Help:Lists

List basics
Media wiki offers three types of lists. Ordered lists, unordered lists, and definition lists. In the following sections, ordered lists are used for examples. Unordered lists would give corresponding results.

Paragraphs in lists
For simplicity, list items in wiki markup cannot be longer than a paragraph. A following blank line will end the list and reset the counter on ordered lists. Separating unordered list items usually has no noticeable effects.

Paragraphs can be forced in lists by using HTML tags. Two line break symbols,, will create the desired effect. So will enclosing all but the first paragraph with

For a list with items of more than one paragraph long, adding a blank line between items may be necessary to avoid confusion.

Continuing a list item after a sub-item
In HTML, a list item may contain several sublists, not necessarily adjacent; thus there may be parts of the list item not only before the first sublist, but also between sublists, and after the last one; however, in wiki-syntax, sublists follow the same rules as sections of a page: the only possible part of the list item not in sublists is before the first sublist.

In the case of an unnumbered first-level list in wikitext code this limitation can be overcome by splitting the list into multiple lists; indented text between the partial lists may visually serve as part of a list item after a sublist; however, this may give, depending on CSS, a blank line before and after each list, in which case, for uniformity, every first-level list item could be made a separate list.

Numbered lists illustrate that what should look like one list may, for the software, consist of multiple lists; unnumbered lists give a corresponding result, except that the problem of restarting with 1 is not applicable.

One level deeper, with a sublist item continuing after a sub-sublist, one gets even more blank lines; however, the continuation of the first-level list is not affected: gives
 * 1) list item A1
 * 2) list item B1
 * 3) list item C1
 * continuing list item B1
 * 1) list item B2
 * 2) list item A2
 * 1) list item A1
 * 2) list item B1
 * 3) list item C1
 * continuing list item B1
 * 1) list item B2
 * 2) list item A2

Changing the list type
The list type (which type of marker appears before the list item) can be changed in CSS by setting the list-style-type property:

Specifying a starting value
Specifying a starting value is possible with HTML syntax. (W3C has deprecated the  and   attributes as used below in HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0. But as of 2007, no popular web browsers implement CSS counters, which were to replace these attributes. Wikimedia projects use XHTML Transitional, which contains the deprecated attributes.)

Or:

Comparison with a table
Apart from providing automatic numbering, the numbered list also aligns the contents of the items, comparable with using table syntax: gives

This non-automatic numbering has the advantage that if a text refers to the numbers, insertion or deletion of an item does not disturb the correspondence.

Tables
A one-column table is very similar to a list, but it allows sorting. If the wikitext itself is already sorted with the same sortkey, this advantage does not apply. A multiple-column table allows sorting on any column.

See also en:Wikipedia:When to use tables.

Changing unordered lists to ordered ones
With the CSS ul { list-style: decimal } unordered lists are changed to ordered ones. This applies (as far as the CSS selector does not restrict this) to all ul-lists in the HTML source code:
 * those produced with *
 * those with  in the wikitext
 * those produced by the system