Wikipedia:Naming conventions (technical restrictions)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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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 the occasional exception. Any substantive edit to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page. |
Some article titles are not displayed correctly because of limitations in the original MediaWiki software. Usually, a template can be added to the article to resolve the problem. For example, {{lowercase}} makes EBay display as "eBay", IPod as "iPod", etc.
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).
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[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] Characters totally forbidden in page titles
The following characters cannot be used in page titles:
# < > [ ] | { }
Due to web server restrictions and protocols, it is necessary to disallow the use of certain characters in page titles. Often, you can simply remove these 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.
Related templates:
{{pound|Correct title}}
{{bracketed|Correct title}}
{{pipe in title|Correct title}}
{{wrongtitle|Correct title}}
[edit] Characters with some problems but not totally forbidden
[edit] Forward slash
The forward slash (/) is used to separate subpages from their main pages. While subpages are now disabled in the main namespace, there are still a couple of side effects of the system to support them that affect articles. Note that existing pages where the title contains a slash do not need to be moved, renamed, or otherwise fixed; the only side-effect is the automatic link at the top of the talk page.
- If a / 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]], [[/dev/null]] or [[/dev/null]] to get to /dev/null.
- 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 will have a subpage level-up link at the top (for example Talk:R/2004 S 1 has a link to Talk:R at the top).
See Wikipedia:Articles with slashes in title for a list of such articles.
[edit] Question mark
Special attention should also be paid to the use of the question mark (?).
A page like Switch? can be created as usual by following the link. However, when typed into the address bar of a browser, the question mark and everything following the question mark will be cut off. For example, typing in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switch?
will cause you to be directed to switch. Instead, use
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switch%3F
This is a consequence of web server software treating everything after a ? as a query string. Whilst it would be possible to glue the URL back together, this would cause issues with URLs like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switch?action=edit, which is equivalent to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Switch&action=edit.
[edit] Plus
The symbol + can sometimes cause problems when used in URLs. In URLs using the "/wiki/Article_name" notation the plus sign has no special meaning, but in the "/w/index.php?title=Article_name" notation (and in the parts of an URL after the question mark in general) the plus sign is replaced with a space. To get an actual plus sign, it must be encoded as "%2B".
For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C++ will lead to the article on the C++ programming language, but http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=C++ will lead to C instead (as the trailing spaces are stripped). To avoid this, use http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=C%2B%2B instead.
[edit] Spaces and underscores
In links spaces and underscores (_) are treated equivalently. The underscore is used in the url while the space is used in displayed titles. This was done to make the urls for page titles containing spaces more readable. Leading and trailing spaces and/or underscores are stripped, multiple spaces and/or underscores are squashed together to a single underscore, and page names consisting of only spaces and/or underscores are not allowed at all.
Use {{pound|title=Correct title}} to correct this.
[edit] Dot
Pages named . or .. and page names starting with ./ or ../ are not allowed at all.
Pages with dots and slashes combined in certain other ways are allowed by MediaWiki, but there are major problems with links to them (probably caused by path parsing code in browsers, but see also #Forward_slash above).
[edit] Percent
MediaWiki supports percent-encoding in wiki links, in which a percent followed by two hexadecimal digits is converted to a single character. Thus, %25 is the same as %. Article titles containing a percent-encoded sequence are not allowed. For example, [[%2542]] should link to "%42", but doesn't link anywhere. Likewise, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%2542 gives a bad title error.
A possible workaround would be to use non-ascii characters that look the same as the ones required; however this may create issues with older browsers.
If the two characters following the percent do not form a valid pair of hexadecimal digits, it works as expected.
[edit] Colon
Article titles with a colon preceded by the title of a namespace are interpreted as being pages in that namespace so can't be used for articles in the main namespace. Article titles that would clash with an interwiki link prefix are also disallowed by the software (with a "bad title" error).
Examples of articles afflicted by this problem include:
- Help: a Day in the Life redirects to and is located at Help!: A Day in the Life (Help: is a Wikipedia namespace)
- Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! is located at Question: Are We Not Men? Answer: We Are Devo! (Q: is a shortcut to Wikiquote)
- Project: Mersh redirects to is located at Project Mersh (Project: goes to the Wikipedia namespace)
- iS: internal section is located at IS - internal section (iS is a shortcut to the Icelandic Wikipedia)
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The following is a proposed Wikipedia policy, guideline, or process. The proposal may still be in development, under discussion, or in the process of gathering consensus for adoption. Thus references or links to this page should not describe it as "policy". |
Titles which would clash with namespace prefixes in this fashion are handled by replacing the colon by a hyphen, and using the magic word {{DISPLAYTITLE:title}} to make the page display the correct headers. A cross-namespace redirect from the title with the colon should be created to allow easy linking where it is possible to do so (this is not, for instance, possible for articles using interwiki prefixes).
Before adding a new namespace or interwiki prefix, care must be taken to move any existing articles out of the way. However this is a task for server admins (developers) not wiki sysops or normal users.
Articles with this type of conflict should be tagged with {{namespace conflict}}.
Also, article titles cannot begin with a :. If the article title begins with a colon, such as :Wumpscut:, use {{wrongtitle|title=:Correct title}} to achieve the correct display. The easiest way to link to articles that begin with a colon is to add an extra colon at the beginning, for example [[::Wumpscut:]] produces :Wumpscut:.
Article names starting with two or more colons, and links starting with three or more colons are forbidden: [[:::CueCat]] produces [[:::CueCat]], and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/::CueCat produces a bad title error. Colons at the beginning of article titles are ignored. For example, [[:)]] redirects to ).
Otherwise, embedded colons are OK, for example A:.
[edit] Encoded characters and entities
HTML character entities such / and – are forbidden, even if the character they represent is allowed. Thus Gauss–Bonnet theorem is allowed as a title but Gauss–Bonnet theorem is not. Titles with HTML entities would have the same linking issues as titles with percent-encoded characters, and are forbidden for the same reason. Most cases will result in a "Bad title" error, but for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/& results in an HTTP 403 error code, and something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&%2347; will cause a redirection to & (%23 is turned into #).
[edit] Pictorial names
This symbol was for many years the proper name of Prince. MediaWiki does not support including an image in the title of an article. Such images should be replaced by Unicode characters. On the other hand, the peace symbol used in Sign “☮” the Times is a valid Unicode character (U+262E), so it can be included in this title.
[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] Browser support limitations
Use precomposed characters when possible.
Use the text normalization NFC [1].
