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This page, Help:Punctuation, explains the use of punctuation marks in Wikipedia pages. In general, pages can contain the type of punctuation marks used in major English style guides. However, some characters entered into column 1 of a line, or combinations of punctuation characters, have special meanings as markup directives to perform extra text formatting.
Ampersand is a prefix to access entities in Wiki code, just like in HTML. Ampersand itself should be encoded as & to avoid possible syntactic interference.
The typewriter apostrophe ', along with its use as a (single) quotation mark, also encodes italic text ''...''orboldface text '''...'''orbold italic text '''''...'''''.
A leading asterisk *, in column 1 of a line, denotes the start of an indented bulleted list. The bulleted list can be indented further by prepending other asterisks colon ** or two *** or three **** (etc.), for more indentation, each of which creates a new unordered list. Template:Indent and similar templates offer an accessible-friendly means of creating visual indentations without changing the bullet appearance.
The double-braces, or curly brackets {{ }}, are used to denote a markup function, variable, or template call (such as {{convert|7|km|mi}}. Within template definitions, triple braces allow a template to refer to one of its parameters (such as parameter 1 {{{1}}}).
The single square brackets [ ] are used to link to an external website, with the URL address in brackets (such as [http://www.google.com Google]). More often, the double-bracket notation [[ ]] is used to denote a wp:wikilink (orhyperlink) connecting to another page. See also: {{Bracket}} and Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Brackets and parentheses.
A leading colon : on a line causes the line to be displayed as the value part of a description list.
When linking to category pages, it prevents the current page from becoming a member of the linked category -- see Colon trick for further information.
Dashes (such as an en dash –, which can be coded by –, and a longer em dash —, which can be coded by —) are punctuation marks with a variety of uses in English typography; see MOS:DASH.
The hyphen-minus -, also known as the keyboard hyphen and keyboard stroke, has several uses along its role as a word joiner. A separate line of 4 hyphens ---- causes a horizontal-rule line to display. Also, a pipe-stroke, or vertical bar with hyphen |- denotes a row inside a wp:wikitable. The use of hyphens as a substitute for dashes is substandard in English Wikipedia; see MOS:HYPHEN.
The hyphen-minus is used as a minus sign in computer programming languages, and in math mode, but in text, the proper typographical symbol for negation or subtraction is the minus sign, available in the "Special characters" dropdown of the edit pane among the "Symbols" in the list ≥ ± − × ÷ ← → · § ‽ where the third character is the "minus". Minus signs may also be coded by −.
Another kind of hyphen is the non‑breaking hyphen, available in the Wiki code as {{nbhyph}}. This character has the sole purpose to be a non-breaking word joiner.
Unlike the hyphen-minus, the dashes and minus sign do not have any special role in the MediaWiki markup language.
Like in HTML code, < > are used in Wiki code for tags. That's why < sometimes needs to be written as <.
A pipe symbol, or vertical bar |, is used for several purposes. Inside a wikilink, the bar separates the link from the displayed anchor text (such as [[boat anchor|anchor]]). In a template call, the bar separates parameters from each other. In a wp:wikitable, a brace with vertical bar begins a table {|, a lone bar denotes a column cell, and a bar-hyphen |- denotes another row in the table. A wikitable ends with the bar-brace token |}.
A leading pound sign #, in column 1 of a line, causes the line to be displayed as an auto-numbered line in a list of numbered entries.
The numbered line can be indented further by prepending a pound sign ## or two ### or three #### or such, for more indentation, each of which creates a new enumerated list. Template:Indent and other templates offer an accessible-friendly means of creating visual indentations without creating other lists.
A leading semicolon ;, in column 1 of a line, causes the line to be displayed as the name part of a description list. These lists contain a name, followed by one or more descriptions that apply to it (e.g. in a glossary). These descriptions are indicated by starting them with :. Although most browsers will display the name term in boldface, this should not be used to create artificial headings for accessibility reasons.
