Help:Wikitext best practices

Did you know the awesome, beautiful content you collectively write is read by over 100 million people all over the world each month? And did you know that over 50% of those people are reading your content on a tablet or mobile phone?

Wikia's best practices will help you build and format your content to look great on any device, be it our rich and dynamic desktop site, our reader-oriented mobile site, or our specialized mobile apps.

What are best practices?
Wikia worked with several experienced admins and community members to establish a set of supported do's and don'ts for wikia content and templates. Our goals are to support and foster the creativity that exists on the Wikia platform today while encouraging modern web practices and standards.

The best practices are easy to add to your existing templates and content. Most of your existing content will continue to look and function exactly as it does today on desktop, but even better on mobile phones and tablets, including our Community Apps. Additionally, abiding with these best practices can improve SEO rankings for your communities and decrease page load times.

There's already a healthy amount of sharing and similarities between communities, but following our best practices will help Wikia identify different content types (infoboxes, navboxes, quote templates, etc.) and display them appropriately to provide world-class reading and editing experiences for existing fragmented elements.

Undisplay element/text
Add class="hidden" to make a hidden element in the mobile skin.

Infobox
Help:PortableInfoboxes includes information on Wikia's new recommended markup for infoboxes.

Quote
A lot of communities include quotes on their article pages. Quotes are great snippets of content that readers love to read and share. There are two options for best practices for quote templates:


 * 1) Build your quote templates out of divs, not tables and use   or   in the appropriate div.
 * 2) Use   tags to construct the template.

View Template:Quote on the Hunger Games wikia for full construction.
 * Example

or

" —"


 * Preview

Table
Tables are more complicated than our other best practices, but improper use of tables can have incredible adverse effects on how article pages render on any device — desktop, tablet, or mobile.

The first best practice for tables is to avoid building and formatting pages entirely out of tables. Tables should only be used to organize and display data, such as a statistical breakdown of a video game weapon or a list of actors in an episode. To achieve specific designs for your article pages, use modern HTML and CSS practices, such as those demonstrated on W3Schools.com.

The second best practice for tables is to avoid nesting tables. Instead, merge cells whenever possible, or abide by W3Schools conventions.

The third best practice for tables is to be reasonable with the number of columns and rows you use to make sure they are easy to read on both desktop and mobile devices. Break up large amounts of data into smaller, easier-to-digest tables.

Notice
Notices are the elements that appear at the top of article page notifying readers and contributors about information related to the article.

Wikia recommends you use Flags (currently in development in limited beta release) to manage your notice templates so they will render appropriately to desktop and mobile readers.

Questions?
If you have any questions about these best practices, or need help adapting your contents to follow these best practices, please reach out on the Community Central forums or via Special:Contact.

Remember — you can always use the mobile preview inside the source editor to quickly check how your content renders on smartphones.


 * Notes

Further help and feedback
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