Lists

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Revision as of 12:13, 9 September 2013 by Daniel (talk | contribs) (Centred tables and cleaned up)
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Lists are used to better structure text that is unsuitable as a paragraph.

General rules

  • Do not use lists if text is read easily as plain paragraphs.
  • Use proper wikimarkup.
  • Do not leave blank lines between items in a bulleted or numbered list unless there is a reason to do so, since this causes the Wiki software to interpret each item as beginning a new list.
  • Use the same grammatical form for all elements in a list, and do not mix sentences and sentence fragments as elements.
  • When the elements are complete sentences, each one is formatted with sentence case (its first letter is capitalized) and a final period (full stop).
  • Use numbers rather than bullets only if:
    • a need to refer to the elements by number may arise;
    • the sequence of the items is critical; or
    • the numbering has some independent meaning.

Bulleted lists

Good example
Wikitext Appearance
== Title of list ==
* Example 1
* Example 2
* Example 3
Title of list
  • Example 1
  • Example 2
  • Example 3

In particular, do not double-space the lines of the list by leaving blank lines or extra HTML <br> tags after them, as in this example:

Bad example
Wikitext Appearance
== Title of list ==
* Example 1

* Example 2

* Example 3
Title of list
  • Example 1
  • Example 2
  • Example 3

Numbered lists

Similar to the above, use a # symbol to obtain a numbered list:

Wikitext Appearance
== Title of list ==
# Example 1
# Example 2
# Example 3
Title of list
  1. Example 1
  2. Example 2
  3. Example 3

Blank lines between items of an ordered list will not only cause the same problems as in the previous example, but will also restart the numbering at "1".