Wiktionary:Tutorial (Formatting)

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Wiki markup

Bold and italics

Composing text in Wiktionary is a little different from writing in a normal word processor.

The wiki can accept some HTML tags, but most people prefer to use the built-in wiki markup language, which is designed for ease of editing. The most commonly used character formatting styles are bold and italics. Bolding and italicizing is done by surrounding a word or phrase with multiple apostrophes:

• ''italics'' is rendered as italics. (2 apostrophes)
• '''bold''' is rendered as bold. (3 apostrophes)
• '''''bold italics''''' is rendered as bold italics. (2+3=5 apostrophes)

If the apostrophe character is part of the highlighted text there are some possible solutions:

1. use a curly quote (’): ''The Way You Wear Your Hat: And the Lost Art of Livin’''
2. put a <nowiki/> tag between the real apostrophe and the formatting apostrophes: ''The Way You Wear Your Hat: And the Lost Art of Livin'<nowiki/>''
3. use the template {{'}}: ''The Way You Wear Your Hat: And the Lost Art of Livin{{'}}''

By convention, the titles of books, movies, publications and taxonomic names are italicized:

[…] from My Fair Lady (1964)

[…] published in The New Yorker

[…] the European mole, Talpa europaea

Entries are generally written to resemble standard dictionary entries, so we do not follow Wikipedia's convention of including the title of the entry in bold in the first paragraph. Instead we use various headings to organize the information. For more information on the format guidelines for a page, see Wiktionary:Entry layout.

Headings and subheadings

Headings and subheadings can be used to specify different parts of speech (noun, verb etc.).

Headings can be created like this:

• ==Top level heading== (with 2 equals signs)
• ===Subheading=== (3 equals signs)
• ====Another level down==== (4 equals signs)

And so forth. If you find you need headings with 5 or more equals signs, you might want to consider restructuring the entry. Headings with only 1 equals sign are never used in the main namespace, and hardly ever used outside it.

If an entry has at least three headings, a table of contents will be automatically generated. Try creating a headline in this page's sandbox. It will be added to the table of contents for the page.

When you're done, click here to continue.

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