What is markup and why is there a special section about it in the Nupedia guidelines? Our articles are saved in the Nupedia database in a "plain text" format, i.e., a format that uses only a very limited number of characters. Therefore, to generate the fancy formatting you see in some articles, markup is used. Markup is, roughly speaking, characters that do not appeared in displayed text but that determine how the text that does appear is interpreted (either how it is displayed or what it means). For example, to make some text appear italicized, like this, one writes: <i>like this</i> .
The following subsections explain the markup that is used to generate notes, pronunciations, italics and other presentational markup, and cross-references and external links. If you don't know what markup to use, you can just use a bit of comments markup and our markup crew will figure it out for you before the article is posted.
Computer programmers might be interested in knowing that, since we will be using XML (we have decided on TEI Lite as a DTD), we plan to include (eventually) semantic markup, i.e., markup that classifies parts of text according to meaning. We will provide extensive guidelines on including semantic markup of Nupedia articles when we start using it, of course.