This guideline documents an English Wikipedia naming convention. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply. Any substantive edit to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.

Shortcuts: WP:NCTR MOS:TTR

Some page names are not possible because of limitations imposed by the MediaWiki software. In some cases (such as names which should begin with a lower case letter, like eBay), a template can be added to the article to cause the title header to be displayed as desired. In other cases (such as names containing restricted characters) it is necessary to adopt and display a different title. This page describes appropriate ways to handle these situations.

Contents 1 Restrictions and workarounds 2 Lower case first letter 3 Forbidden characters 4 Other problematic characters 4.1 Forward slashes and dots 4.2 Spaces and underscores 4.3 Colons 4.4 Percent and encoded characters 4.5 Question marks and plus signs 5 Title length 6 Italics and formatting 7 Pictorial names 8 Browser support limitations

[edit] Restrictions and workarounds

Restrictions on page titles are listed at Help:Page name#Invalid page names. The most commonly encountered problems are that:

• titles cannot begin with a lower case letter;
• titles cannot contain certain restricted characters.

There are two basic ways of handling a situation where the desired title of a page is technically impossible:

• Use the magic word DISPLAYTITLE to change the way the title header is displayed on the page (although the stored page name is not affected). This is often done through a template, the most common one being {{lowercase}}, which causes the title to be displayed with an initial lower case letter, as in iPod.
• If this is not possible (due to restrictions on DISPLAYTITLE), choose a different title for the page, and use a template such as {{wrongtitle}} to place a hatnote stating what the correct title should be. This is normally necessary in the case of restricted characters.

IMPORTANT NOTE: These templates should never be substituted (subst). To see what articles have these naming problems you can click on "What links here" in the toolbox for each template. If the template is substituted, it will no longer be linked.

ANOTHER IMPORTANT NOTE: before declaring the current title to be "wrong" with the wrongtitle template or one of the more specific templates please consider if the title you are proposing as "correct" would really comply with Wikipedia conventions, particularly Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English), Wikipedia:Manual of Style (capital letters) and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (trademarks).

[edit] Lower case first letter

The MediaWiki software is configured so that a page title (as stored in the database) cannot begin with a lower-case letter, and links that begin with a lower-case letter are treated as if capitalized, i.e. [[foo]] is treated the same as [[Foo]].

Examples of articles affected by this problem are eBay (located at EBay), iPod (located at IPod), s-CRY-ed (located at S-CRY-ed), and e (mathematical constant) located at E (mathematical constant). (This also means that the page Long s, on the character ſ, cannot be moved to (or redirected from) ſ, as ſ is a lowercase letter whose uppercase form is S.)

To fix this problem, place the {{lowercase}} tag at the top of the article page (and optionally at the top of its discussion page). This will cause the article title to be displayed with the initial letter in lower case, as at eBay.

[edit] Forbidden characters

Due to clashes with wikitext syntax, the following characters can never be used in page titles (nor are they supported by DISPLAYTITLE):

 # < > [ ] | { } 

If the desired title of an article contains any of these characters, then an alternative title must be used instead. Often, you can simply remove the characters (e.g. MARRS instead of M|A|R|R|S). However, it may be necessary to spell out the character (e.g. Gtk Sharp instead of Gtk#) or use another substitute.

In any of these cases, a hatnote should be placed at the top of the article informing readers what the correct title is. This is done using one of the following templates:

• {{pound|Correct title}} for titles containing #
• {{bracketed|Correct title}} for titles containing < > [ ] { }
• {{wrongtitle|Correct title}} for cases not covered by any one of the above. Use {{!}} to represent the | character within the correct title.

[edit] Other problematic characters

[edit] Forward slashes and dots

In namespaces where the subpage feature is enabled, the forward slash (/) is used to separate a subpage name from its main page name. However subpages are disabled in the main namespace, so article names can contain slashes if appropriate – there is no need for such titles to be fixed. Be aware of the following side effects, however:

• Subpages are still enabled in the talk namespace as they are widely used for archiving old discussion. Therefore if an article has a forward slash in its name, its corresponding talk page may display a redundant subpage level-up link at the top (for example Talk:R/2004 S 1 has a link to Talk:R at the top).
• If / is the first character of the title, then links to it from outside the main namespace will not work as expected (they will prepend the title of the current page); a workaround is to prepend a colon, or to use a html entity as the beginning of the link, e.g. [[:/dev/null]], [[&#47;dev/null]] or [[&#x2f;dev/null]] to get to /dev/null.

Page names consisting of exactly one or two periods (full stops), or beginning with ./ or ../, or containing /./ or /../, or ending with /. or /.., are not allowed. In most such cases DISPLAYTITLE will not work, so {{wrongtitle}} should be used.

[edit] Spaces and underscores

In links, spaces ( ) and underscores (_) are treated equivalently. Underscores are used in URLs, spaces in displayed titles. Leading and trailing spaces/underscores are stripped, consecutive spaces/underscores are reduced to a single one, and page names consisting of only spaces/underscores are not allowed at all.

Titles affected by this behaviour (except for the last restriction) can generally be made to display correctly using the DISPLAYTITLE magic word.

[edit] Colons

In general, article titles containing colons are fine, subject to the following exceptions:

• Page names cannot begin with a colon. However, if the initial colon can be dropped to produce a satisfactory title, then this should be done, and the problem fixed with DISPLAYTITLE. For example, at Wumpscut:, the tag {{DISPLAYTITLE::wumpscut:}} is used to display the desired title :wumpscut:. (This will not work with more than one initial colon.)
• Article titles should not begin with a standard namespace prefix (Talk:, Help: etc.), as this will place them in the wrong namespace, which (among other problems) will exclude them from standard search results. In this case, another title must be found (it won't help to change the capitalization of the prefix or put spaces before or after the colon). For example, Help: a Day in the Life is located at Help!: A Day in the Life. A redirect is created at the original title (in this case at Help:A Day in the Life, which is what the above title resolves to).
• Article titles cannot begin with an interwiki or interlanguage prefix, or namespace alias. Again, these are case-insensitive, and putting spaces before or after the colon won't help. Examples:
  • Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! is located at Question: Are We Not Men? Answer: We Are Devo! (Q: is a prefix for Wikiquote);
  • iS: internal section is located at IS - internal section (is: is a prefix for Icelandic Wikipedia);
  • Project: Mersh is located at Project Mersh (Project: is an alias for the Wikipedia namespace).

In the case of aliases a redirect can be created. In the above example this will be at Wikipedia:Mersh, which is what "Project: Mersh" resolves to.

Except in the case of initial colons, DISPLAYTITLE will not work in the above situations. Use {{namespace conflict}} (a template in the {{wrongtitle}} family) as appropriate.

[edit] Percent and encoded characters

A title can normally contain the character %. However it cannot contain % followed by two hexadecimal digits (which would cause it to be converted to a single character, by percent-encoding). Similarly a title cannot contain HTML character entities such as / and –, even if the character they represent is allowed. In the unlikely event of such sequences appearing in a desired title, an alternative title must be constructed (for example by inserting a space after the %, or omitting a semicolon).

[edit] Question marks and plus signs

There is no reason why titles should not include ? or +. However, with such titles, attention is required when typing URLs into the address bar of a browser. Here ? is interpreted as beginning a query string, and a + in a query string is interpreted as a space. When typing in URLs, ? and + should be replaced by their corresponding escape codes, %3F and %2B. (The same technique is necessary for many other special characters, depending on browser.)

[edit] Title length

Titles must be less than 256 bytes long when encoded in UTF-8; a title this long would probably violate other style guidelines, though.

[edit] Italics and formatting

It is not possible for a title (as stored in the database) to contain formatting, such as italics or bolding. The double or triple apostrophes normally used to produce these effects in wikitext are treated just as groups of apostrophes if they appear in titles. Other wikitext or HTML-based formatting would require characters that are not permissible in titles (see Forbidden characters above).

It is technically possible to display formatting in titles using DISPLAYTITLE. A template, {{italic title}}, exists to display the title in italics. This should be used only in special cases – currently its only common use is for taxonomic genera and species. See Naming conventions (flora); Naming conventions (fauna).

[edit] Pictorial names

Titles cannot contain images, only Unicode characters. For example, the peace symbol used in Sign “☮” the Times is a valid Unicode character (U+262E), so it can be included. However the symbol used as a name for many years by the musician Prince (see here) is not a Unicode character and so cannot appear in a page title.

[edit] Browser support limitations

See also: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (standard letters with diacritics)#Printability

Use precomposed characters when possible.

Use the text normalization NFC [1].