "horse", "swine", etc.) should not be capitalized, unless it is a part of the breed name itself and is consistently presented that way in the breed standard(s) (rare cases include Norwegian Forest Cat and American Quarter Horse).


Celestial bodies

  • The words sun, earth, and moon do not take capitals in general use (The sun was over the mountain top; The tribal people thought of the whole earth as their home). They are capitalized when the entity is personified (Sol Invictus ("Unconquered Sun") was the Roman sun god) or when used as the name of a specific body in a scientific or astronomical context (The Moon orbits the Earth; but Io is a moon of Jupiter).
  • Names of planets, moons, asteroids, comets, stars, constellations, and galaxies are proper names, and therefore capitalized (The planet Mars is in the constellation Gemini, near the star Pollux). The first letter of every word in such a name is capitalized (Alpha Centauri and not Alpha centauri; Milky Way, not Milky way). Words such as comet and galaxy should be capitalized where they form part of a proper name, but not when they are used as a generic description (Halley's Comet is the most famous of the comets; The Andromeda Galaxy is a spiral galaxy).

Compass points




Proper names versus generic terms




Ligatures should be used in languages in which they are standard (hence Moreau's last words were clin d'œil is preferable to Moreau's last words were clin d'oeil) but not in English (encyclopedia or encyclopaedia, not encyclopædia), except in proper names (Æthelstan not Aethelstan).


Abbreviations are shortened forms of words or phrases. In strict analysis, they are distinct from contractions, which use an apostrophe (e.g., won't, see § Contractions), and initialisms. An initialism is formed from some or all of the initial letters of words in a phrase. Below, references to abbreviations should be taken to include acronyms, and the term acronym to apply also to initialisms.

Write out both the full version and the abbreviation at first occurrence

When an abbreviation will be used in an article, first introduce it using the full expression:

an early local area network (LAN) developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) ... DEC's later LAN products were ...

Do not use capitals in the full version merely because capitals are used in the abbreviation: an early Local Area Network (LAN).

Except in special circumstances, common abbreviations (such as PhD, DNA, USSR) need not be expanded even on first use.

Plural forms

Pluralize acronyms by adding -s or -es: Three CD-ROMs and two BIOSes were released. (Do not use apostrophes to form plurals: Three CD-ROM's and two BIOS's were released.)

Punctuation and spacing

An abbreviation may or may not be terminated with a full point (also called a period or stop). A consistent style should be maintained within an article. North American usage is typically to end all abbreviations with a period/point (Dr. Smith of 42 Drummond St.) but in common British and Australian usage, no period/point is used if the abbreviation (contraction) ends in the last letter of the unabbreviated form (Dr Smith of 42 Drummond St) unless confusion could result. This is also common practice in scientific writing. Regardless of punctuation, words that are abbreviated to more than one letter are spaced (op. cit. not op.cit. or opcit). There are some exceptions: PhD (see above) for "Philosophiae Doctor"; BVetMed for "Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine". In most situations, Wikipedia uses no such punctuation inside acronyms and initialisms: GDP, not G.D.P.

US and U.S.

While, in principle, either US or U.S. may be used (with internal consistency) to abbreviate "United States" in any given article, the use or non-use of periods (full points) should also be consistent with other country abbreviations in the same article (thus the US, UK, and USSR, not the U.S., UK, and USSR). In longer abbreviations (three letters or more) that incorporate the country's initials (USN, USAID), do not use periods. When the United States is mentioned with one or more other countries in the same sentence, U.S. or US may be too informal, especially at the first mention or as a noun instead of an adjective (France and the United States, not France and the U.S.). Do not use the spaced U. S. or the archaic U.S. of A., except when quoting; and do not use U.S.A. or USA except in a quotation, as part of a proper name (Team USA), or in certain technical or formal uses (e.g., the ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes and FIFA country codes).



Do not use unwarranted abbreviations


Do not invent abbreviations or acronyms

Generally avoid devising new abbreviations, especially acronyms (World Union of Billiards is good as a translation of Union Mondiale de Billard, but neither it nor the reduction WUB is used by the organization or by independent sources; use the original name and its official abbreviation, UMB).


HTML tags and templates for abbreviations



In normal text and headings, use and instead of the ampersand (&): January 1 and 2, not January 1 & 2. But retain an ampersand when it is a legitimate part of the style of a proper noun, such as in Up & Down or AT&T. Elsewhere, ampersands may be used with consistency and discretion where space is extremely limited (e.g. tables and infoboxes). Quotations may be cautiously modified, especially for consistency where different editions are quoted, as modern editions of old texts routinely replace ampersands with and (just as they replace other disused glyphs, ligatures, and abbreviations).



Italics are used for emphasis, rather than boldface or capitals. But overuse diminishes its effect; consider rewriting instead.

Use <em>...</em> or {{em|...}} for emphasis. This allows user style sheets to handle emphasis in a customized way, and helps reusers and translators.[6]

  • Correct: The vaccine is <em>not</em> a cure.
  • Correct: The vaccine is {} a cure.


Use italics for the titles of works (such as books, films, television series, named exhibitions, computer games, music albums, and paintings). The titles of articles, chapters, songs, episodes, research papers and other short works instead take double quotation marks. Italics are not used for major religious works (the Bible, the Quran, the Talmud). Many of these titles should also be in title case.

Words as words

Use italics when mentioning a word or character (see Use–mention distinction) or a string of words up to one sentence (the term panning is derived from panorama; the most common letter in English is e). When a whole sentence is mentioned, double quotation marks may be used instead, with consistency (The preposition in She sat on the chair is on; or The preposition in "She sat on the chair" is "on"). Quotation marks may also be used for shorter material to avoid confusion, such as when italics are already being heavily used in the page for some other purpose (e.g. many non-English words and phrases). Mentioning (to discuss grammar, wording, punctuation, etc.) is different from quoting (in which something is usually expressed on behalf of a quoted source). Quotation is done with quotation marks, never italics, nor both at once (see § Quotations for details).


Foreign words


Scientific names

Use italics for the scientific names of plants, animals, and all other organisms except viruses at the genus level and below (italicize Panthera leo and Retroviridae, but not Felidae). The hybrid sign is not italicized (Rosa × damascena), nor is the "connecting term" required in three-part botanical names (Rosa gallica subsp. officinalis).

Quotations in italics

Don't use italics for quotations. Instead, use quotation marks for short quotations and block quoting for long ones.

Italics within quotations

Use italics within quotations to reproduce emphasis that exists in the source material. If it is not clear that the source already included italics (or some other styling) for emphasis, add the editorial note [emphasis in original] after the quotation.

If adding emphasis that was not in the original, add the editorial note [emphasis added] after the quotation.

  • "Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince: And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest." [emphasis added]

Effect on nearby punctuation


  • Correct: What are we to make of that?

Italicized links



Controlling line breaks








Brief quotations of copyrighted text may be used to illustrate a point, establish context, or attribute a point of view or idea. While quotations are an indispensable part of Wikipedia, try not to overuse them. Using too many quotes is incompatible with an encyclopedic writing style and may be a copyright infringement. It is generally recommended that content be written in Wikipedia editors' own words. Consider paraphrasing quotations into plain and concise text when appropriate (while being aware that close paraphrasing can still violate copyright).

Original wording

Quotations must be verifiably attributed, and the wording of the quoted text should be faithfully reproduced. This is referred to as the principle of minimal change. Where there is good reason to change the wording, enclose changes within square brackets (for example replacing pronouns with nouns that aren't identified in the quote: "Ocyrhoe told [her father] his fate" instead of "Ocyrhoe told him his fate"). If there is a significant error in the original statement, use [''[[sic]]''] or the template {{sic}} (produces a note like [sic] ) to show that the error was not made by Wikipedia. However, trivial spelling and typographic errors should simply be corrected without comment (for example, correct basicly to basically and harasssment to harassment), unless the slip is contextually important.

Use ellipses to indicate omissions from quoted text. Legitimate omissions include extraneous, irrelevant, or parenthetical words, and unintelligible speech (umm, and hmm). Do not omit text where doing so would remove important context or alter the meaning of the text. When a vulgarity or obscenity is quoted, it should appear exactly as it does in the cited source; Wikipedians should never bowdlerize words by replacing letters with dashes, asterisks, or other symbols, except when faithfully reproducing quoted text that did so. In carrying over such an alteration from a quoted source, [[sic]] or the {{sic}} template may be used to indicate that the transcription is exact.


Point of view




  • Permissible: Siskel and Ebert called the film interesting.

Typographic conformity

A quotation is not a facsimile and, in most cases, it is not a requirement that the original formatting be preserved. Formatting and other purely typographical elements of quoted text should be adapted to English Wikipedia's conventions without comment provided that doing so will not change or obscure meaning or intent of the text. These are alterations which make no difference when the text is read aloud, for example:

  • Normalize dashes and hyphens: see § Dashes. Use the style chosen for the article: unspaced em dash or spaced en dash.
  • Convert apostrophes and quotation marks to Wikipedia's style:
  • When quoting text from non-English languages, the outer punctuation should follow the Manual of Style for English quote marks. If there are nested quotations, follow the rules for correct punctuation in that language. If there are multiple styles for a language, the one used by the Wikipedia for that language is preferred unless the punctuation itself is under discussion.
The cynical response "L'auteur aurait dû demander: « à quoi sert-il d'écrire ceci? » mais n'a pas" was all he wrote.
  • Remove spaces before punctuation such as periods and colons.
  • Generally preserve bold and italics (see § Italics), but most other styling should be altered. Underlining, spac ing within words, colors, ALL CAPS, small caps, etc. should generally be normalized to plain text. If it clearly indicates emphasis, use italic emphasis ({{em}}) or, in an already-italic passage, boldface (with {{strong}}). For titles of books, articles, poems, and so forth, use italics or quotation marks following the guidance for titles. Italics can also be added to mark up non-English terms (with the {{lang}} template), for an organism's scientific name, and to indicate a words-as-words usage.
  • Expand an abbreviation (not already used in the content before the quotation) as a square-bracketed change, or explain it with the {{abbr}} template.
  • Normalize archaic glyphs and ligatures in English that are unnecessary to the meaning. Examples include æae, œoe, ſs, and þethe. See also § Ampersand.

(See Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles § Typographic conformity for special considerations in normalizing the typography of titles of works.)


Direct quotation should not be used to preserve the formatting preferred by an external publisher (especially when the material would otherwise be unchanged), as this tends to have the effect of "scare-quoting":




When quoting a complete sentence, it is usually recommended to keep the first word capitalized. However, if the quoted passage has been integrated into the surrounding sentence (for example, with an introduction such as "X said that"), the original capital letter may be lower-cased.

  • LaVesque's report stated: "The equipment was selected for its low price. This is the primary reason for criticism of the program."
  • LaVesque's report said that "the equipment was selected for its low price".
  • The program was criticized primarily because "the equipment was selected for its low price", according to LaVesque.

It is not normally necessary to explicitly note changes in capitalization. However, for more precision, the altered letter may be put inside square brackets: "The" → "[t]he".

  • The program was criticized primarily because "[t]he equipment was selected for its low price", according to LaVesque.


The reader must be able to determine the source of any quotation, at the very least via a footnote. The source must be named in article text if the quotation is an opinion (see Wikipedia:Neutral point of view § Attributing and specifying biased statements). When attributing a quotation, avoid characterizing it in a biased manner.

Quotations within quotations

See § Double or single.


Be conservative when linking within quotations: link only to targets that correspond to the meaning clearly intended by the quote's author. Where possible, link from text outside of the quotation instead – either before it or soon after. (If quoting hypertext, add an editorial note, [link in original] or [link added], as appropriate, to avoid ambiguity as to whether the link was made by the original author.)

Block quotations



Use {{quote}} or <blockquote> only for quotations. (See § Indentation for how to indent in other situations.)

The template also provides parameters for attribution. For use of dashes with attributions, see § Other uses (em dash only). Below-quote attributions are not typical in articles. It is more usual to attribute the quotation in an introductory sentence or fragment, ending with a colon and the source citation for it. However, quotation templates that support attribution also have citation parameters for when that format is used. Added citations do not go within the text of block quotations, since they are not part of the quoted material. If a citation is used within the {{quote}} template or <blockquote> tags, then it must go at the very end of the quotation.

Line breaks and indentation inside a {{quote}} or <blockquote> are generally ignored; use <poem> for poetry, lyrics, and similar material:

<blockquote><poem> What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore Meant in croaking "Nevermore." </poem></blockquote> 

This gives:

            Meant in croaking "Nevermore."

Or quote such material inline, with line breaks indicated by {}/, and paragraph or stanza breaks by {}//.

Foreign-language quotations






  • Use straight apostrophes ('), not curly apostrophes ().[c]
  • Do not use accent marks or backticks (`) as apostrophes.
  • Wikipedia's use of sequences of single quotes to create italics and boldface makes handling such formatting somewhat complicated and error-prone for content beginning or ending with apostrophes. For this reason apostrophe templates have been created – {{'}} and {{'s}}, as for example in "Dynasty's first season" (wikitext: ' ' Dynasty ' ' {{'s}} first season) – for use where an apostrophe might otherwise be misinterpreted as wiki markup. In such cases use either the templates, <nowiki>...</nowiki> tags surrounding the apostrophe, or the HTML apostrophe code &apos;.
  • Characters resembling apostrophes, such as transliterated Arabic ayin ( ʿ ) and alif ( ʾ ), are represented by their correct Unicode characters (U+02BF MODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RING and U+02BE MODIFIER LETTER RIGHT HALF RING respectively), despite possible display problems. If this is not feasible, use a straight apostrophe instead.
  • For Wade-Giles romanizations of Mandarin Chinese, use {{asper}}, which makes a spiritus asper ().
  • For usage of the possessive apostrophe, see § Possessives.
  • For a thorough treatment of all apostrophe use (possessive, elision, formation of certain plurals, specific foreign-language issues) see the article Apostrophe.

Quotation marks

In the material below, the term quotation includes conventional uses of quotation marks such as for titles of songs, chapters, episodes, and so on. Quotation marks are also used in other contexts, such as in cultivar names.

Quotation characters

  • Use "straight" quotation marks, not curly ones. (For single apostrophe quotes: 'straight', not curly).[c]
  • Do not use accent marks, backticks (`text´), low-high („ “) or guillemet (« ») marks as quotation marks. The symbols and seen in edit window dropdowns are prime and double-prime; these are used to indicate subdivisions of the degree, but not as apostrophes or quote marks.
  • Quotation marks and apostrophes in imported material should be changed if necessary.

Double or single

Most quotations take double quotation marks (Bob said: "Jim ate the apple.").[g] Exceptions:

  • Plant cultivars take single quotation marks (Malus domestica 'Golden Delicious'; see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (flora)).
  • Simple glosses that translate or define unfamiliar terms usually take single quotes (Cossack comes from Turkic qazaq 'freebooter').

For a quotation within a quotation

For a quotation within a quotation, use single quotes:

  • Bob asked: "Did Jim say 'I ate the apple' before he left?"

For deeper nesting, alternate single and double:

  • He said, "That book asserts, 'Confucius said "Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it."'"

For quote marks in immediate succession, add a sliver of space by using {{" '}}, {{' "}}, or (as in the example just given) {{" ' "}}:

  • He announced, "The answer was 'Yes!'" Markup: He announced, "The answer was 'Yes!{{' "}}
  • He announced, "The answer was 'Yes!'" (simply jamming ' and " together)

Article openings


Punctuation before quotations

The comma-free approach is often used with partial quotations:
Commas are usually used with interrupted quotations:

Names and titles

Quotation marks should be used for the following names and titles:

  • Articles and chapters (books and periodicals italicized)
  • Sections of musical pieces (pieces italicized)
  • Individual strips from comics and webcomics (comics italicized)
  • Poems (long or epic poems italicized)
  • Individual episodes of television and radio series and serials (series title italicized)[h]

For example: The song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" from the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by the band the Beatles.

Do not use quotation marks or italics for:

  • Ancient writings
  • Concert tours
  • Locations
  • Myths and epics
  • Prayers


Punctuation inside or outside



If the quotation is a single word or a sentence fragment, place the terminal punctuation outside the closing quotation mark. When quoting a full sentence, the end of which coincides with the end of the sentence containing it, place terminal punctuation inside the closing quotation mark.

  • Marlin needed, he said, "to find Nemo".
  • Marlin said: "I need to find Nemo."


  • "I need", said Marlin, "to find Nemo."

If the quoted sentence is followed by a clause that should be preceded by a comma, omit the full stop (period) – but other terminal punctuation, such as a question mark or exclamation mark, may be retained.



  • "Why are you sleeping?", asked Darla.
  • "Fish are friends, not food", said Bruce.


  • "Fish are friends," said Bruce, "not food."
  • "Why", asked Darla, "are you sleeping?"

Brackets and parentheses

This section applies to both round brackets ( ), often called parentheses, and square brackets [ ].


  • We journeyed on the Inter[continental].
  • Most people are right-handed. (Some people are left-handed, but that does not make right-handed people "better" than left-handed people.)


If sets of brackets are nested, use different types for adjacent levels of nesting; for two levels, it is customary to have square brackets appear within round brackets. This is often a sign of excessively convoluted expressions; it is often better to recast, linking the thoughts with commas, semicolons, colons, or dashes.




  • To clarify: She attended [secondary] school, where this was the intended meaning, but the type of school was unstated in the original sentence.
  • To reduce the size of a quotation: X contains Y, and under certain circumstances, X may contain Z as well may be reduced to X contains Y [and sometimes Z]. When an ellipsis (...) is used to indicate that material is removed from a direct quotation, it should not normally be bracketed (see § Ellipses).
  • To make the grammar work: Referring to someone's statement "I hate to do laundry", one could properly write She "hate[s] to do laundry".
  • If a sentence includes subsidiary material enclosed in square or round brackets, it must still carry terminal punctuation after those brackets, regardless of any punctuation within the brackets.

Brackets and linking

Square brackets inside of links must be escaped:


He said, "John [Doe] answered."

He said, "[[John Doe|John {}]] answered." 

He said, "John [Doe] answered."


On the first day [etc.]

[ On the first day {}] 

On the first day [etc.]




Use an ellipsis (plural ellipses) if material is omitted in the course of a quotation, unless square brackets are used to gloss the quotation (see § Brackets and parentheses, and the points below).

  • Wikipedia's style for an ellipsis is three unspaced dots (...); do not use the precomposed ellipsis character () or three dots separated by spaces (. . .)
  • Generally, use a non-breaking space before an ellipsis, and a regular space after it: "Alpha, Bravo,{}... Zulu"
    • But where an ellipsis is immediately followed by any of . ? ! : ; , ) ] } or by a closing quotation mark (single or double), use a non-breaking space before the ellipsis, and no space after it:
      Jones wrote, "These stories amaze me. The facts suffer so frightfully{}..."
      "But what of the other cities? London, Paris{}...?" (Place terminal punctuation after an ellipsis only if it is textually important, as is often the case with exclamation marks and question marks but rarely with periods.)
    • Or, if the ellipsis immediately follows a quotation mark, use no space before the ellipsis, and a non-breaking space after it:
      He continued to pursue Smith ("...{}to the ends of the earth", he had sworn) until his own death.
Pause or suspension of speech
With square brackets
Occasionally, square brackets are placed around an ellipsis to make clear that it isn't original to the material being quoted, for example if the quoted passage itself contains an ellipsis (She retorted: "How do I feel? How do you think I ... This is too much! [...] Take me home!").


  • A pair of commas can bracket an appositive (as can brackets or dashes, though with greater interruption of the sentence). For example:

    Always use a pair of commas for this, unless another punctuation mark takes the place of the second comma:

    Incorrect: The newest member, John Smith was blunt.
    Correct: Blunt comments came from the newest member, John Smith.
    Correct: The newest member, John Smith – himself a retired teacher – was blunt.
  • Don't let other punctuation distract you from the need for a comma, especially when the comma collides with a bracket or parenthesis:
    Clear: Schubert's heroes included Mozart, Beethoven, and Joseph and Michael Haydn.

  • Place quotation marks by following § Punctuation inside or outside. This is called "logical quotation" (see also § Punctuation inside or outside quotation marks).
  • A comma may be included before a quotation embedded within a sentence (see § Quotation marks).

Serial commas

A serial comma is a comma used immediately before a conjunction (and, or, nor) in a list of three or more items: the phrase ham, chips, and eggs includes a serial comma, while ham, chips and eggs omits it. Editors may use either convention so long as each article is internally consistent; however, there are cases in which either omitting or including the serial comma results in ambiguity:

The author thanked her friends, Sinéad O'Connor and Bob Marley – which may list either four or more people (the friends and the two people named) or two people (O'Connor and Marley, who are the friends).
The author thanked a friend, Sinéad O'Connor, and Bob Marley – which may list either two people (O'Connor, who is the friend, and Marley) or three people (the first being the friend, the second O'Connor, and the third Marley).

In such cases of ambiguity, clarify one of three ways:

  • Add or remove the serial comma.
  • Use separate sentences, bullet lists, or some other structural change to clarify.
  • Recast the sentence (first example above):
    • To list several people: The author thanked Sinéad O'Connor, Bob Marley, and her friends.
    • To list two people: The author thanked Bob Marley and Sinéad O'Connor, her friends.
      • Clearer: The author thanked two friends – Bob Marley and Sinéad O'Connor.
      • Or for something more specific (the commas here set off non-restrictive appositives): The author thanked her mentor, Bob Marley, and her childhood friend, Sinéad O'Connor.
  • Recast the sentence (second example above):
    • To list two people: The author thanked Bob Marley and her friend, Sinéad O'Connor.
    • To list three people: The author thanked Bob Marley, Sinéad O'Connor, and a friend.
      • Clarity with gender-specific terms like mother can be tricky; The author thanked her mother, Kim Thayil, and Sinéad O'Connor is unclear because readers may not know Kim Thayil is male and couldn't be the same person as the mother.
      • Clearer: The author thanked Kim Thayil, Sinéad O'Connor, and her own mother.




A colon may also be used to introduce direct speech enclosed within quotation marks (see § Quotation marks).


Incorrect: The years he attempted it included: 1941 and 1943. (Just remove the colon.)
Permissible but awkward: Spanish, Portuguese, French: these, with a few others, are the West Romance languages.

Except in technical usage (a 3:1 ratio), no sentence should contain multiple colons, no space precedes a colon, and a space (but never a hyphen or dash) follows a colon.





Correct: Oranges are an acidic fruit; bananas are classified as alkaline.
Incorrect: Oranges are an acidic fruit, bananas are classified as alkaline.

This incorrect use of a comma between two independent clauses is known as a comma splice; however, in certain kinds of cases a comma may be used where a semicolon would seem to be called for:

Accepted: "Life is short, art is long." (two brief clauses in an aphorism; see Ars longa, vita brevis)


Unwieldy: Oranges are an acidic fruit; bananas are classified as alkaline; pears are close to neutral; these distinctions are rarely discussed.
One better way: Oranges are an acidic fruit, bananas are alkaline, and pears are close to neutral; these distinctions are rarely discussed.



Semicolon before "however"

The meaning of a sentence containing a trailing clause that starts with the word however depends on the punctuation preceding that word. A common error is to use the wrong punctuation, thereby changing the meaning to one not intended.

When the word however is an adverb meaning "nevertheless", it should be preceded by a semicolon and followed by a comma. Example:





Meaning: Regardless of how they tried, it was obvious they could not convert these people.


A sentence or clause can also contain the word however in the middle, if it is an adverb meaning "although" that could have been placed at the beginning but does not start a new clause in mid-sentence. In this use, the word may be enclosed between commas. Example:




  1. In hyphenated personal names: John Lennard-Jones.
    • There is a clear trend to join both elements in all varieties of English (subsection, nonlinear). Hyphenation clarifies when the letters brought into contact are the same (non-negotiable, sub-basement) or are vowels (pre-industrial), or where a word is uncommon (co-proposed, re-target) or may be misread (sub-era, not subera). Some words of these sorts are nevertheless common without the hyphen (e.g. cooperation is more frequently attested than co-operation in contemporary English).
  3. To link related terms in compound modifiers:[i]
    • Compounds that are hyphenated when used attributively (adjectives before the nouns they qualify: a light-blue handbag, a 34-year-old woman) or substantively (as a noun: she is a 34-year-old) are usually not hyphenated when used predicatively (descriptive phrase separated from the noun: the handbag was light blue, the woman is 34 years old). Where there would otherwise be a loss of clarity, however, a hyphen may be used in the predicative form as well (hand-fed turkeys, the turkeys were hand-fed). Awkward attributive hyphenation can sometimes be avoided with a simple rewording: Hawaiian-native culturenative Hawaiian culture.
Incorrect: 9-mm gap
Incorrect:    9 millimetre gap
Correct: 9-millimetre gap
Correct: 12-hour shift
Correct: 12 h shift








Soft hyphens: Use soft hyphens to mark locations where a word will be broken and hyphenated if necessary at the end of a line of text, usually in very long words or narrow spaces (such as captions, narrow table columns, or text adjacent to a very wide image), for example: {}. Use sparingly to avoid making wikitext difficult to read and edit. For more information, see Help:Line-break handling.

Encoding: The hyphen is represented by the ASCII/UNICODE HYPHEN-MINUS character, which is entered by the hyphen or minus key on all standard computer keyboards. Do not use the UNICODE HYPHEN character.



Two forms of dash are used on Wikipedia: en dash () and em dash (). To enter them, click on them in the CharInsert toolbar to the right of the "Insert" dropdown beneath the edit window (in the Monobook Skin), or enter them manually as &ndash; or &mdash;, respectively. Do not use a double hyphen (--) to stand in for a dash. (See also: Wikipedia:How to make dashes.)


In article titles


Punctuating a sentence (em or en dashes)


  • An em dash is always unspaced (without a space on either side):
  • An en dash is spaced (with a space on each side) when used as sentence punctuation:

Ideally, use a non-breaking space before the en dash, which prevents the en dash from occurring at the beginning of a line (markup: the {{spaced ndash}} or {{snd}} templates, or use the HTML character entity &nbsp;):

Another "planet" was detected{}but it was later found to be a moon of Saturn.



  • The book summarizes works of some major philosophers in chronological order: Descartes, Locke, Hume – but not his Treatise (deemed too complex for the target audience) – and Kant.


  • The birds – at least the ones Darwin collected – had red and blue feathers.
  • "We have run aground at—", was the final, incomplete message received from the ship.
  • Avoid: First – at a marshy site leveled with landfill – came the workshop – then administrative and other buildings. Better: First – at a marshy site leveled with landfill – came the workshop; administrative and other buildings were erected later.

Other uses (en dash only)

The en dash (–) has other roles, beyond its use as a sentence-punctuating dash (see immediately above). It is often analogous to the hyphen (see § Hyphens), which joins components more strongly than the en dash; or to the slash (see § Slashes), which separates alternatives more definitely. Consider the exact meaning when choosing which to use.

Other uses (em dash only)

An indented em dash may be used before a name or other source when attributing below a block quotation, poem, etc. This dash should not be fully spaced, though it is best for metadata and accessibility reasons to hair-space it from the name with the HTML character code &#8202;.[j] Most of Wikipedia's quotation templates with attribution-related parameters already provide this formatting.

For example, {{in5}}—&#8202;Charlotte Brontë will produce:

     — Charlotte Brontë

In ranges that might otherwise be expressed with to or through
  • pp. 7–19;   64–75%;   Henry VIII reigned 1509–1547[7]

Do not change hyphens to dashes in filenames, URLs, or templates like {{Bibleverse}} (which formats verse ranges into URLs).

Do not mix en dashes with between or from.

  • 450–500 people
  • from 1961 to 1962, not from 1961–62


  • −10 to 10, not −10–10


  • wavelengths in the range 28 mm – 17 m.




  • Wilkes-Barre, a single city named after two people, but Minneapolis–Saint Paul, an area encompassing two cities
  • John Lennard-Jones, an individual named after two families

An en dash between separate nations; for people and things identifying with multiple nationalities, use a hyphen when applied as an adjective or a space as a noun.

  • France–Britain rivalry;   French–British rivalry
  • Wrong: Franco–British rivalry; Franco- is a combining form, not an independent word, so use a hyphen: Franco-British rivalry
  • Wrong: Austria–Hungary; the hyphenated Austria-Hungary was a single jurisdiction during its 1867–1918 existence








Instead of a hyphen, when applying a prefix or suffix to a compound that includes a space


Use this punctuation when there are compelling grounds for retaining the construction. For example, from a speech that is simply transcribed and cannot be re-worded; or in a heading where it has been judged most natural as a common name; or for conciseness in a caption or table entry. Otherwise recasting is better.

The en dash in all of the compounds above is unspaced.

To separate parts of an item in a list

Spaced en dashes are sometimes used between parts of list items. For example:



  • "The Future" – 7:21
  • "Ain't No Cure for Love" – 6:17
  • "Bird on the Wire" – 6:14

Other dashes

Do not use typewriter approximations or other substitutes, such as two hyphens (--), for em or en dashes.

For a negative sign or subtraction operator use U+2212 MINUS SIGN (HTML &#8722; · &minus;), which can also be generated by clicking on the following the ± in the Insert toolbar beneath the edit window.





An unspaced slash may be used:

  • in a fraction (7/8), though other techniques are also used, depending on context; see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers § Fractions and ratios
  • where a slash occurs in an expression or abbreviation widely used outside Wikipedia, and a different construction would be inaccurate, unfamiliar, or ambiguous (e.g., his/her, w/o)

A spaced slash may be used:






Avoid writing and/or unless other constructions would be lengthy and also, or alternatively, would be awkward. Instead of Most had trauma and/or smoke inhalation, write simply trauma or smoke inhalation (which would normally be interpreted to imply or both); or, for emphasis or precision or both, write trauma or smoke inhalation or both. Where more than two possibilities are present, instead of x, y, and/or z write one or more of x, y, and z or some or all of x, y, and z.

Number sign




Terminal punctuation


In normal text, never put a space before a comma, semicolon, colon, period/full stop, question mark, or exclamation mark (even in quoted material; see § Typographic conformity).

Some editors type two spaces after a period/full stop; these are condensed to one when the page is rendered, so what the reader sees is not affected – see Sentence spacing.

Consecutive punctuation marks


Incorrect: He made several films with Sammy Davis Jr..
Correct: He made several films with Sammy Davis Jr.

Punctuation and footnotes



  • Example: Flightless birds have a reduced keel,[10] and also have smaller wing bones than flying birds of similar size.[11][12]

Exceptions: Ref tags are placed before dashes, not after. Where a footnote applies only to material within parentheses, the ref tags belong just before the closing parenthesis.

  • Example: Paris is not the capital city of England – the capital of which is London [10] – but that of France,[11] and is widely known as a beautiful city.[12]

Punctuation after formulae


Dates and time

For ranges of dates and times, see § En dashes: other uses.


Time of day




Full dates are formatted 10 June 1921 or June 10, 1921; or where the year is omitted, use 10 June or June 10.

  • The dates in the text of any one article should all have the same format (day-first or month-first).
    • For date formats in citations, see WP:Citing sources § Citation style.
    • Dates in quotations and titles are always left as-is.
    • If a numerical format is required (e.g. for conciseness in lists and tables), use the YYYY-MM-DD format: 2005-04-03.
  • Articles on topics with strong ties to a particular English-speaking country should generally use the more common date format for that country (month-first for the US, except in military usage; day-first for most others; articles related to Canada may use either consistently). Otherwise, do not change an article from one date format to the other without good reason.





Years and longer periods


More information on all of the above topics can be found at WP:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers § Chronological items, including the handling of dates expressed in different calendars, and times corresponding to different time zones.



Incorrect: He is the current ambassador to ...


  • Integers from zero to nine are spelled out in words. Integers greater than nine expressible in one or two words may be expressed either in numerals or in words. Other numbers are given in numerals or in forms such as 21 million. See MOS:NUM § Numbers as figures or words.
  • In general, use a comma in numbers with five or more digits to the left of the decimal point. Numbers with four digits are at the editor's discretion: 12,345, but either 1,000 or 1000. See MOS:NUM § Grouping of digits.
  • In general, use decimals rather than fractions for measurements, but fractions are sometimes used with imperial and U.S. customary units. Keep articles internally consistent.
  • Scientific notation (e.g., 5.8×107 kg) is preferred in scientific contexts. Markup: {}.
  • Write 3%, three percent, or three per cent, but not 3 % (with a space) or three %. "Percent" is American usage, and "per cent" is British usage (see § National varieties of English). In ranges of percentages written with an en dash, write only a single percent sign: 3–14%.
  • Indicate uncertainties as e.g., (1.534±0.35)×1023 m. Markup: {}. See MOS:NUM § Uncertainty and rounding for other formats.


  • Use the full abbreviation on first use (US$ for the US dollar and A$ for the Australian dollar), unless the currency is already clear from context. For example, the government of the United States always spends money in American dollars, and never in Canadian or Australian dollars.
  • Most currency symbols are placed before the number, and unspaced ($123 not $ 123).

Units of measurement

    • In non-scientific articles with strong ties to the United States, the main unit is generally a U.S. customary unit (22 pounds (10 kg)).
    • In non-scientific articles with strong ties to the United Kingdom, although the main unit is generally a metric unit (10 kilograms (22 lb)), imperial units are still used as the main units in some contexts (7 miles (11 km) by road).
  • Most unit names are not capitalized. (For spelling differences, follow § National varieties of English.)
  • For ranges, see § En dashes: other uses, and MOS:NUM, at §§ Date ranges, Percentages, Unit names and symbols, and Formatting of monetary values.

Common mathematical symbols

  • For multiplication, use a multiplication sign (U+00D7 × MULTIPLICATION SIGN) or a dot (U+22C5 DOT OPERATOR), which are input by clicking on them in the edit toolbox under the edit window or by entering &times; or &sdot;. Care should be taken not to confuse the dot operator (in the "Math and logic" section of the edit toolbox) with an interpunct (in the "Insert" section of the edit toolbox) or a bullet. The letter x should not be used to indicate multiplication, but it is used (unspaced) as the substitute for "by" in terms such as 4x4.
  • Do not use programming language notation outside computer program text. In most programming languages, subtraction, multiplication, and exponentiation are respectively represented by the hyphen-minus -, the asterisk *, and either the caret ^ or the double asterisk **, and scientific notation is replaced by E notation.
  • Symbols for binary operators and relations are usually spaced on both sides:
    • multiplication and division: ×, ÷;
  • The {{math}} template can be used to style formulas in a serif font to help distinguish them from surrounding text. For single variables, {{mvar}} is also available.

Grammar and usage


Singular nouns

  • For the possessive of singular nouns, including proper names and words ending with an s, add 's (my daughter's achievement, my niece's wedding, Cortez's men, the boss's office, Glass's books, Illinois's largest employer, Descartes's philosophy, Verreaux's eagle). Exception: abstract nouns ending with an /s/ sound, when followed by sake (for goodness' sake, for his conscience' sake). If a name already ends in s or z and would be difficult to pronounce if 's were added to the end, consider rearranging the phrase to avoid the difficulty: Jesus's teachings or the teachings of Jesus.

Plural nouns


Official names


First-person pronouns


  • The author's we found in scientific writing (We construct S as follows), though rephrasing to use passive voice may be preferable (S is constructed as follows).[l]

Second-person pronouns


  • The passive voice may sometimes be used instead:[l] Impurities are removed before bottling.



Some collective nouns – such as team (and proper names of them), army, company, crowd, fleet, government, majority, mess, number, pack, and party – may refer either to a single entity or to the members that compose it. In British English, such words are sometimes treated as singular, but more often treated as plural, according to context. Exceptionally, names of towns and countries usually take singular verbs (unless they are being used to refer to a team or company by that name, or when discussing actions of that entity's government). For example, in England are playing Germany tonight, England refers to a football team; but in England is the most populous country of the United Kingdom, it refers to the country. In North American English, these words (and the United States, for historical reasons) are almost invariably treated as singular; the major exception is when sports teams are referred to by nicknames, plural verbs are commonly used to match e.g. the Heat are playing the Lakers. See also § National varieties of English.

Verb tense

By default, write articles in the present tense, including those covering products or works that have been discontinued. Articles discussing works of fiction are also written in the present tense (see Wikipedia:Writing better articles § Tense in fiction). Generally, do not use past tense except for dead subjects, past events, and subjects that no longer meaningfully exist as such.

  • The PDP-10 is a mainframe computer family manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation from 1966 into the 1980s.
  • The Gordon Riots of 1780 were ...
  • Barack Obama is a former president of the United States (not Barack Obama was a president of the United States).




Avoid contractions, which have little place in formal writing. For example, write cannot instead of can't.

Gender-neutral language

Use gender-neutral language – avoiding the generic he and generic she, for example – where this can be done with clarity and precision. This does not apply to direct quotations or the titles of works (The Ascent of Man), which should not be altered, or to wording about one-gender contexts, such as an all-female school (When any student breaks that rule, she loses privileges).


Contested vocabulary


Instructional and presumptuous language

Avoid such phrases as remember that and note that, which address readers directly in an unencyclopedic tone and lean toward instructional. They are a subtle form of Wikipedia self-reference, "breaking the fourth wall". Similarly, phrases such as of course, naturally, obviously, clearly, and actually make presumptions about readers' knowledge, may express a viewpoint, and may call into question the reason for including the information in the first place. Do not tell readers that something is ironic, surprising, unexpected, amusing, coincidental, etc. Simply state the sourced facts and allow readers to draw their own conclusions. Such constructions can usually just be deleted, leaving behind proper sentences with a more academic and less pushy tone: Note that this was naturally subject to controversy in more conservative newspapers. becomes This was subject to controversy in more conservative newspapers.

Avoid rhetorical questions, especially in headings. Use a heading of Active listening and text such as The term active listening, coined in ..., not What is active listening?.

A neutral cross-reference is permissible – e.g., (see also Bulverism) – but is usually better recast as a sentence with a link – Bulverism, also known as the psychogenetic fallacy, is a related logic flaw.

Subset terms

A subset term identifies a set of members of a larger class. Common subset terms are including, among, and et cetera (etc.). Avoid redundant subset terms (e.g., mis-constructions like: Among the most well-known members of the fraternity are included two members of the Onassis family; or The elements in stars include hydrogen, helium, etc.). The word including does not introduce a complete list; instead, use comprising, consisting of, or composed of.





Gender identity

Main biographical article on a person whose gender might be questioned
Referring to the person in other articles

Foreign terms

Foreign words should be used sparingly.


No common usage in English

Use italics for phrases in other languages and for isolated foreign words that are not current in English. See WP:Manual of Style/Text formatting § Foreign terms for details. The {{lang}} template and related templates automatically italicize text, so do not add separate italics markup around or within them.

Common usage in English

Loanwords and borrowed phrases that have common usage in English – Gestapo, samurai, vice versa – do not require italics. A rule of thumb is to not italicize words that appear unitalicized in general-purpose English-language dictionaries.

Spelling and romanization




Sometimes the usage will be influenced by other guidelines, such as § National varieties of English, which may lead to different choices in different articles.

Other concerns

Technical language


Geographical items


Media files


  • Each image should be inside the level 2 section to which it relates, within the section defined by the most recent ==Heading== delimited by two equal signs, or at the top of the lead section. Do not place images immediately above section headings.
  • Avoid referring to images as being to the left, the right, above or below, because image placement varies with platform, and is meaningless to people using screen readers; instead, use captions to identify images.

Other media files


Avoid using images to convey text


For entering textual information as audio, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia.



Formatting of captions

  • Captions normally start with a capital letter.[a]

Bulleted and numbered lists

  • Use numbers rather than bullets only if:
    • The sequence of the items is critical; or
    • Complete sentences – each one is formatted with sentence case (its first letter is capitalized) and a final period (full point);
    • Sentence fragments – the list is typically introduced by an introductory fragment ending with a colon;
    • Titles of works – they retain the original capitalization of the titles;
    • Other elements – they are formatted consistently in either sentence case or lower case.







External links


  • *[ History of NIH]
  • *[ National Institutes of Health homepage]

These will appear as:




Keep markup simple


In general, wikitext formatting is considered easier to use than HTML and wikitext is preferred if there are equivalents; see Help:HTML in wikitext. Obsolete elements and attributes should be updated or removed. There are many templates that allow HTML markup to be used without putting it in articles directly, such as {{em}} (see MOS:EMPHASIS) and {{strong}} (see MOS:BOLD).


Formatting issues

Modifications in font size, blank space, and color (see § Color coding) are an issue for the Wikipedia site-wide style sheet, and should be reserved for special cases only.

Typically, the use of custom font styles will:

  • reduce usability, since it might be impossible for people with custom style sheets (for accessibility reasons, for example) to override it, and it might clash with a different skin or inconvenience people with color blindness (see below); and

Outside article text, different font sizes are routinely used in navigation templates and infoboxes, tables (especially in larger ones), and some other contexts where alternatives are not available (such as table captions). Specify font sizes relatively (for example with font-size: 85%) rather than absolutely (like font-size: 8pt).

Color coding






Avoid : (description list markup) for simple visual indentation in articles (common as it may be on talk pages). It causes accessibility problems and outputs invalid HTML. See WP:Manual of Style/Accessibility § Indentation for alternatives.

Scrolling lists and collapsible content


When such features are used, take care that the content will still be accessible on devices that do not support JavaScript or CSS, and to the 45% (and climbing) of Wikipedia readers who use the mobile version of the site,[m] which has a limited set of features. Mobile ability to access the content in question is easy to test with the "Mobile view" link at the bottom of each page.[n]



Invisible comments








See also



Other community standards

Guidelines within the Manual of Style

(Links to policy and guidelines on specific questions)



  1. ^ a b c d Wikipedia uses sentence case for sentences, article titles, section titles, table headers, image captions, list entries (in most cases), and entries in infoboxes and similar templates, among other things. Any MoS guidance about the start of a sentence applies to items using sentence case.
  2. ^ Using phrases such as In early life is acceptable for section headings.
  3. ^ a b c Curly quotation marks and apostrophes are deprecated on the English Wikipedia because:
    • Consistency keeps searches predictable. Though most browsers do not distinguish between curly and straight marks, Internet Explorer still does (as of 2016), so that a search for Alzheimer's disease will fail to find Alzheimer’s disease and vice versa.
    • Straight quotation marks and apostrophes are easier to type reliably on most platforms.
  5. ^ A comment outside the == == but on the same line may cause the section-editing link to fail to appear at all; in other browsers, it may appear, but using it will cause the section heading to not automatically be added to the edit summary.
  6. ^ Breeds guideline added per a December 2018 RfC. "Standardized breed" doesn't have a perfectly clear meaning, but does encompass any breed subject to the breed standard or studbook of a notable breeders or fanciers organization. Various other groupings of domesticated animals are not standardized breeds: ancient historical varieties, breed groups, feral populations, landraces, and crossbreeds or hybrids that no major organizations recognize as breeds. Many often are not notable anyway.
  7. ^ Double quotation marks are preferred to single because:
    • They are immediately distinguishable from apostrophes:
    • Most browsers distinguish single and double quotation marks. Searches for "must see" attractions may fail to find 'must see' attractions.
  9. ^ Specifically, compound attributives, which are modifiers of a noun that occur within the noun phrase. (See English compound § Hyphenated compound modifiers.)
  10. ^ The hair space should be done as &#8202; because the actual Unicode character ( ) is almost invisible, and the alternative code "&hairsp;" is not standard and not supported in many browsers.
  12. ^ a b The passive voice is often advised against in many forms of writing, but is used frequently in encyclopedic writing, where its careful use avoids inappropriate first- and second-person constructions. Passive voice should still be avoided when it is not needed; write Germany invaded Poland in 1939, not Poland was invaded by Germany in 1939.
  14. ^ The "Mobile sidebar preview" tool near the bottom of Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets permits live preview. The "Mobile view" page-bottom feature shows the article only as it currently exists; if using that, and considering a change that could have mobile accessibility implications, please save the change first in a user sandbox and test the mobile version of that. A page's mobile version can also be accessed by changing the in the address bar to and loading that version of the URL. Note also that viewing the normal "desktop" version of the website on a mobile device is not viewing the mobile version of the site, though (depending on mobile browser and what transcoding it is doing) this may be a worthwhile test for some broader accessibility matters, especially on tablets, which do not always use the mobile version of Wikipedia.


  2. ^ a b These matters have been addressed in rulings of ArbCom in 2005, 2006, 2009, and 2015.
  3. ^ "⚓ T134423 Deprecate nonstandard behavior of self-closed HTML tags in wikitext". Retrieved 2019-09-25.
  4. ^ See ArbCom decisions in June 2005, November 2005, and 2006
  5. ^ See 2017 ArbCom decision, and WP:AutoWikiBrowser § Rules of use; bot-like editing that continues despite objections or which introduces errors may lead to a block and to revocation of semi-automated tools privileges.
  6. ^ Ishida, Richard (2015). "Using b and i elements". W3C Internationalization. World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 1 September 2016. […] the content of a b element may not always be bold, and that of an i element may not always be italic.
  7. ^ A change from a general preference for two digits, to a general preference for four digits, on the right side of year–year ranges was implemented in July 2016 per this RFC. For more information see WP:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers § Ranges.

Further reading

External style guides


For additional reference works, see notable entries at style guide and Dictionary § Major English dictionaries.