Wikipedia:Manual of Style (glossaries)

Glossaries can be stand-alone list articles or embedded lists in sections of articles. Stand-alone glossaries are typically titled "Glossary of subject terms". A glossary within an article usually starts with a heading with the title "Glossary".

The following terms are used consistently throughout this guideline:

There are three styles to choose from when creating a glossary: template-structured, bullet-style, and subheading-style.

There is a special set of templates used for formatting glossary content. The templates are:

Nearly all stand-alone, and most embedded, glossaries are good candidates for the template-structured format. Here's what the format looks like:

Optional introductory text.

To produce a template-structured glossary, follow these simple steps:

Do not make individual terms in a template-structured glossary into headings. Doing so will produce garbled output. The terms will be linkable without being headings.

If a glossary consists of only a few entries, with lengthy definitions, consider instead formatting the article as a subheading-style glossary, in regular paragraphs.

Template-structured glossaries use semantic, accessible markup that adheres to Web standards, for reasons detailed above. Some example code, showing various formatting options, as might appear in a stand-alone glossary article divided into sections by letter of the alphabet:

Optional introductory text.

More of the definition of term A.

Block-quoted passage

More definition of term D.

As is shown in the example, multiple definitions use multiple {{defn}} templates. See the templates' documentation for the advanced features of {{}}, {{}}, and {{}}.

Multiple paragraphs can be created, as in regular prose, simply by introducing a blank line as shown in the example, or can be explicitly blocked out with <p>...</p> markup.

Within a {{glossary}}, all text and other content must be inside a {{defn}}. The following markup is invalid in several places, as annotated:

Such add-on content does not go inside the {{term}}, which is just for the term and its markup.

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