Formatting your article | Wikimedian in Residence

Different ways to format your page.

Text formatting

Use the Visual Editor to format your text with headings, bold, italics, and links.

Before you begin, log in to your Wikipedia account and open the page you would like to edit (your user page is ideal for practice).

Select Edit to open the Visual Editor.
To add a heading, select the Paragraph dropdown and choose the appropriate heading level.
To make text bold or italic, highlight the text and select the A (Formatting) menu.
To add a link to another Wikipedia article, highlight the text and select the Link (chain) icon.
When you have finished, select Publish changes and include a brief edit summary (for example, Added headings, links and formatting).

Tip: Only link a term once within an article. For example, if University of Edinburgh appears several times, it only needs to be linked the first time.

Creating lists

Lists make information easier to read and are useful for grouping related items.

Try this on your user page.

Select Edit.
Add a heading (for example, Things I Enjoy).
Type a short list of two or three items.
Highlight the list.
From the formatting menu, choose either Bullet list or Numbered list.
Select Publish changes and add an edit summary.

Adding an infobox

An infobox provides a summary of key information and appears on the right-hand side of many Wikipedia articles. Different article types use different infobox templates.

For practice, you can add an Infobox Wikipedia user to your user page.

Go to your user page and select Edit.
Select Insert → Template.
Search for Infobox Wikipedia user.
Select Add template.
Complete any fields you wish to include (for example, your username).
Select Insert.
Select Publish changes and add an edit summary.

You can edit or expand the infobox at any time.

Further resources

Adding categories

Categories help organise Wikipedia pages and make them easier to discover.

A good way to choose categories is to look at similar Wikipedia articles and see which categories they use.

To add categories:

Select Edit.
Open the Page options menu (three horizontal lines).
Select Categories.
Begin typing the name of an existing category (for example, Wikipedians or Wikipedians in Scotland).
Select the correct category from the suggestions.
If a category appears in red, it does not exist or has been misspelled. Remove it using the delete icon and try again.
Select Apply changes.
Select Publish changes and include an edit summary.

Tip: Categories are case-sensitive, so ensure they are spelt and capitalised correctly.

Further resources

Navigation boxes

Navigation boxes sit at the bottom of a Wikipedia article and they are a grouping of links used in multiple related articles to facilitate navigation between those articles.

For example, see the navigation boxes on these pages:

Further resources

Guide to navigation boxes

This article was published on Tuesday 8 October 2024