Help:Lists

This page deals with creating lists in Mediawiki.

List basics
MediaWiki offers three types of lists. Ordered lists, unordered lists, and definition lists. In the following sections, ordered lists are used for examples. Unordered lists would give corresponding results.

Paragraphs in lists
For simplicity, list items in wiki markup cannot be longer than a paragraph. A following blank line will end the list and reset the counter on ordered lists. Separating unordered list items usually has no noticable effects.

Paragraphs can be forced in lists by using HTML tags. Two line break symbols,, will create the desired effect. So will enclosing all but the first paragraph with

For a list with items of more than one paragraph long, adding a blank line between items may be necessary to avoid confusion.

Continuing a list item after a sub-item
In HTML, a list item may contain several sublists, not necessarily adjacent; thus there may be parts of the list item not only before the first sublist, but also between sublists, and after the last one; however, in wiki-syntax, sublists follow the same rules as sections of a page: the only possible part of the list item not in sublists is before the first sublist.

In the case of an unnumbered first-level list in wikitext code this limitation can be overcome by splitting the list into multiple lists; indented text between the partial lists may visually serve as part of a list item after a sublist; however, this may give, depending on CSS, a blank line before and after each list, in which case, for uniformity, every first-level list item could be made a separate list.

Numbered lists illustrate that what should look like one list may, for the software, consist of multiple lists; unnumbered lists give a corresponding result, except that the problem of restarting with 1 is not applicable.

One level deeper, with a sublist item continuing after a sub-sublist, one gets even more blank lines; however, the continuation of the first-level list is not affected: gives
 * 1) list item A1
 * 2) list item B1
 * 3) list item C1
 * continuing list item B1
 * 1) list item B2
 * 2) list item A2
 * 1) list item A1
 * 2) list item B1
 * 3) list item C1
 * continuing list item B1
 * 1) list item B2
 * 2) list item A2

See also and subdivisions.

Changing the list type
The list type (which type of marker appears before the list item) can be changed in CSS by setting the list-style-type property:

Extra indentation of lists
In a numbered list in a large font, some browsers do not show more than two digits, unless extra indentation is applied (if there are multiple columns: for each column). This can be done with CSS: ol { margin-left: 2cm} or alternatively, like below.

To demonstrate that all three methods show all digits of 3-digit numbers, see List demo.

Specifying a starting value
Specifying a starting value is only possible with HTML-syntax:

Amsterdam Rotterdam The Hague  gives Amsterdam Rotterdam The Hague 

Comparison with a table
Apart from providing automatic numbering, the numbered list also aligns the contents of the items, comparable with using table syntax: gives

This non-automatic numbering has the advantage that if a text refers to the numbers, insertion or deletion of an item does not disturb the correspondence.

Multi-column bulleted list
gives:

Multi-column numbered list
Specifying a starting value is useful for a numbered list with multiple columns, to avoid restarting from one in each column. As mentioned above, this is only possible with HTML-syntax (for the first column either wiki-syntax or HTML-syntax can be used).

In combination with the extra indentation explained in the previous section:

gives

Using the computation of the starting values can be automated, and only the first starting value and the number of items in each column except the last has to be specified. Adding an item to, or removing an item from a column requires adjusting only one number, the number of items in that column, instead of changing the starting numbers for all subsequent columns.

gives

gives

gives

gives

Streamlined style or horizontal style
It is also possible to present short lists using very basic formatting, such as:

Title of list: example 1, example 2, example 3

Title of list: example 1, example 2, example 3

This style requires less space on the page, and is preferred if there are only a few entries in the list, it can be read easily, and a direct edit point is not required. The list items should start with a lowercase letter unless they are proper nouns.

Tables
Although the use of tables to display lists is discouraged (because it introduces unnecessarily complex code and makes editing difficult), there are some instances where they can be useful, such as when three or more columns are required. See en:Wikipedia:When to use tables.

Changing unordered lists to ordered ones
With the CSS ul { list-style: decimal } unordered lists are changed to ordered ones. This applies (as far as the CSS selector does not restrict this) to all ul-lists in the HTML source code:
 * those produced with *
 * those with  in the wikitext
 * those produced by the system

Since each special page, like other pages, has a class based on the pagename, one can separately specify for each type whether the lists should be ordered, see Help:User contributions and Help:What links here.

However, it does not seem possible to make all page history lists ordered (unless one makes all lists ordered), because the class name is based on the page for which the history is viewed.