Manual:Page title
A page title is the title of a page. It is stored in the page table. When one is specifying a certain page by typing it into the search box, or putting it in an article as a wikilink, the input consists of a Namespace (or no namespace, if it's mainspace) followed by a colon (optional if it's mainspace) and then the database key. For example, Manual:Page table specifies the Manual: namespace and the page table database key.
The page title is case-sensitive except the first character.
You can set $wgCapitalLinks
to false to make the first character case-sensitive.
However it's currently impossible to make the page title completely case-insensitive (phab:T2453).
Invalid page titles[edit]
The following are not valid as page titles:
- Base names beginning with a lower-case letter (in any alphabet), depending on the setting of
$wgCapitalLinks
. Note that a title can be displayed with an initial lower-case letter, using DISPLAYTITLE or the {{lowercase title}} template. This does not fix every occurrence, like the history, edit, or log pages (phab:T55566) - or the browser address bar (phab:T63851), but only affects the page title on the rendered HTML page and tab/window title bars. - Titles starting with a lowercase letter are automatically converted to leading uppercase
- Titles containing the characters
# < > [ ] | { } _
(which have special meanings in Wiki syntax), the non-printable ASCII characters 0–31, the "delete" character 127, or HTML character codes such as &. Note that the plus sign + is allowed in page titles, although in the default setup for MediaWiki it is not. This is configured by setting the value of$wgLegalTitleChars
in LocalSettings.php . - Special characters like
( ) & +
are translated into their equivalent %-hex notation - Base names beginning with a colon (:).
- Base names equal to "." or "..", or beginning "./" or "../", or containing "/./" or "/../", or ending "/." or "/..".
- Base names whose length exceeds 255 bytes. Be aware that non-ASCII characters may take up to four bytes in UTF-8 encoding, so the total number of characters you can fit into a title may be less than 255.
- Titles containing "Talk:" in front of a namespace.
- Titles with an invalid UTF-8 sequence.
- Titles beginning with a namespace alias (WP:, WT:, Project:, Image:, on Wikipedia). For example, the name Project:About is not possible if Project: is set as a namespace alias.
- Titles beginning with a prefix that refers to another project, including other language Wikipedias, e.g. "fr:" (see Interwiki links and Interlanguage links ). For example, an article about the album "Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!" cannot have that exact name, as the "q:" prefix leads to Wikiquote. (The restriction includes the prefixes "w:" and "en:" that refer to English Wikipedia itself. This self-reference restriction does not apply on all projects. For example, Wikiquote supports titles beginning "Q:".) A list of all these interwiki prefixes can be found on Special:Interwiki.
- Titles beginning with any non-standard capitalization of a namespace prefix, alias or interwiki/interlanguage prefix, or any of these with a space (underscore) before or after the colon. For example, it is not possible for a title to begin such as: "HELP:", "HeLp:", "Help :", "Help:_", and the like.
- Titles consisting of only a namespace prefix, with nothing after the colon.
- Titles beginning or ending with a space (underscore), or containing two or more consecutive spaces (underscores).
- Titles containing 3 or more consecutive tildes. (~~~)
- 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).
Note also that it is not possible for editors to create page titles beginning with the virtual namespace prefixes Media: and Special:.
Related configuration settings[edit]
See also[edit]
- Manual:Page_table#page_title
- Manual:Title.php
- w:Wikipedia:Page name#Invalid page_names
- w:Wikipedia:Naming conventions_(technical restrictions)
- Help:Magic words – The page title can be used in wiki text programmatically without knowing what it is using wiki code (e.g. {{PAGENAME}}) and suchlike