Tardis:Tables

A lot of users get confused when it comes to making tables. Therefore, we've tried to make table creation a very easy process by creating a standard format. You should always try to follow the simple table creation process outlined on this page so that our wiki has a consistent look to its tables.

Table basics
Tables are created on this wiki through the use of wikicode, which substitutes a few simple symbols for HTML expressions. Understanding these symbols is thus a good starting point.

What's really important here is the difference between a pipe (|) and an exclamation point (!). If you start the second line of your table — that is, the line that has all the column titles — with a pipe, you'll still get a table. But the resulting table will have no true header.

For instance, an awful lot of tables wrongly use the pipe like this:

This produces the following:

Okay, that's a table, technically. But it's got no header. See how you can mouseover the first row just as easily as the second? That shouldn't be happening.

What you need to do, therefore, is to actually declare the writer/director/producer line as the table header. You do this by beginning that line with an exclamation mark, not a pipe. Here's the right way to make a table with wikicode:

It's a tiny change. But notice the dramatic difference in the output:

Notice that you can, if you wish, use multiple exclamation points:

Getting fancier
Can you make your table code fancier? It's technically possible, but it's not recommended. Now that we have CSS table code — and we've only had it since early 2012 — it's best that you just use the simple markup in the above section. Our goal is to try to make all the tables look the same. Of course, you'll find tables that look a bit different. These were created in the first six years of the wiki's life. They are slowly being converted to the above format.

Prettytable vs. wikitable
used to mean something different than it does now. Now it means the same thing as a class=wikitable statment. So these two statements are essentially equivalent: