UniWiki:Manual of Style/Text formatting

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.

Boldface

Boldface (text like this) is common in Wikipedia articles, but only for certain usages. To create it, surround the text to be boldfaced with triple apostrophes: '''...'''.

Article title terms

Main article: UniWiki:Manual of Style/Lead section#Format of the first sentence

The most common use of boldface is to highlight the first occurrence of the title word/phrase of the article (and often its synonyms) in the lead section, as well as terms that are redirected to the article or its sub-sections. This is done for the majority of articles, but is not a requirement.

Automatically applied boldface

In the following cases, boldface is applied automatically, either by MediaWiki software or by the browser:

• Subsection headings of level 3 and below (===Sub-heading===, ====Sub-sub-heading====, etc., markup). There are 6 heading levels total in articles.
• The term in description (a/k/a definition or glossary) lists (example: Glossary of the American trucking industry)
• Table headers and captions (but not image captions)

Manually added boldface markup in such cases would be redundant and is to be avoided.

Other uses

Use boldface in the remainder of the article only in a few special cases:

• To follow the "principle of least astonishment" after following a redirect, for terms in the first couple of paragraphs of an article, or at the beginning of a section of an article, which are the subjects of redirects to the article or section (e.g. sub-topics of the article's topic, rather than the synonyms as already boldfaced per the above)

  (See Wikipedia:What needs to be done on pages that are targets of redirects? for examples and further details.)

• Mathematical objects traditionally written in boldface such as vectors and the rational number symbols Q and Z
• In some citation formats, for the volume number of a journal or other multi-volume works

Citation templates automatically supply all formatting (such as italic, boldface, and quotation marks). Therefore, applying manual formatting inside a citation template will cause undesired results.

When not to use boldface

Avoid using boldface for emphasis in article text. Instead, use HTML's <em>...</em> element (which usually renders as italic). Italic wikimarkup (''...'', or <i>...</i>) is often also used for this purpose, but is not semantically correct, and may be replaced (it is for non-emphasis italics, such as that used for book titles and foreign-language phrases, as detailed below).

It is technically possible to put non-Latin alphabets such as Greek or Cyrillic in boldface, but this should be avoided.

HTML's <strong>...</strong> emphasis (which usually renders as boldface) is generally not appropriate in article text, though it is common in project pages, template documentation, talk page discussions and other non-article contexts.

Italic type

See also: UniWiki:Manual of Style/Titles and UniWiki:Manual of Style#Italics

Italic type (text like this) is produced with double apostrophes around the content to be italicized: ''...''. Parameters should be accurate, and should not be omitted if the formatting applied by the template is not in agreement with the text-formatting guidelines above.

Private Use Area and invisible formatting characters

The only invisible characters in the editable text should be spaces and tabs. However, other invisible characters are often inserted inadvertently by pasting from a word processor. These can cause confusion with editors and handling problems with editing software. Any necessary invisible or Private Use Area (PUA) characters should be substituted with their decimal or hexadecimal code values (that is, as &Template:Var;) so that they can be edited properly. A template, {{PUA}}, is used to mark PUA characters; it has no effect on the text, but places the article in a tracking category. Template:Crossref

Mixed right-to-left text

Template:Shortcut When right-to-left text is embedded in certain left-to-right contexts, such as when tagged with a reference, it may require control characters to display properly. The marker to return to left-to-right text should be encoded as ‎ or supplied through the template Template:Tlx.

Depending on your browser, there may be a difference between the display of unformatted Urdu:
Template:In5خ ?<ref>Template:Var</ref>:   خ ?Template:Dummy ref with formatted:
Template:In5خ&lrm; ?<ref>Template:Var</ref>:   خ‎ ?Template:Dummy ref or {{Rtl-lang|ur|خ}} ?<ref>Template:Var</ref>:   Template:Rtl-lang ?Template:Dummy ref

and unformatted:
Template:In5(خ)<ref>Template:Var</ref>:   (خ)Template:Dummy ref
with formatted:
Template:In5(خ)&lrm;<ref>Template:Var</ref>:   (خ)‎Template:Dummy ref or {{Rtl-lang|ur|(خ)}}<ref>Template:Var</ref>:   Template:Rtl-langTemplate:Dummy ref

If there is intervening LTR text, as in خ abc<ref>Template:Var</ref>, a control character is not required. Spacing and most punctuation, however, are not defined as either LTR or RTL, so the direction of the text needs to be reset manually.

PUA characters

Template:Shortcut Private Use Area (PUA) characters are in three ranges of code points (U+E000–U+F8FF in the BMP, and in planes 15 and 16). PUA characters should normally be avoided, but they are sometimes used when they are found in common fonts, especially when the character itself is the topic of discussion.

Where PUA characters cannot be replaced with non-PUA Unicode characters, they should be converted to their (hexa)decimal code values (that is, &#...; or &#x...;). However, whenever a PUA character has a Unicode equivalent, it should instead be replaced with that equivalent (Unicodified). The Unicode may be obvious when text is copied and pasted from a document that uses the PUA for bullets or similar characters in Latin text, but similar things happen with punctuation and emoticons in documents using Japanese and other scripts, so an editor familiar with those scripts may be needed. In Chinese documents it's not uncommon for the PUA to be used for characters that now have full Unicode support, due to poorer support for Chinese characters when those fonts were designed. Such PUA characters, which are sometimes found on Wikipedia in references and footnotes, should not be substituted with their (hexa)decimal values, as that will lock in the illegible character. If you're moderately familiar with the script, an internet search of the surrounding text will often locate a fully Unicode version of the text which can be used to correct the Wikipedia article.

Because browsers do not know which fonts to use for PUA characters, it is necessary for Wikipedia to specify them. {{Unicode}} or {{IPA}} formatting is sufficient in some cases. Otherwise the fonts should be specified through html markup, as in the example below. Note that if a font is not specified, or if none of the fonts are installed, readers will only see a numbered box in place of the PUA character.

Tagging a (hexa)decimal code with the template {{PUA}} will enable future editors to review the page, and to Unicodify the character if it is included in future expansions of Unicode. This happened, for example, at strident vowel, where a non-Unicode symbol for the sound was used in the literature and added to the PUA of SIL's IPA fonts. Unicode didn't support it until several years after the Wikipedia article was written, and once the fonts were updated to support it, the PUA character in the article was replaced with its new Unicode value.

For example,

SIL added these letters at U+F267 and U+F268: <span style="font-family:Gentium Plus, Charis SIL, Doulos SIL, serif">{{PUA|&#xf267;}}, {{PUA|&#xf268;}}</span>.

which renders as:

SIL added these letters at U+F267 and U+F268: Template:PUA, Template:PUA.

See also

• WP:Advanced text formatting
• WP:Manual of Style/Capital letters
• WP:Manual of Style/Command-line examples
• WP:Manual of Style#Ligatures
• WP:Stop bolding everything (essay)