This is an explanatory essay about the Wikipedia:Manual of Style guideline. This page provides additional information about concepts in the page(s) it supplements. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community.

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This page advises on article layout and style, and on making an article clear, precise and relevant to the reader.

• You can post questions about English grammar and usage at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language.
• If you want to read some of Wikipedia's finest articles, have a look at Wikipedia:Featured articles.
• For information on how to cite sources, see Wikipedia:Citing sources.
• For our guidelines on style, see the Wikipedia:Manual of Style and its subsidiary pages, listed in its template.
• To learn about markup in Wikipedia articles, see Help:Editing.
• To learn about lists, disambiguation pages, and images, see Help:List, Wikipedia:Disambiguation, and Help:Pictures.

Good articles start with introductions, continue with a clear structure, and end with standard appendices such as references and related articles.

Introductory material / Lead

Articles start with a lead section (WP:CREATELEAD) summarising the most important points of the topic. The lead section is the first part of the article; it comes above the first header, and may contain a lead image which is representative of the topic, and/or an infobox that provides a few key facts, often statistical, such as dates and measurements.

The lead should stand on its own as a concise overview of the article's topic, identifying the topic, establishing context, and explaining why the topic is notable. The first few sentences should mention the most notable features of the article's subject – the essential facts that every reader should know. Significant information should not appear in the lead if it is not covered in the remainder of the article; the article should provide further details on all the things mentioned in the lead. Each major section in the article should be represented with an appropriate summary in the lead, including any prominent controversies; but be careful not to violate WP:Neutral point of view by giving undue attention to less important controversies, information, or praise in the lead section. As in the body of the article itself, the emphasis given to material in the lead should roughly reflect its importance to the topic, according to reliable, published sources.

As a rough guide to size, a lead section should generally contain no more than four well-composed paragraphs and be carefully sourced as appropriate.

Sometimes, the first section after the lead is a broad summary of the topic, and is called "Overview", although more specific section titles and structures are generally preferred.

Paragraphs

Paragraphs should be short enough to be readable, but long enough to develop an idea. Paragraphs should deal with a particular point or idea. All the sentences within a paragraph should revolve around the same topic. When the topic changes, a new paragraph should be started. Overly long paragraphs should be split up, as long as the cousin paragraphs keep the idea in focus.

One-sentence paragraphs are unusually emphatic, and should be used sparingly.

Some paragraphs are really tables or lists in disguise. They should be rewritten as prose or converted to their unmasked form. Wikipedia:When to use tables and Wikipedia:Embedded list offer guidance on the proper use of these elements.

Headings

Headings help clarify articles and create a structure shown in the table of contents. To learn about how the MediaWiki software uses sections, see Help:Section.

Headings are hierarchical. The article's title uses a level 1 heading, so you should start with a level 2 heading (==Heading==) and follow it with lower levels: ===Subheading===, ====Subsubheading====, and so forth. Whether extensive subtopics should be kept on one page or moved to individual pages is a matter of personal judgment. See also below under § Summary style.

Headings should not be Wikilinked. This is because headings in themselves introduce information and let the reader know what subtopics will be presented; Wikilinks should be incorporated in the text of the section.

Images

If the article can be illustrated with pictures, find an appropriate place to position these images, where they relate closely to text they illustrate. For more information on using pictures, see Wikipedia:Layout § Images and Wikipedia:Picture tutorial.

Standard appendices

As explained in more detail at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Layout § Standard appendices and footers, optional appendix sections containing the following information may appear after the body of the article in the following order:

1. A list of books or other works created by the subject of the article (works)
2. A list of internal "wikilinks" to related Wikipedia articles (see also)
3. Notes and references (notes, footnotes, or references)
4. A list of recommended relevant books, articles, or other publications that have not been used as sources (further reading)
5. A list of recommended relevant websites that have not been used as sources (external links).

With some exceptions, any links to sister projects appear in further reading or external links sections. Succession boxes and navigational footers go at the end of the article, following the last appendix section, but preceding the category and interwiki templates.

Excessively long articles should usually be avoided. Articles should ideally contain less than 50,000 characters of text. When articles grow past this amount of readable text, they can be split into smaller articles to improve readability and ease of editing, or may require trimming to remain concise. The headed sub-section should be retained, with a concise version of what has been removed under an italicized header, such as Main article: History of Ruritania (a list of templates used to create these headers is available at Category:Wikipedia page-section templates). Otherwise, context is lost and the general treatment suffers. Each article on a subtopic should be written as a stand-alone article—that is, it should have a lead section, headings, et cetera.

When an article is long and has many sub articles, try to balance the main page. Do not put undue weight into one part of an article at the cost of other parts. In shorter articles, if one subtopic has much more text than another subtopic, that may be an indication the subtopic should have its own page, with only a summary presented on the main page.

Articles covering subtopics

Wikipedia articles tend to grow in a way that leads to the natural creation of new articles. The text of any article consists of a sequence of related but distinct subtopics. When there is enough text in a given subtopic to merit its own article, that text can be summarized in the present article and a link provided to the more detailed article. Cricket is an example of an article covering subtopics: it is divided into subsections that give an overview of the sport, with each subsection leading to one or more subtopic articles.

Two styles, closely related and not mutually exclusive, tend to be used for Wikipedia articles. The tone, however, should always remain formal, impersonal, and dispassionate.

These styles are summary style, which is the arrangement of a broad topic into a main article and side articles, each with subtopical sections; and the inverted pyramid style (or news style, though this term is ambiguous), which prioritizes key information to the top, followed by supporting material and details, with background information at the bottom.

A feature of both styles, and of all Wikipedia articles, is the presence of the lead section, a summarizing overview of the most important facts about the topic. The infobox template found at the top of many articles is a further distillation of key points.

Summary style

Summary style may apply both across a category of articles and within an article. Material is grouped and divided into sections that logically form discrete subtopics, and which over time may spin off to separate articles in order to prevent excessive article length as the main article grows. As each subtopic is spun off, a concise summary of it is left behind with a pointer (usually using the {{Main}} template) to the new side article.

There are three main advantages to using summary style:

• Different readers want varying amounts of detail, and this style permits them to choose how much they are exposed to. Some readers need just a quick summary and are satisfied by the lead section; others seek a moderate amount of info, and will find the main article suitable to their needs; yet others want a lot of detail, and will be interested in reading the side articles.
• An article that is too long becomes tedious to read. Progressively summarizing and spinning off material avoids overwhelming the reader with too much text at once.
• An excessively detailed article is often one that repeats itself or exhibits writing that could be more concise. The development of summary-style articles tends to naturally clear out redundancy and bloat, though in a multi-article topic this comes at the cost of some necessary cross-article redundancy (i.e., a summary of one article in another).

The exact organizing principle of a particular summary-style article is highly context-dependent, with various options, such as chronological, geographical, and alphabetical (primarily in lists), among others.

Some examples of summary style are the featured articles Association football and Music of the Lesser Antilles.

Inverted pyramid

Some Wikipedians prefer using the inverted pyramid structure of journalism. This information presentation technique is found in short, direct, front-page newspaper stories and the news bulletins that air on radio and television. This is a style used only within a single article, not across a category of them.

The main feature of the inverted pyramid is placement of important information first, with a decreasing importance as the article advances. Originally developed so that the editors could cut from the bottom to fit an item into the available layout space, this style encourages brevity and prioritizes information, because many people expect to find important material early, and less important information later, where interest decreases.

Encyclopedia articles are not required to be in inverted pyramid order, and often aren't, especially when complex. However, a familiarity with this convention may help in planning the style and layout of an article for which this approach is a good fit. Inverted-pyramid style is most often used with articles in which a chronological, geographical, or other order will not be helpful. Common examples are short-term events, concise biographies of persons notable for only one thing, and other articles where there are not likely to be many logical subtopics, but a number of facts to prioritize for the reader.

The lead section common to all Wikipedia articles is, in essence, a limited application of the inverted pyramid approach. Virtually all stub articles should be created in inverted-pyramid style, since they basically consist of just a lead section. Consequently, many articles begin as inverted-pyramid pieces and change to summary style later as the topic develops, often combining the approaches by retaining a general inverted pyramid structure, but dividing the background material subtopically, with summary pointers to other articles. The subtopic sections can also be constructed using inverted pyramid structure so that readers skimming the sections get the most important information first before moving to the next section.

Tone

Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, textbook, or scientific journal. Articles and other encyclopedic content should be written in a formal tone. Standards for formal tone vary a bit depending upon the subject matter but should usually match the style used in Featured- and Good-class articles in the same category. Encyclopedic writing has a fairly academic approach, while remaining clear and understandable. Formal tone means that the article should not be written using argot, slang, colloquialisms, doublespeak, legalese, or jargon that is unintelligible to an average reader; it means that the English language should be used in a businesslike manner.

Use of pronouns

Articles should not be written from a first- or second-person perspective. In prose writing, the first-person (I/me/my and we/us/our) point of view and second-person (you and your) point of view typically evoke a strong narrator. While this is acceptable in works of fiction and in monographs, it is unsuitable in an encyclopedia, where the writer should be invisible to the reader. Moreover, the first person often inappropriately implies a point of view inconsistent with the neutrality policy, while the second person is associated with the step-by-step instructions of a how-to guide, which Wikipedia is not. First- and second-person pronouns should ordinarily be used only in attributed direct quotations relevant to the subject of the article.

There can be exceptions to these guidelines. For instance, the "inclusive we" widely used in professional mathematics writing is sometimes used to present and explain examples in articles, although discouraged on Wikipedia even for that subject. Use common sense to determine whether the chosen perspective is in the spirit of the guidelines.

Gender-neutral pronouns should be used (or pronouns avoided) where gendered language is not necessary, and especially when gender is not specific or unknown. (See WP:Gender-neutral language, and WP:Manual of Style § Identity, for further information.)

News style or persuasive writing

As a matter of policy, Wikipedia is not written in news style (in any sense other than some use of the inverted pyramid, above), including tone. The encyclopedic and journalistic intent and audience are different. Especially avoid bombastic wording, attempts at humor or cleverness, reliance on primary sources, editorializing, recentism, pull quotes, journalese, and headlinese.

Similarly, avoid news style's close sibling, persuasive writing, which has many of those faults and more of its own, most often various kinds of appeals to emotion and related fallacies. This style is used in press releases, advertising, op-ed writing, activism, propaganda, proposals, formal debate, reviews, and much tabloid and sometimes investigative journalism. It is not Wikipedia's role to try to convince the reader of anything, only to provide the salient facts as best they can be determined, and the reliable sources for them.

Colloquial, emphatic or poetic language

Another error of writing approach is attempting to make bits of material "pop" (an undue weight problem), such as with excessive emphasis, over-capitalization, use of contractions, unnecessary acronyms and other abbreviations, the inclusion of hyperbolic adjectives and adverbs, or the use of unusual synonyms or loaded words. Just present the sourced information without embellishment, agenda, fanfare, cleverness, or conversational tone.

An extreme example of hyperbole and emphatic language taken from Star Canopus diving accident as of 28 December 2019 (fixed in the next two revisions) reads:

Miraculously both divers survived the 294-foot fall, but now they faced a harrowing predicament. ... Helplessly trapped, with nothing to keep them warm, ... all they could do was huddle together and pray that rescuers would find them in time. ... But time was not on their side.

This was fixed to:

Both divers survived the 294-foot fall.

See Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Words to watch for other examples. Avoid using words and phrases like terrible, rising star, curiously, championed the likes of or on the other side of the pond, unless part of a quotation or stated as an external viewpoint.

Punctuation marks that appear in the article should be used only per generally accepted practice. Exclamation marks (!) should be used only if they occur in direct quotations.

Rhetorical questions

As with exclamation marks, question marks (?) should also generally only be used if they occur in direct quotations; do not pose rhetorical questions for the reader.

For example, do not write:

There are many environmental concerns when it comes to industrial effluent. How can these be solved? Well, one solution involves ...

Rhetorical questions can occasionally be used, when appropriate, in the presentation of material, but only when the question is asked by the material under consideration, not being asked in Wikipedia's own voice.

For example:

One model of policy analysis is the "five-E approach", which consists of examining a policy in terms of:

Effectiveness

How well does it work (or how well will it be predicted to work)?

Efficiency

How much work does or will it entail? Are there significant costs associated with this solution, and are they worth it? ...

Inappropriate lists

A related presentation problem is "info-dumping" by presenting information in the form of a long, bulleted list when it would be better as normal prose paragraphs. This is especially true when the items in the list are not of equal importance, or are not really comparable in some other way, and need context. Using explanatory prose also helps identify and remove trivia; if we cannot explain to readers why something is important, then it is not important.

Wikipedia is an international encyclopedia. People who read Wikipedia have different backgrounds, education and opinions. Make your article accessible and understandable for as many readers as possible. Assume readers are reading the article to learn. It is possible that the reader knows nothing about the subject, so the article needs to explain the subject fully.

Avoid using jargon whenever possible. Consider the reader. An article entitled "Use of chromatic scales in early Baroque music" is likely to be read by musicians, and technical details and terms are appropriate, linking to articles explaining the technical terms. On the other hand, an article entitled "Baroque music" is likely to be read by laypersons who want a brief and plainly written overview, with links to available detailed information. When jargon is used in an article, a brief explanation should be given within the article. Aim for a balance between comprehensibility and detail so that readers can gain information from the article.

Evaluating context

Here are some thought experiments to help you test whether you are setting enough context:

• Does the article make sense if the reader gets to it as a random page?
• Imagine yourself as a layperson in another English-speaking country. Can you figure out what or who the article is about? Can you figure out whether a particular place or time is relevant?
• Can people tell what the article is about if the first page is printed out and passed around?
• Would a reader want to follow some of the links? Do sentences still make sense if they can't?

Build the web

Remember that every Wikipedia article is tightly connected to a network of other topics. Establishing such connections via wikilink is a good way to establish context. Because Wikipedia is not a long, ordered sequence of carefully categorized articles like a paper encyclopedia, but a collection of randomly accessible, highly interlinked ones, each article should contain links to more general subjects that serve to categorize the article. When creating links, do not go overboard, and be careful to make your links relevant. It is not necessary to link the same term twelve times (although if it appears in the lead, then near the end, it might be a good idea to link it twice).

Avoid making your articles orphans. When you write a new article, make sure that one or more other pages link to it, to lessen the chances that your article will be orphaned through someone else's refactoring. Otherwise, when it falls off the bottom of the Recent Changes page, it will disappear into the Mariana Trench. There should always be an unbroken chain of links leading from the Main Page to every article in Wikipedia; following the path you would expect to use to find your article may give you some hints as to which articles should link to your article.

State the obvious

State facts that may be obvious to you, but are not necessarily obvious to the reader. Usually, such a statement will be in the first sentence or two of the article. For example, consider this sentence:

The Ford Thunderbird was conceived as a response to the Chevrolet Corvette and entered production for the 1955 model year.

Here no mention is made of the Ford Thunderbird's fundamental nature: it is an automobile. It assumes that the reader already knows this—an assumption that may not be correct, especially if the reader is not familiar with Ford or Chevrolet. Perhaps instead:

The Ford Thunderbird was a car manufactured in the United States by the Ford Motor Company.

However, there is no need to go overboard. There is no need to explain a common word like "car". Repetition is usually unnecessary, for example:

Shoichi Yokoi was conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army in 1941.

conveys enough information (although it is not a good first sentence). However, the following is not only verbose but redundant:

Shoichi Yokoi was a Japanese soldier in Japan who was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army in 1941.

As explained in more detail at Wikipedia:Lead section § Introductory text, all but the shortest articles should start with introductory text (the "lead"). The lead should establish significance, include mention of consequential or significant criticism or controversies, and be written in a way that makes readers want to know more. The appropriate length of the lead depends on that of the article, but should normally be no more than four paragraphs. The lead itself has no heading and, on pages with more than three headings, automatically appears above the table of contents, if present.

Opening paragraph

Normally, the opening paragraph summarizes the most important points of the article. It should clearly explain the subject so that the reader is prepared for the greater level of detail that follows. If further introductory material is appropriate before the first section, it can be covered in subsequent paragraphs in the lead. Introductions to biographical articles commonly double as summaries, listing the best-known achievements of the subject. Because some readers will read only the opening of an article, the most vital information should be included.

First sentence content

The article should begin with a short declarative sentence, answering two questions for the nonspecialist reader: "What (or who) is the subject?" and "Why is this subject notable?"

• If possible, the page title should be the subject of the first sentence: However, if the article title is merely descriptive—such as Electrical characteristics of dynamic loudspeakers—the title does not need to appear verbatim in the main text. Similarly, where an article title is of the type "List of ...", a clearer and more informative introduction to the list is better than verbatim repetition of the title.
• When the page title is used as the subject of the first sentence, it may appear in a slightly different form, and it may include variations. Similarly, if the title has a parenthetical disambiguator, the disambiguator should be omitted in the text.
• If its subject is amenable to definition, then the first sentence should give a concise definition: where possible, one that puts the article in context for the nonspecialist. Similarly, if the subject is a term of art, provide the context as early as possible.
• If the article is about a fictional character or place, make sure to say so.

First sentence format

• As a general rule, the first (and only the first) appearance of the page title should be in boldface as early as possible in the first sentence:

  An electron is a subatomic particle that carries a negative electric charge.

• However, if the title of a page is descriptive and does not appear verbatim in the main text, then it should not be in boldface. So, for example, Electrical characteristics of dynamic loudspeakers begins with:

  The chief electrical characteristic of a dynamic loudspeaker's driver is its electrical impedance as a function of frequency.

• If the subject of the page is normally italicized (for example, a work of art, literature, album, or ship) then its first mention should be both bold and italic text; if it is usually surrounded by quotation marks, the title should be bold but the quotation marks should not:

  Las Meninas (Spanish for The Maids of Honour) is a 1656 painting by Diego Velázquez, ...

  "Yesterday" is a pop song originally recorded by The Beatles for their 1965 album Help!

• If the subject of the page has a common abbreviation or more than one name, the abbreviation (in parentheses) and each additional name should be in boldface on its first appearance:

  Sodium hydroxide (NaOH), also known as lye, caustic soda and (incorrectly, according to IUPAC nomenclature) sodium hydrate, is ...

• Use as few links as possible before and in the bolded title. Thereafter, words used in a title may be linked to provide more detail:

  Arugam Bay is a bay situated on the Indian Ocean in the dry zone of Sri Lanka's southeast coast.

The rest of the opening paragraph

Then proceed with a description. Remember, the basic significance of a topic may not be obvious to nonspecialist readers, even if they understand the basic characterization or definition. Tell them. For instance:

Peer review, known as refereeing in some academic fields, is a scholarly process used in the publication of manuscripts and in the awarding of money for research. Publishers and agencies use peer review to select and to screen submissions. At the same time, the process assists authors in meeting the standards of their discipline. Publications and awards that have not undergone peer review are liable to be regarded with suspicion by scholars and professionals in many fields.

The rest of the lead section

If the article is long enough for the lead section to contain several paragraphs, then the first paragraph should be short and to the point, with a clear explanation of what the subject of the page is. The following paragraphs should give a summary of the article. They should provide an overview of the main points the article will make, summarizing the primary reasons the subject matter is interesting or notable, including its more important controversies, if there are any.

The appropriate length of the lead section depends on the total length of the article. As a general guideline: