User:Proteins/Basic list tutorial

This tutorial illustrates how to add numbered lists and bullet-point lists to Wikipedia articles. NUmbered and bullet-point lists are sometimes called ordered and unordered lists, respectively, and correspond to the <OL> and <UL> tags in HTML. A third type, definition lists, will be covered in another tutorial; such lists correspond to the <DL> tags in HTML.

Numbered lists

To put items in a numbered list, open the editing window and place a pound sign # at the beginning of the line before the item, as in the following example.

There are 10 types of people in the world:

# those who understand binary, and

# those who don't. (It's a geek joke.)

This produces the following text:

There are 10 types of people in the world:

1. those who understand binary, and
2. those who don't. (It's a geek joke.)

Potential mistakes

The pound sign should be at the beginning of the line. If it's not, you'll get something like this:

 # those who understand binary, and 

Another mistake is to put a line space between the list items, which produces this:

There are 10 types of people in the world:

1. those who understand binary, and

1. those who don't.

It may seem as though the list items belong to one list, but they don't. The line-space creates a new list, which restarts the counting.

Bullet-point lists

Bullet-pointed lists ar ejust like numbered lists, except that you use an asterisk instead of a pound sign. Thus, if you open an editing window and add the text

There are two types of people in the world: * cat lovers * dog lovers

you'll see the following result after saving:

There are two types of people in the world:

• cat lovers
• dog lovers

Again, the asterisk should be at the beginning of the line, and the list items should not be separated by a line space. The effects of a single line space are not visible, as the following example shows:

There are two types of people in the world:

• cat lovers

• dog lovers

However, a new unordered list is started, which makes it harder for visually impaired people to navigate the page. Do the right thing, and keep those list items together.

Combining the lists

It's also possible to combine these two types of lists. For example, you can place an bullet-point list within a numbered list

1. The first item
2. The second item
   • A sublist item
   • Another sublist item
3. The third item

Conversely, you can place a numbered list within a bullet-point list

• The first item
• The second item
  1. A sublist item
  2. Another sublist item
• The third item

In both cases, the symbols occur at the beginning of the line as usual, and the list items don't have line-spaces between them.