Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Contents

Manual of Style (MoS)
Content Accessibility Article message boxes Biographies Disambiguation pages Infoboxes Linking Self-references Words to watch
Formatting Abbreviations Capitalization Dates and numbers Pronunciation Proper names Spelling Text formatting Titles
Images Captions Galleries Icons Images
Layout Layout Lead section Tables Trivia sections
Lists Embedded lists Lists Lists of works Road junctions Stand-alone lists
Legal Legal Trademarks
By topic area Arts Comics Film Lyrics and Poetry Novels Philosophy Television Visual arts Writing about fiction Music Music samples Record charts Stringed instruments Category Regional Specific naming conventions Canada China France Hawaii India Ireland Japan Korea Philippines Poland Singapore Trinidad and Tobago Religion Islam Latter Day Saints Science Chemistry Computer science Computing Mathematics Medicine Sports Cue sports Snooker
Related guidelines Article size Article titles Categories, lists, and navigation templates Categorization Citing sources Hatnotes Military history Signatures Subpages Talk page guidelines Template namespace Understandability User pages Wikimedia sister projects WikiProjects
Overview Directory Tips

This is a descriptive directory of the pages which make up the Wikipedia Manual of Style. It includes only current guidelines, not proposals or historical pages, nor pages that now redirect outside the manual of style.

To search key words or terms on this page with your browser press Ctrl+F or F3, or ⌘ Command+F on a Mac.

Article content

• Wikipedia:Manual of Style (WP:MOS, WP:STYLE)

  The main page of the Manual of Style. It contains general remarks, summaries of the guidance to be found on certain other MoS pages, and fully detailed guidance on certain topics:

  • How to deal with national varieties of English (MOS:ENGVAR)
  • Language for section headings (MOS:HEAD)
  • How to format quotations (MOS:QUOTE)
  • The preferred usage of punctuation (MOS:PUNCT), the largest section specific to the main Manual of Style page
  • Miscellaneous grammatical issues including the writing of possessives, use of pronouns, the ampersand (MOS:&), collective plurals (MOS:PLURALS), and general guidelines for dealing with foreign words and languages.
  • Usage of images (MOS:IMAGES).
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Abbreviations (MOS:ABBR)
  • Use of periods, disambiguation, and which abbreviations need and need not be spelled out first.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility (MOS:ACCESS)
  • Details recommended editing practices for best web accessibility of Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters (MOS:CAPS)
  • When and when not to use capitals, including all-caps (MOS:ALLCAPS).
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Captions (WP:CAPTION)
  • Best practices for writing and formatting image captions.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers (MOS:NUM)
  • Covers time and date formatting, including seasons (MOS:TIME), recommendations for numbers and their notation, which units to use and how to format and abbreviate them (MOS:UNITS), dealing with currencies (MOS:CURRENCY) and geographical coordinates (MOS:COORDS).
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Embedded lists (WP:EMBED)
  • When to and not to use a list instead of prose within an article.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Icons (MOS:ICON)
  • On the use of small images within text.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Layout (MOS:LAYOUT)
  • Ordering of content within articles, structures of standard appendices (MOS:APPENDIX).
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section (MOS:LEAD)
  • Everything about the article opener, including the guidance on bolding the subject's name (MOS:BOLDTITLE)
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking (MOS:LINKS)
  • Everything about the best use of wikilinks.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lists (MOS:LISTS)
  • How and when to use lists on Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lists of works (MOS:WORKS)
  • Presenting a list of works by the article's subject.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation (MOS:PRON)
  • How to introduce pronunciation data in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Proper names (MOS:PN)
  • Details how Wikipedia:Article titles applies within the text of articles.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Self-references to avoid (MOS:SELF)
  • How to avoid mentioning Wikipedia itself, or the fact the article is a webpage.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Spelling (MOS:SPELLING)
  • Not a guideline per se, but a handy guide to national varieties of English.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Stand-alone lists (WP:STANDALONE)
  • Goes into greater details than MOS:LISTS.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Tables (WP:TABLES)
  • The use and formatting of wikitables.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Text formatting (MOS:TEXT)
  • The use of bold (MOS:BOLD), italics (MOS:ITALICS), and font size (MOS:FONTSIZE) are all discussed here.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Trademarks (MOS:TM)
  • Dealing with the idiosyncratic formatting of many trademarks.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Trivia sections (WP:TRIVIA)
  • How to avoid accumulation of poorly formatted miscellaneous information.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Words to watch (MOS:WTW)
  • Techniques for recognizing and dealing with puffery (MOS:PUFF), charged words (MOS:LABEL and MOS:CLAIM), weasel and doubtful words (MOS:WEASEL and MOS:ALLEGED), editorializing (MOS:EDITORIAL), euphemisms (MOS:EUPHEMISM), clichés (MOS:CLICHE) and rapidly dated expressions (MOS:RELTIME) are all to be found here.

Items outside article text

• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Article message boxes (WP:AMBOX)
  • Legacy page describing the styling of these banner templates.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Disambiguation pages (MOS:DAB)
  • What to include, how to format it and in which order.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Infoboxes (WP:IBX)
  • Design of infobox templates.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Wikipedia books (WP:MOSBOOKS)
  • The styling of books.

Topic- and culture-specific guidelines

Topic-specific

These usually originated as project guidelines, and typically cover all of terminology, layout, conventions and formatting related to the topic at hand.

• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Anime- and manga-related articles (MOS:ANIME)
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Biographies (MOS:BIO)
  • How to deal with all the parts of the name, including post-nominal letters (MOS:INITIALS) and honorifics (MOS:HONORIFIC).
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Chemistry (MOS:CHEM)
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Comics (WP:CMOS)
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Cue sports (MOS:CUE)
  • For all billiards/pool games, but see also MOS:SNOOKER for snooker-specific additions.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Film (MOS:FILM)
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Islam-related articles (MOS:ISLAM)
  • Transliteration and terminology, religious text references
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Latter Day Saints (MOS:LDS)
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Legal (MOS:LEGAL)
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Mathematics (MOS:MATHS)
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles (MOS:MED)
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Military history (MOS:MILHIST)
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Music (MOS:MUSIC)
  • Also covers musical notation (in text and images), and use of italics for classical music works
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Music samples (WP:SAMPLE)
  • Fair-use policy on this issue, and how to present them in articles.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Novels (WP:NOVELS)
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Philosophy (MOS:PHILO)
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Record charts (WP:CHARTS)
  • The ordering, presentation and sourcing of chart information
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Road junction lists (MOS:RJL)
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Snooker (MOS:SNOOKER)
  • Much of MOS:CUE also applies.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Stringed instrument tunings (MOS:TUNINGS)
  • Spun out from MOS:MUSIC
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Television (MOS:TV)
  • Covers television series, seasons and episodes.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles (MOS:TITLE)
  • All about the use of italics or quotation marks for titles of works.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Visual arts (MOS:VA)
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Writing about fiction (MOS:FICTION)
  • How to keep the right perspective, source and present in-universe information and similar aspects of writing about fiction.

Country-, region- and language-specific

A number of proposed or inactive language-specific guidelines exist, but they are not listed here; there are language-specific guidelines for several languages including Korean, Chinese and Hebrew; most issues are instead covered by naming conventions.

• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Canada-related articles (MOS:CA)
  • Covers mostly disambiguation, French names and sourcing population data.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/France and French-related (MOS:FR)
  • Accents and their effects on sorting, capitalization of works, noble titles.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Hawaii-related articles (MOS:HAWAII)
  • Capitalization and use of Hawaiian diacritics.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Ireland-related articles (MOS:IE)
  • Historical issues, Irish vs. English, reference to counties
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Japan-related articles (MOS:JP)
  • Mostly issues of romanization and plural, but also terminology, addresses and related matters
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Philippine-related articles (MOS:PHIL)
  • Choice of ethnonym, use of diacritics, disambiguation, name of subdivisions
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Poland-related articles (MOS:PL)
  • Terminology, pronunciation, and spelling
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Singapore-related articles (MOS:SG)
  • Mostly covers names of people

Other relevant pages

The following pages are not part of the Manual of Style, but contain related guidance.

• Wikipedia:Article titles WP:AT
  • Principles for choosing the titles of articles. Contains links to many topic-related naming convention pages.
• Wikipedia:Citing sources WP:CITE
  • Guidance on organizing and formatting references.
• Wikipedia:Summary style WP:SUMMARY
  • What happens when a section becomes an article.

See also

• Manual of Style tutorial – a quick introduction to the style guide for articles.
• Simplified Manual of Style – the basics about commonly used style guidelines.
  • Beginners' guide to the Manual of Style – a trimmed down version of the main Manual of Style page
• Styletips – a list of advice for editors on writing style and formatting.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Reading schedule

Related essays

• Article development – lists the ways in which you can help an article grow.
  • Basic copyediting – gives helpful advice on copy-editing.
  • Better articles – guidance on how to make articles better.
  • Perfect article – point by point guidance on what makes a great article.
• Avoiding common mistakes – gives a list of common mistakes and how to avoid them.
• Logical quotation – describes how to best use logical quotation in articles.

Other community standards

• List of policies – a comprehensive descriptive directory of policies
• List of guidelines – a comprehensive descriptive directory of guidelines.
  • Community standards and advice – a quick directory of community norms and related guidance essays.
• Advice pages – about advice pages written by WikiProjects.