Wikipedia:Indentation

This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

Shortcut WP:INDENT

Good indentation makes prolonged discussions easier to read and understand. It might be helpful to think of discussions as reports with numbered/bulleted sections and subsections where material is not necessarily written in chronological order.

Although this example page about how to indent is an essay, the use of normal indentation is a behavioural guideline that editors are expected to follow. Such guidelines may be enforced by administrative action, especially when other editors have been unable to persuade an individual to abide by them. The guideline should never be used to bite newcomers who don't know how to indent properly, but experienced users are expected to comply with it, to facilitate threaded discussion on talk pages.

This essay only applies to talk pages. Because of differing Cascading Style Sheets between talk pages and other pages, the techniques described in this page are likely to work poorly in other kinds of pages.