Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Lists

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Manual of Style This page falls within the scope of the Wikipedia:Manual of Style, a collaborative effort focused on enhancing clarity, consistency, and cohesiveness across the Manual of Style (MoS) guidelines by addressing inconsistencies, refining language, and integrating guidance effectively.Manual of StyleWikipedia:WikiProject Manual of StyleTemplate:WikiProject Manual of StyleManual of Style This page falls under the contentious topics procedure and is given additional attention, as it closely associated to the English Wikipedia Manual of Style, and the article titles policy. Both areas are subjects of debate. Contributors are urged to review the awareness criteria carefully and exercise caution when editing. For information on Wikipedia's approach to the establishment of new policies and guidelines, refer to WP:PROPOSAL. Additionally, guidance on how to contribute to the development and revision of Wikipedia policies of Wikipedia's policy and guideline documents is available, offering valuable insights and recommendations. Lists This page is within the scope of WikiProject Lists, an attempt to structure and organize all list pages on Wikipedia. If you wish to help, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.ListsWikipedia:WikiProject ListsTemplate:WikiProject ListsList

Ost316 is making many edits like this one, claiming that bold headers are a MOS-related improvement over semicolon and asterisk markup. The semicolon markup appears to me to conform with MOS:DEFLIST's description of name-value or topic-value pairs, but I will defer to the experts here. The editor appears to have made hundreds of these edits. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:04, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This seems like a pretty core use-case of definition lists. Remsense ‥ 论 00:33, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

A definition list (MOS:DEFLIST) is a ; line followed by one or more : lines, not by * list items. So Ost316 is certainly right that the old syntax they are fixing is not proper deflist syntax and likely produces invalid HTML. Gawaon (talk) 06:17, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Right, of course. How is one meant to mix the two again, just open a {{blist}} after the :? Remsense ‥ 论 06:36, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I have never tried, but I suppose that would work. Gawaon (talk) 07:37, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There are nonzero infobox situations where I'd just like to separate a bulleted list with headers thusly, even after slimming it down as appropriate. Unno. Remsense ‥ 论 07:41, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In that case, just using bold markup around the header line, like Ost316 does it, doesn't seem the worst solution. Gawaon (talk) 08:12, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the responses. I searched the MOS:PSEUDOHEAD page for "semicolon", which I should have done earlier, and I found this explicit guidance, which says not to put * after ; markup. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:15, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

So I've just done a rudimentary bit of brainstorming, and I quickly realized this is a really easy—seemingly not previously addressed—itch to scratch. Behold, {{Bulleted dl}}:

Labor unions

Communications Workers of America District 1 and Local 1126

New York State AFL–CIO

Newspapers

The Post-Standard

Remsense ‥ 论 20:54, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

 You are invited to join the discussion at List of genocides § List ordering: Reverse or regular chronology. —Alalch E. 00:50, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Due to Conversations about Important Things entering its third year, I am exploring the idea of converting the list of topics from a table to a list, because most of the entries do not have a description. I wish to ask what format could I employ, taking into account the use of colons, dashes, and parentheses in the topic names? --Minoa (talk) 17:33, 2 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

When I read some lists of people. I saw we can find differences among lists.

For exemple "List of Russian artists" contain potraits of people mentionned but not the "List of Turkish actors".

Unlike the "List of Russian artists" and "List of Swedish poets". The "List of Turkish actors" don't class names by alphabetical order but by year of birth then alphabetical order.

"List of Swedish poets" and "List of Turkish actors" don't contain portraits.

Can we create common norms for lists about people to avoid these differences ? Anatole-berthe (talk) 03:50, 3 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Nope. This is clearly something that should be decided on a per-case basis based on what the editors decide is best for the given topic and situation. That's how our Manual of Style works in general. The point is to alleviate confusion and reduce friction, not impose uniformity for its own sake. Remsense ‥ 论 05:00, 3 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This is on a per-case basis (Understandable because Wikipedia is a big project and it would be impossible to manage all of that easily).

Therefore , the goal of the manual is not to impose uniformity but to alleviate confusion and reduce friction and live with disparities in absence of uniformity.

Did I righly understood ? Anatole-berthe (talk) 05:54, 3 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That's pretty much what I said verbatim, so you likely understand, yes. Remsense ‥ 论 05:55, 3 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Community input is sought on applying consistent styling to a group of list articles. See Talk:Memory_of_the_World_Programme#Consistency_for_the_list_articles. Thanks in advance for any help, MartinPoulter (talk) 14:41, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The section Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Lists#Other_cases has

<ol type="a">
<li>this</li>
<li>list</li>
<li>uses</li>
<li>letters</li>
<li>as</li>
<li>indexes</li>
</ol>

But the terminating </li> is optional, provided each item is on its own line, correct? So this also works:

<ol type="a">
<li>this
<li>list
<li>uses
<li>letters
<li>as
<li>indexes
</ol>

This simpler alternative might be worth mentioning, especially for editors that want to convert an existing bullet list (has *) or a numbered list (has #) into a lettered list ... this page should tell them that they merely need to replace "*" with <li> . Adding the </li> terminators is onerous and error-prone. Noleander (talk) 17:47, 7 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The latter is more error prone. An li element's end tag may be omitted if and only if the li element is immediately followed by another li element or if there is no more content in the parent element. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 19:47, 7 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think that the recommendation for including </li> tags is that in earlier versions of the MediaWiki software, XHTML was served, which has no optional tags - for every opening tag, there must be a matching closing tag. Similarly, in XHTML, an unpaired <br> was illegal - you either needed to write <br></br> (which has its own problems) or the preferred form <br />. Since late 2014, MediaWiki has served HTML5, where many of the tags that had been optional in HTML 4 are also optional in HTML5, where <br> and the unpaired <li> are both legal. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:12, 8 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]