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}} 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 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:.

Special cases

• By default, titles starting with a lowercase letter are automatically converted to leading uppercase. Alternative per-namespace configurations are possible. See $wgCapitalLinks and $wgCapitalLinkOverrides.
• The magic words PAGENAME and FULLPAGENAME return encoded strings in which some types of characters, such as apostrophes, are converted to numeric character sequences. This means that while apostrophes are perfectly valid in page names, you may encounter issues when reusing those strings for some purpose. One simple way to fix this is wrapping the pagename in from the ParserFunctions extension.

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