Help:Punctuation

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It details processes or procedures of some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms and practices. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting.

Shortcuts

This page, Help:Punctuation, explains the use of punctuation marks in Wikipedia pages. In general, pages can contain the type of punctuation marks used in major English style guides. However, some characters entered into column 1 of a line, or combinations of punctuation characters, have special meanings as markup directives to perform extra text formatting.

Ampersand

Ampersand is a prefix to access entities in Wiki code, just like in HTML. Ampersand itself should be encoded as & to avoid possible syntactic interference.

Apostrophes

The typewriter apostrophe ', along with its use as a (single) quotation mark, also encodes italic text ''...'' or boldface text '''...''' or bold italic text '''''...'''''.

Asterisks

A leading

unordered list. Template:Indent

Braces or curly brackets

The double-braces, or

curly brackets {{ }}, are used to denote a markup function, variable, or template call (such as {{convert

|7|km|mi}}. Within template definitions, triple braces allow a template to refer to one of its parameters (such as parameter 1 {{{1}}}).

Brackets

The single

wp:wikilink (or hyperlink) connecting to another page. See also: {{Bracket}} and Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Brackets and parentheses

.

Colon

A leading colon : on a line causes the line to be displayed as the value part of a description list.

When linking to category pages, it prevents the current page from becoming a member of the linked category -- see Colon trick for further information.

Dashes, hyphens, and minus signs

MOS:DASH

.

The

MOS:HYPHEN

.

The hyphen-minus is used as a minus sign in computer programming languages, and in math mode, but in text, the proper typographical symbol for negation or subtraction is the minus sign, available in the "Special characters" dropdown of the edit pane among the "Symbols" in the list ≥ ± − × ÷ ← → · § ‽ where the third character is the "minus". Minus signs may also be coded by −.

Another kind of

nbhyph

}}. This character has the sole purpose to be a non-breaking word joiner.

Unlike the hyphen-minus, the dashes and minus sign do not have any special role in the MediaWiki markup language.

Less-than and greater-than signs

Like in HTML code, < > are used in Wiki code for tags. That's why < sometimes needs to be written as <.

Pipe or vertical bar

A pipe symbol, or

wp:wikitable

, a brace with vertical bar begins a table {|, a lone bar denotes a column cell, and a bar-hyphen |- denotes another row in the table. A wikitable ends with the bar-brace token |}.

Pound sign

A leading pound sign #, in column 1 of a line, causes the line to be displayed as an auto-numbered line in a list of numbered entries. The numbered line can be indented further by prepending a pound sign ## or two ### or three #### or such, for more indentation, each of which creates a new enumerated list. Template:Indent and other templates offer an accessible-friendly means of creating visual indentations without creating other lists.

Semicolon

A leading

accessibility reasons

.