Wikipedia:Technical terms and definitions: Difference between revisions
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Markkawika (talk | contribs) Fixed some of the rendering problems, fixed a misspelled word, and got rid of <i> tags. |
Joris Gillis (talk | contribs) m the revival of the semi-colon |
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As in the fern example above, any of the three styles described above could be turned into a link if there exists a more detailed or better explanation of the technical term in a separate article. It may not be necessary then to define the term in the article if a link leads to a definition. However, to aid the reader in continuing with the text without having to leave an article for other details, it might still be appropriate to include a non-technical substitute in parentheses, as in the fern example above.
When a vast amount of jargon appears in an article, you might consider bundling all terms and their definitions within a list. When you do so, do use the appropriate definition list markup:
Instead of
<nowiki>*'''term''': definition</nowiki>
use
<nowiki>; term : definition</nowiki>
Some other markups are available but risky. Examples are <tt>teletype</tt> (edited as <tt><tt>teletype</tt></tt>), <u>underline</u> (edited as <tt><u>underline</u></tt>), and ''italic'' (edited as <tt><i>italic</i></tt> or <tt><cite>italic</cite></tt>). But the teletype (monospace) tag does not usually produce text sufficiently different from the standard Wikipedia font to be useful; the underline tag can create confusion with links; and the HTML tags <i> and <cite> are not differentiated by most common browsers. The Wikipedia italic, described above and edited as <tt><nowiki>''</nowiki>italic<nowiki>''</nowiki></tt>, is preferable to the
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