This page documents an English Wikipedia style guideline. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply. Any substantive edit to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.

Shortcuts: WP:GTL WP:LAY WP:LAYOUT

Sample article layout (click on image for larger view).

This Wikipedia Guide to Layout is an annotated, working guide to the basics of laying out an article. Complicated articles may be best modeled on the layout of an existing article of appropriate structure. This guide is not about how to use wiki markup (see Help:Editing for that); nor is it about writing style (see Manual of Style for that).

Lead section

As explained in detail at Elements of the lead section, the lead section may contain optional elements presented in the following order: disambiguation links (dablinks), maintenance tags, infoboxes, images, navigational boxes (navigational templates), introductory text, and table of contents, moving to the heading of the first section.

Body sections

Body sections appear after the lead and table of contents (click on image for larger view).

Headings and sections

Sections and subsections are introduced by headers. Very short or very long sections and subsections in an article look cluttered and inhibit the flow of the prose. These headings clarify articles by breaking up text, organizing content, and populating the table of contents that users can choose to view (the default) or not to view (by changing their Preferences).

Headings follow a six level hierarchy, starting at 1 and ending at 6. The level of the header is defined by the number of equal signs on either side of the title. Header 1 (=Header 1=) is automatically generated as the title of the document, and is never appropriate within the body of articles. Sections start at the second level (==Header 2==), with subsequent subsections at the third level (===Header 3===), and sub-subsection at the fourth level (====Header 4====)—until six. Sections should be consecutive such that they do not skip levels from sections to sub-subsections, the exact methodology is deferred to WP:ACCESS.^[1] Between sections, there should be a single blank line; multiple blank lines in the edit window create too much white space in the article.

Section templates and summary style

Main article. When a section is a summary of another article that provides a full exposition of the section, a link to that article should appear immediately under the section heading. You can use the {{Main}} template to generate a Main article; link.^[2]

Other references under the section title. If one or more articles provide further information or additional details (rather than a full exposition—see above), references to such articles may be placed immediately after the section heading for that section, provided they are not wikilinked in the text. These additional references should be grouped along with the {{Main}} template (if there is one), for easy selection by the reader, rather than being scattered throughout the text of a section. You can use one of the following templates to generate these links:

• {{Details}} – this generates For more details on this topic, see
• {{Further}} – this generates Further information:
• {{Related}} – this generates Related terms:
• {{See also}} – this generates See also

Paragraphs

Sections usually consist of paragraphs of running prose. Bullet points should be minimized in the body of the article, if they are used at all; however, a bulleted list may be useful to break up what would otherwise be a large, grey mass of text, particularly if the topic requires significant effort on the part of readers. Bulleted lists are typical in the reference and reading sections at the bottom. Between paragraphs—as between sections—there should be only a single blank line; bullet points are not usually separated by a blank line.

The number of single-sentence paragraphs should be minimized, since they can inhibit the flow of the text; by the same token, paragraphs that exceed a certain length become hard to read. Short paragraphs and single sentences generally do not warrant their own subheading; in such circumstances, it may be preferable to use bullet points. See also Wikipedia:Guide to writing better articles#Paragraphs.

Standard appendices and footers

When certain optional standard appendix sections are used, they should appear at the bottom of an article, with ==level 2 headings==,^[3] followed by the various footers. In the rare cases when it is useful to sub-divide these sections (for example, to separate a list of magazine articles from a list of books), most editors prefer to use bold-faced text ("Books") instead of level 3 headers (===Books===).

Order of optional appendices:^[4]

1. Works or Publications or Bibliography
2. See also
3. Notes and/or References
4. Further reading
5. External links (It is especially important that this section appears last^[5])

Order of optional footers:

1. Succession boxes and navigational templates (footer navboxes)
2. Categories
3. Stub templates (the first stub template should be preceded by two blank lines)
4. Interlanguage links

Works or Publications or Bibliography

Contents: A bulleted list, usually ordered chronologically, of the works created by the subject of the article.

Title: "Works" is preferred when the list includes items that are not written publications (e.g., music, films, paintings, choreography, or architectural designs). "Bibliography", "Discography", or "Filmography" are occasionally used where appropriate. "Works"/"Publications" should be plural, even if it lists only a single item.^[6]

See also section

Contents: A bulleted list, preferably alphabetized, of internal links (wikilinks) to related Wikipedia articles. Please refrain from adding links to pages that do not yet exist (red links). A brief annotation may be necessary when the link's relevance is not immediately apparent, when the meaning of the term may not be generally known, or when the term is ambiguous. For example:

• Related person – made a similar achievement on April 4, 2005
• Ischemia – restriction in blood supply

A reasonable number of relevant links that would be in the body of a hypothetical perfect article are suitable to add to the "See also" appendix of a less developed one. Links already integrated into the body of the text are generally not repeated in a "See also" section, and navigation boxes at bottom of articles may substitute for many links (see bottom of Pathology for example). However, whether a link belongs in the "See also" section is ultimately a matter of editorial judgment and common sense. Indeed, a good article might not require a "See also" section at all. Thus, although some links may not naturally fit into the body of text they may be excluded from the "See also" section due to article size constraints. Links that would be included if the article were not kept relatively short for other reasons may thus be appropriate, though should be used in moderation, as always. Links included in the "See also" section may be useful for readers seeking to read as much about a topic as possible, including subjects only peripherally related to the one in question. The "See also" section should not link to pages that do not exist (red links). {{Portal}} links are usually placed in this section.

Notes and References

Notes and References appear after See also (click on image for larger view).

Contents: These sections present (1) citations that verify the information in the article, and (2) explanatory notes that would be awkward in the body text.

Title: The most frequent choice is "References"; other articles use "Notes", "Footnotes", or "Works cited" (in diminishing order of popularity). Several alternate titles ("Sources", "Citations", "Bibliography") may also be used, although each is problematic: "Sources" may be confused with source code in computer related articles; "Citations" may be confused with official awards or a summons to court; "Bibliography" may be confused with a list of printed works by the subject of a biography. The header should be plural, even if it lists only a single item.^[6]

Further reading

Contents: A bulleted list, usually alphabetized, of a reasonable number of recommended publications that do not appear elsewhere in the article and were not used to verify article content. This section may be substituted by an External links section; editors will occasionally merge the two if both are very short. When an article contains both sections, some editors prefer to list websites and online publications under External links. Publications listed in Further reading are cited in the same reference style used by the rest of the article. See also Wikipedia:Manual of Style (lists of works).

External links

External links section usually appears last (click on image for larger view).

Contents: A bulleted list of recommended relevant websites, each accompanied by a short description. These hyperlinks normally should not appear in the article's body text, nor should they appear in this section if they already appear in the References or Notes section. "External links" should be plural, even if it lists only a single item.^[6] This section may be substituted by a "Further reading" section.

InterWikimedia links to other projects (except Wiktionary and Wikisource) should generally not appear outside this section. If placing such links in the External links section results in a long sequence of right-aligned boxes hanging off the bottom of the article, consider using the in-line versions: {{Commons category-inline|Some category}}. For further information, see Wikipedia:Wikimedia sister projects.

Formatting

Images

You should always be watchful not to overwhelm an article with images by adding more just because you can. Unless clearly better or more appropriate images are available, the existing images in the article should be left in place.

Images should ideally be spread evenly within the article, and relevant to the sections they are located in. All images should also have an explicative caption. An image that would otherwise overwhelm the available text space on a 800×600 window should be shrunk, or formatted as a panorama. It is a good idea to try to maintain visual coherence by aligning the sizes of images and templates on a given page.

When placing images, be careful not to stack too many of them within the lead, or within a single section to avoid bunching up several section edit links in some browsers. Generally, if there are so many images in a section that they strip down into the next section at 1024×768 screen resolution, that probably means either that the section is too short, or that there are too many images.

If an article has many images—so many, in fact, that they lengthen the page beyond the length of the text itself (this also applies if a template like {{taxobox}} or {{Judaism}} is already stretching the page)—you can use a gallery. Another solution might be to create a page or category combining all of them at Wikimedia Commons and use a relevant template ({{commons}}, {{commonscat}}, {{commons-inline}} or {{commonscat-inline}}) to link to it instead, so that further images are readily found and available when the article is expanded. Please see WP:IG for further information on the use of galleries.

Links

As part of Wikifying articles^[7] , two square brackets should be placed around important words or phrases relevant to the context of the first occurrence within a h2 section; if the phrase or word does not match the name of the article, you may place the exact name of the article following by a pipe "|" (vertical bar, shift backward slash on some keyboards) followed by the phrase you wish to see in the context of the article you are editing. This creates a hyperlink linking to other Wikipedia articles:

Lennie and George came to a ranch near [[Soledad, California|Soledad]] southeast of [[Salinas, California]] to "work up a stake".

When saved, this produces:

Lennie and George came to a ranch near Soledad southeast of Salinas, California, to "work up a stake".

Horizontal rule

Horizontal rules — a series of hyphens (----), resulting in a straight line — are deprecated; that is, they are no longer used in articles. Rules were once employed to separate multiple meanings of a single article's name, but this task is now accomplished through disambiguation pages.

Rules can be used to provide separation inside certain templates (for example, {{politbox}} derivatives), within discussions, or when needed in some other formats.

See also

• Help:Editing
• Help:Preferences
• Help:Section
• Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines shows how to use headings on talk pages

Footnotes