Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Text formatting
 | This guideline is a part of the English Wikipedia's Manual of Style. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply. Any substantive edit to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page. |
| Manual of Style (MoS) |
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This is Wikipedia's style manual for text formatting. Use it for guidance on when to apply various formatting techniques, such as bold, italics, and underlining. For instructions on how to do that, please see Wikipedia:How to edit a page#Character formatting.
Boldface
In the first paragraph of an article, put the article name and any synonyms (including acronyms) in boldface. Do this only once for each case; that is, avoid using boldface for both the article title in the lead section and the caption of the lead image. It is technically possible to bold Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, but this should be avoided; the purpose of the bolding is to separate the article name from ordinary text, and the change of alphabets does this by itself.
Wikipedia automatically puts headings (section titles) in boldface. Bolded headings, though possible, will appear especially bold, and are not desired in almost all cases.
Use italics, not boldface, for emphasis. Use boldface in the remainder of the article only for a few special uses:
- Table headers
- Definition lists (example: David E. Kelley)
- Volume numbers in some formats for bibliographic entries for journal articles (example: template:cite journal)
Italic type
Titles
Use Italics for titles of the following:
- Living organisms, as a genus or genus-species such as Escherichia, Escherichia coli or E. coli
- Books such as The Da Vinci Code
- Computer and video games such as Halo
- Court cases such as Roe v. Wade
- Films such as The Terminator
- Foreign language words such as kanji
- Genes (however, the proteins encoded by the genes are set in roman)
- Long or epic poems, such as Iliad
- Musical albums such as The Dark Side of the Moon
- Named passenger trains such as 20th Century Limited
- Orchestral works such as New World Symphony
- Periodicals (newspapers, journals, and magazines) such as Newsweek and The New York Times
- Plays such as Much Ado About Nothing
- Ships such as RMS Titanic
- Television series such as Gilligan's Island
- Works of visual art such as Nude Descending a Staircase
Italics are generally used for titles of longer works. Enclose titles of shorter works in double quotation marks, such as the following:
- Articles, essays or papers
- Chapters of a longer work
- Episodes of a television series
- Short poems
- Short stories
- Songs and singles
There are a few cases in which the title should be in neither italics nor quotation marks:
- Scripture
- Legal or constitutional documents
Words as words
Use italics when writing about words as words, or letters as letters (to indicate the use-mention distinction). This category may also use quotation marks to distinguish words as words. For example:
- Deuce means ‘two’.
- The term panning is derived from panorama, which was coined in 1787.
- The most common letter in English is e.
Foreign terms
Wikipedia prefers italics for phrases in other languages and for isolated foreign words that do not yet have every day use in non-specialised English. Use the native spellings if they use the Latin alphabet (with or without diacritics) - otherwise Anglicise their spelling. For example: "The title Sveriges och Götes Konung was last used for Gustaf I of Sweden who liked to breakfast on crisp bread (knäckebröd) open sandwiches with toppings such as messmör (butter made from goat's milk), ham (skinka), vegetables (grönsaker) like tomatoes (tomat) or cucumber (gurka)." Per the guide to writing better Wikipedia articles, use foreign words sparingly.
Loan words or phrases that have common use in English, however — praetor, Gestapo, samurai, esprit de corps — do not require italicization. If looking for a good rule of thumb, do not italicize words that appear in Merriam-Webster Online.
If there is a reason to include native spelling in a non-Latin script, it can be placed in parentheses. Text in non-Latin scripts (such as Greek or Cyrillic) should not be italicized at all — even where this is technically feasible; the difference of script suffices to distinguish it on the page.
Quotations
It is normally incorrect to put quotations in italics. They should only be used if the material would otherwise call for italics, such as for emphasis or to indicate use of non-English words. Indicate whether italics were used in the original text or whether they were added later. For example:
- Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince: And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
- (emphasis added)
Symbols for variables in formulas
The symbols for variables normally use italics (E = mc²). Exceptions include bold or letters with an arrow on top for vectors.
Do not use italics for
Some things remain in upright regardless of the surrounding text
- Symbols for chemical elements such as HCl
- Symbols for units of measure such as kg, ft/s
- Symbols for mathematical operators such as sin and ln
- sin x, ln (p/p0)
Emphasis
The following are proposed guidelines regarding the use of various style devices to show emphasis:
- Italics are used for emphasis, but sparingly.
Avoid various kinds of overemphasis, which distracts from the writing:
- Exclamation points (!) should usually only be used in direct quotes.
- Bold type is reserved for certain uses (see #Boldface, above).
- "Quotation marks" for emphasis of a single word or phrase, or scare quotes, are discouraged. Quotation marks are to show that you are using the correct word as quoted from the original source. For example: His tombstone was inscribed with the name "Aaron" instead of the spelling he used during his life.
- ALL CAPS formatting should be reduced to the Title Case where each word is capitalized. "WAR BEGINS TODAY" should be reduced to "War Begins Today". This has become the standard for the New York Times in its transcription project. The same rule applies to book and magazine titles as per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (capital letters)#All caps.
- Double emphasis such as "italics in quotation marks" or italics and an exclamation point! is unnecessary.
- Underlining is used in typewriting and handwriting to represent italic type. Do not underline text or it may be confused with links on a web page.