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

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

• $wgAllowDisplayTitle
• $wgRestrictDisplayTitle

See also

• 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