UniWiki:Manual of Style/Tables

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This page is a part of the UniWiki's Manual of Style. It is a general guideline intended to harmonize article style across the UniWiki, though it is best treated with common sense, and exceptions may apply. Any substantive edit to this page should be approved by the Wiki Manager. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.
This page discusses when and how tables should be used on the UniWiki. For specific considerations of table style and accessibility, see Wikipedia's data tables tutorial. For technical guidance on how to create and edit tables, see Wikipedia:Help:Table.

Tables are a way of presenting information in rows and columns. They can be useful for a variety of content presentations on Wikipedia, but should be used only when appropriate; sometimes the information in a table may be better presented as prose paragraphs or as an embedded list.

Avoid referring to tables as being located on the left or right of a display page. Placement can be different for mobile viewers, and is meaningless to people having pages read to them by assistive software. Instead, use captions to identify tables.

Formatting

See also: Wikipedia:Help:Table

It is recommended that wikitables be used in place of HTML tables, as they are easier to customize and maintain. A standard "wikitable style" is available, by adding class="wikitable" to the top row of the table. The powerful and useful sorting feature can be enabled by adding class="sortable" to the top row. Extreme caution should be applied if rowspan or colspan is used. It is also possible to combine classes, as in class="wikitable sortable".

Captions and headers

Table captions and column and row headers should be succinct and self explanatory. In most cases, individual words or sentence fragments should be used, and thus articles (a, an, the) and sentence-ending punctuation are unnecessary. Only the first word in the caption or header should be capitalized (except for proper nouns), in keeping with the UniWiki's conventions for capital letters. In some rare cases, judicious use of soft hyphens may be helpful.

Much of UniWiki:Manual of Style § Article titles, headings, and sections also pertains to table headers: Use sentence case when appropriate; avoid redundantly including the subject's name in a header; do not put images in the header (including flag icons), unless this is the best way to present tabular information in a particular case; and do not use questions as headers. Title headers are often suitable places for reference citations (e.g., to source a specific row or column of data). Unlike section headings, they often begin with or consist entirely of numbers (such as model numbers, dates, version numbers, etc.). Table headers do not automatically generate link anchors the way section headings do.

Appearance

In general, styles for tables and other block-level elements should be set using CSS classes, not with inline style attributes. This is because it creates a greater degree of professionalism by ensuring a consistent appearance between articles. Deviations from standard conventions are acceptable where they create a semantic distinction (for instance, the infoboxes and navigational templates relating to The Simpsons use a yellow color-scheme instead of the customary mauve, to tie in with the dominant color in the series) but should not be used gratuitously.

See UniWiki:Manual of Style/Accessibility § Styles and markup options for guidance on use of coloring or non-standard formatting.

Consideration may be given to collapsing tables which consolidate information covered in the prose.

Accessibility

Main article: UniWiki:Manual of Style/Accessibility#Tables

Screen readers and other web browsing tools make use of specific table tags to help users navigate the data contained within tables. Use the correct wikitable pipe syntax to take advantage of all the features available.

See UniWiki:Manual of Style § Color coding for information about restrained use of color in tables, to avoid creating accessibility problems for visually-impaired as well as normal vision readers.

Do not separate items by leaving blank lines between them, even when using unordered or definition lists. The Wikipedia list templates explicitly identify lists for readers, rather than relying on visual formatting to indirectly imply the presence of a list.

Size

Splitting lists and tables per summary style is advised against. Among other problems, arbitrarily splitting a wikitable effectively disables the powerful and useful sorting feature from working across the entire table.

On the other hand, overloading tables with too much detailed statistical data is not always helpful. Careful thought should be given to how a reader would use a table, and what level of detail is appropriate.

Suitability

Tables are a way of presenting links, data, or information in rows and columns. They are a complex form of list, formatted into a systematic grid pattern. Tables might be useful for presenting mathematical data such as multiplication tables, comparative figures, or sporting results. They may also be useful for presenting equivalent words in two or more languages; for awards by type and year; complex discographies; etc.

The sortability of multiple columns in a table is a powerful tool that helps the reader to understand relationships and find patterns in large lists. The sortability of tables makes them very useful for "List of..." articles in Wikipedia, which are intended to give an overview of the subject area, and to allow easy comparisons among many similar items. Avoid cramming too much detailed information into individual table entries; if appropriate, the reader should be able to click a Wikilink to read a full, detailed article corresponding to a concise table entry.

Often a list is best left as a list. Before reformatting a list into table form, consider whether the information will be more clearly conveyed by virtue of having rows and columns. If so, then a table is probably a good choice. If there is no obvious benefit to having rows and columns, then a table is probably not the best choice.

Tables should not be misused to resolve visual layout problems. If the information you are editing is not tabular in nature, it probably does not belong in a table: Do not misuse tables for putting a caption under a photograph, arranging a group of links, or other strictly visual features. These practices make the article harder for other Wikipedians to edit, and will likely cause problems when viewed on different display sizes and aspect ratios. Also, when compared with tables, wikimarkup is more flexible, easier to use, and less arcane when used correctly for desktop publishing layout, page elements, and page orientation and positioning.

Prose

Prose is preferred in articles as prose allows the presentation of detail and clarification of context, in a way that a table may not. Prose flows, like one person speaking to another, and is best suited to articles, because their purpose is to explain. Tables which are mainly links, which are most useful for browsing subject areas, should usually have their own entries: see Wikipedia:Stand-alone lists for detail. In an article, significant items should normally be mentioned naturally within the text rather than merely tabulated.

Page layout

Page layouts (using multiple columns, positioning elements, adding borders, etc.) should be done via CSS, not tables, whenever possible.

  • Images and other embedded media should be positioned using standard image syntax.
  • There are several templates available that will create preformatted multi-column layouts: see Wikipedia:Help:Columns.
  • Other elements can be positioned or given special formatting through the use of the HTML <div> element and CSS styling.

See also

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