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Formatting a Wikipedia article is a bit different from writing on a standard word processor (see the cheatsheet). Instead of a strict WYSIWYG approach ("What You See Is What You Get"), Wikipedia 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
==Elizabeth II hats==	Elizabeth II hats
===Straw hats===	Straw hats

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.

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 →