User:Robchurch/Editing Crash Course/Basic Editing/Formatting 101

It is often necessary to format text on a wiki page in order to emphasise or otherwise transform it. This lesson details basic formatting, including bold/italic/underline, controlling text size, and striking through text.

Formatting of text in wikimarkup is done through the simple use of tags which surround the text to be formatted. For instance, to embolden some text, one surrounds it with three apostrophes (') which MediaWiki detects as being an indicator for bold text.

Formatting text

Bold

To make text bold, surround it with three apostrophes ('). For example:

'''This is some bold text'''

is rendered as

This is some bold text

Italics

To italicise text, surround it with two apostrophes ('). For example:

''This is some italic text''

is rendered as

This is some italic text

Bold and italic

To make text bold and italic, surround it with five apostrophes ('). A number of combinations are possible, for example:

'''''This is some bold and italic text'''''
 '''This is some bold and ''italic'' text'''
 ''This is some '''bold''' and italic text''

is rendered as

This is some bold and italic text
This is some bold and italic text
This is some bold and italic text

Underline

To underline text, surround it with <u> and </u>. For example:

<u>This is some underlined text</u>

is rendered as

This is some underlined text

Strike-out

While not necessarily useful in articles, in discussions on talk pages is it usually considered better form to cross out comments you no longer endorse. This can be achieved by surrounding the text with <s> and </s>. For example:

<s>This is my discarded opinion</s>

This is my new opinion

is rendered as

This is my discarded opinion
This is my new opinion

Sizing text

Making text bigger

To make text bigger, use the <big> and </big> tags. For example:

 <big>This is big text</big>

is rendered as

This is big text

Note: It's not generally a good idea to use this tag too often.

Making text smaller

To make text smaller, use the <small> and </small> tags. For example:

<small>This is small text</small>

is rendered as

This is small text