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Wikipedia articles should be written for the widest possible general audience. As a free encyclopedia, Wikipedia serves readers with a wide range in backgrounds, interests, and goals. Even for articles about the most technically demanding subjects, these readers include students and curious laypeople in addition to experts.
Consider the examples presented below. There are three basic markups used to make technical terms stand out; these are italic (in typography also termed oblique with regard to sans-serif fonts), bold, and bold italic. The following uses of these styles are recommended for technical articles: Italic (edited as ''italic'') is used for:
However, encyclopedia articles should also be easily understood by as general an audience as practical, avoiding the assumption of prerequisite knowledge and gratuitous use of specialized jargon and advanced technical notation: these shortcuts which save time and effort for experts can easily become barriers for the uninitiated.
Articles start with a lead section (WP:CREATELEAD) summarising the most important points of the topic.The lead section is the first part of the article; it comes above the first header, and may contain a lead image which is representative of the topic, and/or an infobox that provides a few key facts, often statistical, such as dates and measurements.
Example 1: An article on new traffic regulations starts with the key decisions made, then narrates public reactions, and concludes with an overview of expected impacts. Example 2: In a scientific report, the hourglass structure may present research findings first, followed by the methodology used, and conclude with implications and future ...
For example, “All gases expand when heated; this gas was heated; therefore, this gas expanded". Statistical explanation, involves subsuming the explanandum under a generalization that gives it inductive support. For example, “Most people who use tobacco contract cancer; this person used tobacco; therefore, this person contracted cancer”.
Words such as these are often used without attribution to promote the subject of an article, while neither imparting nor plainly summarizing verifiable information. They are known as "peacock terms" by Wikipedia contributors. [a] Instead of making subjective proclamations about a subject's importance, use facts and attribution to demonstrate it.
For example, phrases like "Continued on page 3" redirect the reader to a page where the article is continued. [ citation needed ] While a good conclusion is an important ingredient for newspaper articles, the immediacy of a deadline environment means that copy editing occasionally takes the form of deleting everything past an arbitrary point in ...