Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Layout: Difference between revisions

This page documents an English Wikipedia style guideline. Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply. Substantive edits to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.

Shortcuts WP:GTL WP:LAY WP:LAYOUT

This Wikipedia Guide to Layout is an annotated, working guide to the basics of laying out an article. Complicated articles may be best modeled on the layout of an existing article of appropriate structure. This guide is not about how to use wiki markup (see Help:Editing for that); nor is it about writing style (see Manual of Style for that).

As explained in detail at Wikipedia:Lead section#Elements of the lead, the lead section may contain optional elements presented in the following order: disambiguation links (dablinks), maintenance tags, infoboxes, images, navigational boxes (navigational templates), introductory text, and table of contents, moving to the heading of the first section.

Headings and sections

Headings are located at the top of sections and subsections, which they delimit. Very short or very long sections and subsections in an article look cluttered and inhibit its flow. Headings help to make an article clearer, and they populate the table of contents that users can choose to view (the default) or not to view, under their "Preferences".

Headings are hierarchical: you should start with a second-level heading (two equals signs on each side: ==Heading==). A subsection of a section should have a third-level subheading (===Subheading===), and a subsection of one of these subsections should have a fourth-level subheading (====Subsubheading====). Between sections, there should be only a single blank line; multiple blank lines in the edit window create too much white space in the article.

If the order in which sections should appear in a longer article is unclear, alphabetical or chronological order can be helpful. Alphabetical order is especially useful when sections are divided on the basis of criteria such as country or state.

Section templates and summary style

Main article. When a section is a summary of another article that provides a full exposition of the section, a link to that article should appear immediately under the section heading. You can use the {{Main}} template to generate a Main article; link.^[1]

Other references under the section title. If one or more articles provide further information or additional details (rather than a full exposition—see above), references to such articles may be placed immediately after the section heading for that section, provided they are not wikilinked in the text. These additional references should be grouped along with the {{Main}} template (if there is one), for easy selection by the reader, rather than being scattered throughout the text of a section. You can use one of the following templates to generate these links:

• {{Details}} – this generates For more details on this topic, see
• {{Further}} – this generates Further information:
• {{See also}} – this generates See also

Paragraphs

Sections usually consist of paragraphs of running prose. Bullet points should be minimized in the body of the article, if they are used at all; however, a bulleted list may be useful to break up what would otherwise be a large, grey mass of text, particularly if the topic requires significant effort on the part of readers. Bulleted lists are typical in the reference and reading sections at the bottom. Between paragraphs—as between sections—there should be only a single blank line; bullet points are not usually separated by a blank line.

The number of single-sentence paragraphs should be minimized, since they can inhibit the flow of the text; by the same token, paragraphs that exceed a certain length become hard to read. Short paragraphs and single sentences generally do not warrant their own subheading; in such circumstances, it may be preferable to use bullet points. See also Wikipedia:Guide to writing better articles#Paragraphs.

Certain optional standard sections, when used, should be placed at the bottom of an article. The plural form of the section name should be used.^[2] Common appendix sections are discussed below. These sections should all be level 2 headings so that they appear as sections rather than subsections in the table of contents.^[3]

When used, appendix sections containing the following information appear after the body of the article in the following order:^[4]

1. a list of books or other works created by the subject of the article (works),
2. a list of internal "wikilinks" to related Wikipedia articles (see also),
   
3. notes and references (notes, footnotes, or references),
   
4. a list of recommended relevant books, articles, or other publications that have not been used as sources (further reading), and
   
5. a list of recommended relevant websites that have not been used as sources (external links).

With some exceptions, any links to other Wikimedia projects appear in the external links section. Succession boxes and navigational footers go at the end of the article, following the last appendix section, but preceding the category and interwiki templates.

Works

Contents: The "Works" or "Publications" section provides a list of books or other works created by the subject of the article. "Works" is preferred when the works listed include one or more items that are not written publications (e.g., music, films, paintings, choreography, or architectural designs). "Bibliography" is occasionally used if the list of works contains only books.

Location: Usually precedes the other optional appendices.^[4]

Format: A list, usually ordered chronologically, as explained in more detail at Wikipedia:Manual of Style (lists of works).

"See also" section

Contents: The "See also" (less commonly "Related topics") section provides internal links to related Wikipedia articles. "See also" is the most appropriate place to link a Portal with the {{portal}} template.

A reasonable number of relevant links that would be in the body of a hypothetical "perfect article" are suitable to add to the "See also" appendix of a less developed one. Links already included in the body of the text are generally not repeated in "See also"; however, whether a link belongs in the "See also" section is ultimately a matter of editorial judgment and common sense. A "perfect" article then might not require a "See also" section at all, though some links may not naturally fit into the body of text and others may not be included due to size constraints. Links that would be included if the article were not kept relatively short for other reasons may thus be appropriate, though should be used in moderation, as always. These may be useful for readers looking to read as much about a topic as possible, including subjects only peripherally related to the one in question. The "See also" section should not link to pages that do not exist (red links).

Location: The "See also" section, if used, follows the "Works" section, if used.^[4]

Format: The links should appear in a bulleted list. It is helpful to alphabetize the links if there are more than a few of them. Also provide a brief explanatory sentence when the relevance of the added links is not immediately apparent. For example:

• Related person, made a similar achievement on April 4, 2005

Notes, Footnotes, or References

Contents: This section, or group of sections, presents the explanatory notes and a list of the references that support the information in the article.

Location: The notes and references appear after the See also section (if any) and before the Further reading and External links sections (if any).^[4]

Format: It may take the name of "Notes", "Footnotes", "References", "Sources", "Citations", "Bibliography", and "Works cited"—although "Sources" have been depreciated because it may be confused with source code in computer related articles, "Citations" may be confused with official awards or a summons to court, and "Bibliography" may be confused with being a list of printed works by the author in the case of a biography. Depreciation does not imply prohibition as some citation styles require them. The exact methodology depends on the citation style used, which is deferred to WP:CITE. The section title "References" is the most popular, followed by "Notes", and then "Footnotes". It is inappropriate to change an article from one defined style to another unless there is a reason that goes beyond mere choice of style.^[5]

Further reading

Contents: A list of recommended books, articles, or other publications that have not been used as sources and may provide useful background or further information.

This section does not include publications that were used as reliable sources in writing this article; these should be cited as references. Websites and online publications are normally listed in the "External links" section instead of in this section, although editors occasionally prefer to merge very short lists of publications and external links into this section. To avoid unnecessary duplication of information, publications listed in any other section of the article should not be included in "Further reading".

Location: This section is placed after the References section and before the External links section (if any).^[4]

Format: This is a bulleted list, usually alphabetized, as explained in more detail at Wikipedia:Manual of Style (lists of works). Publications listed in this section are cited in the same reference style used by the rest of the article.

External links

Contents: A list of recommended relevant websites that have not been used as sources. Unlike wikilinks, which are often used within the article's text, external links are normally limited to the "External links" section. Links to external websites used as sources should be listed in the "References" or "Notes" section. External links may be listed in the section "Further reading", instead of having a separate section specifically for external links.

Location: If there is an External links section, it should be last.^[4] There are a number of reasons for this, including: So many articles have the External links section at the end that many people expect that. Some External links and references sections are very long, and when the name of the section is not visible on the screen, it could cause problems if someone meant to delete an external link, and deleted a reference instead. Keeping the External links last is also helpful to editors who patrol external links.

Format: External links should be arranged in a bulleted list, with a short description of the link and no blank lines between items. By convention, if the article is about a company or organization, then its official website is the first link in the list.

Links to other Wikimedia projects

Links to Wikimedia sister projects other than Wiktionary and Wikisource, including Commons, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikispecies and Wikiversity, should appear as part of the External links section (create the section if needed). The appropriateness of these and other external links is discussed at Wikipedia:External links. Links to media on Commons that do not mention "Commons" are fine ([[File:...]] will link to Commons if the image is on Commons). Links to Wiktionary (in the format [[wikt:word|]]) may be used outside of External links when a definition is needed for clarity and when there is no Wikipedia article which would serve the purpose just as well. See also WP:Explain jargon and the policy that Wikipedia is not a dictionary.

External links can be in the form "Main page at Wikibooks", {{wikibooks}}, or {{wikibooks-inline}}. See Category:Interwiki link templates to check whether an inline template exists.

Navigational footers, categories, interlanguage links etc.

Various navigational aids go at the end of the article, following the last appendix section. The conventional order is:

• Succession boxes and navigational templates
• Categories
• Stub templates. It is usually desirable to leave two blank lines between the first stub template and whatever precedes it.
• Interlanguage links

Images

You should always be watchful not to overwhelm an article with images by adding more just because you can. Unless clearly better or more appropriate images are available, the existing images in the article should be left in place.

Images should ideally be spread evenly within the article, and relevant to the sections they are located in. All images should also have an explicative caption. An image should not overwhelm the screen; 300px may be considered a limit, as this is approximately half Wikipedia's text space's width on a 800x600 screen. It is a good idea to try to maintain visual coherence by aligning the width of images and templates on a given page.

When placing images, be careful not to stack too many of them within the lead, or within a single section to avoid bunching up several section edit links in some browsers. Generally, if there are so many images in a section that they strip down into the next section at 1024x768 screen resolution, that probably means either that the section is too short, or that there are too many images.

If an article has many images, so many, in fact, that they lengthen the page beyond the length of the text itself (this also applies if a template like {{taxobox}} or {{Judaism}} is already stretching the page), you can use a gallery, but another solution might be to create a page or category combining all of them at Wikimedia Commons and use a relevant template ({{commons}}, {{commonscat}}, {{commons-inline}} or {{commonscat-inline}}) and link to it instead, so that further images are readily found and available when the article is expanded. Please see WP:IG for further information on the use of galleries.

Links

As part of Wikifying articles, two square brackets should be placed around important words or phrases relevant to the context of the first occurrence within a h2 section; if the phrase or word does not match the name of the article, you may place the exact name of the article following by a pipe "|" (shift forward slash, \) followed by the phrase you wish to see in the context of the article you are editing. This creates a hyperlink linking to other Wikipedia articles:

Lennie and George came to a ranch near [[Soledad, California|Soledad]] southeast of [[Salinas, California]] to "work up a stake".

Below is how it would look like after it has been saved:

Lennie and George came to a ranch near Soledad southeast of Salinas, California to "work up a stake".

Horizontal rule

The use of horizontal rules (----) in articles is deprecated. They were once used to separate multiple meanings of a single article name. However this is now done with disambiguation pages.

They are occasionally used to provide separation inside some templates (e.g. {{politbox}} derivatives), within some discussions, or when needed in some format specialties.

• Help:Editing
• Help:Preferences
• Help:Section
• Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines shows how to use headings on talk pages