Editing Encyclopedia:Manual of Style (section)

===Colons===
{{Shortcut|MOS:COLON}}
{{For|the "colon trick" (for linking to a category, image, or interwiki link without adding the page to the category, displaying the image, or adding the interwiki link)|Help:Colon trick}}

A [[Colon (punctuation)|colon]] ({{xt|:}}) introduces something that demonstrates, explains, or modifies what has come before, or is a list of items that has just been introduced. The items in such a list may be separated by commas, or if they are more complex and perhaps themselves contain commas, the items should be separated by semicolons or arranged in a bulleted list.

{{Block indent|{{xt|We visited several tourist attractions: the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which I thought could fall at any moment; the Bridge of Sighs; the supposed birthplace of Petrarch, or at least the first known house in which he lived; and so many more.}}}}

A colon may also be used to introduce [[Quotation marks in English#Quotations and speech|direct speech]] enclosed within quotation marks. {{crossref|pw=y|(See {{section link||Quotation marks}}.)}}

In most cases, a colon works best with a complete grammatical sentence before it. When what follows the colon is also a complete sentence, start it with a capital letter, but otherwise do not capitalize after a colon except where doing so is needed for another reason, such as for a proper name. When a colon is being used as a separator in an article title, section heading, or list item, editors may choose whether to capitalize what follows, taking into consideration [[#Retaining existing styles|the existing practice]] and [[Wikipedia:Article titles#Consistent titling|consistency with related articles]].

Except in technical usage ({{xt|a 3:1 ratio}}), no sentence should contain multiple colons, no space should precede a colon, and a space (but never a hyphen or dash) should follow the colon.