Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Record charts

This page serves as a guideline for formatting tables of record chart information in music-related articles. Specifics about which charts should be included are common to the tables, article prose, and discography tables, and guidance about what charts to include may be found in WP:Record charts.

The chart positions should be organized into one table, and the table should be formatted using.

Charts should be arranged by country in alphabetical order.

The only exception to this rule is when there is a very specific reason, such as charts representing the home country of the artist or composer (this can mean country of origin, country of residence, official nationality or any country where the artist or composer has lived for a substantial part of their lives) or releases with a strong link to the country in question (e.g. Eurovision entries).

Within the table, charts should be properly named as listed by the source and peaks should not appear boldfaced, as this violates Wikipedia's policy regarding neutral point of view and breaches WP:MOSBOLD. Flag icons should not be displayed on chart tables, as per MOS:FLAG, nationalities should not be emphasized.

All of these example tables include indicators to show correct location of references. (These are not legitimate references for information contained in this article.) References should be as specific as possible, and generally should be to a URL that will display the exact charting information being included, not simply to the website where the chart may be found. Thus sources should be archived meaning that they can be accessed at later dates. 'Outside' archive sources such as the Wayback Machine or WebCite are also acceptable.

Please note that while the charting action is active or ongoing within a specific market area (country), that non-archived reference(s) from reliable sources may be used as it pertains to that specific chart due to the fact it is too early for such information to appear in official archives. Where possible 'outside' archiving is also preferred.

Articles about songs and albums should not include succession boxes that indicate which songs or albums preceded and succeeded it on the top spot of a chart.

Original (manual) chart format
Note that references should be individual and specific to each chart that is being used. Sources per column or table are insufficient.

Albums and singles which peak on different charts during different years are formatted with the charts for the more recent year(s) in a separate table below the earlier table(s):

Note that this often causes the left columns of different tables to have differing widths, which makes the tables harder to read. One approach is to add a width instruction (e.g., ) for the smaller column to roughly match the width of the larger. See the code for the Chart (2007) table in the above example.

Alternative versions of the same song, such as remixes or radio edits, should be indicated in the table as an additional line within the Chart name cell:

Chart templates
The single chart template is available for formatting chart tables for single articles and the album chart template is for album articles. The use of the templates is strongly encouraged, as they automatically create a correct reference for the chart entry, allow changes to sourcing sites to be accommodated by editing a central location instead of edits across thousands of articles, and will permit future implementation of a bot to assist in vandalism reversion. Documentation on the use of single chart and album chart is available at the template pages.

The templates will look something like this on pages:

The references will look like this:

Notes
 * For the German template you must format the artist name "last,first" and the song must be written like it is on their website for example "I Want to Know What Love Is (2-track)".
 * The United States Billboard charts visually look the same as the original chart format.
 * Although the templates are not compulsory they are not to be reverted if they have been upgraded.
 * Chart table top is also available to format chart table headers. As with single chart, instructions on its usage can be found on its template page.