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Wikipedia:Naming conventions (technical

restrictions)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Wikipedia:Technical restrictions" redirects here. For technical restrictions on editing privileges,
see Wikipedia:User access levels. For technical restrictions on external links, see WP:Spam
blacklist. For technical restrictions of MediaWiki template mechanism, see Wikipedia:Template
limits.

This guideline documents an English Wikipedia naming

convention.
Shortcut
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  WP:NCTR
reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.

Article titles

All naming conventions

 Category:Wikipedia naming conventions

Nature

 Fauna (animals)

 Flora (plants)

Arts · Entertainment · Media

 Books

 Broadcasting

 Comics

 Films

 Manuscripts

 Music

 Operas

 Television
  Video games

 Visual arts

People

 Baseball players

 Clergy

 Ethnicities

 Ancient Romans

 Royalty and nobility

 Sportspeople

Science · Technology · Transport

 Astronomy

 Chemistry

 Medicine

 Programming languages

 Aircraft

 Ships

Government · Politics · Law

 Government and legislation

 Legal

 Political parties

Organizations

 Companies

 Latter Day Saints

 Sports teams

Numbers · Dates

 Numbers and dates

Places · Events
  Places

 Events

Lists · Categories

 Categories

 Lists

 Long lists

 Stub sorting

Language/country-specific

 Writing systems

 All languages

 All countries

 Armenian

 Burmese

 Chinese

 German

 Greek

 Hebrew

 Indic

 Irish

 Japanese

 Korean

 Macedonian

 Mongolian

 New Zealand

 Old Norse

 Polish

 Russian

 Tibetan

 Ukrainian
  Vietnamese

Formatting

 Capitalization

 Definite or indefinite article at beginning of name

 Plurals

 Acronyms

 Technical restrictions

 v

 t

 e

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 lowercase 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
[hide]

 1Restrictions and workarounds

 2Lowercase first letter
 3Forbidden characters
 4Other problematic characters
o 4.1Forward slashes and periods
o 4.2Spaces and underscores
o 4.3Colons
o 4.4Percent and encoded characters
o 4.5Question marks and plus signs
o 4.6Three consecutive tildes
 5Title length
 6Italics and formatting
 7Pictorial names
 8Browser support limitations
 9Restrictions on usernames

Restrictions and workarounds

Restrictions on page titles are listed at Wikipedia:Page name § Technical restrictions and
limitations. The most commonly encountered problems are that:
  titles cannot begin with a lowercase 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 lowercase 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 {{correct title}} to place a hatnote stating what the correct
title should be. This is normally necessary in the case of
restricted characters.
These templates should never be substituted (subst). To see which 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.
Before declaring the current title to be "wrong" with the "correct title" template or one of the
more specific templates, please consider whether 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).

Lowercase first letter

Shortcut

 WP:NCLOWERCASEFIRST
The MediaWiki software is configured so that a page title on the English Wikipedia (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)
 e (mathematical constant) located at E (mathematical
constant)
 pH (located at PH)
 musical.ly (located at Musical.ly)
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 title}} 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 lowercase, as at eBay. Note that it does not fix every occurrence, like the
history, edit, log pages, or the browser address bar (it only affects the page title on the
rendered HTML page and tab/window title bars).

Forbidden characters
Shortcut

 WP:NCHASHTAG
Due to clashes with wiki markup and HTML syntax, the following characters are not allowed to
be part of page titles (nor are they supported by DISPLAYTITLE):
# < > [ ] | { }

For articles about these characters, see number sign, less-

than sign, greater-than sign, bracket (covers several
characters), vertical bar.
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. C-sharp instead
of C#) or use another substitute. Note that the sharp sign ♯
(different from the keyboard # character) can be used, as
in C♯ (musical note).
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:

 {{Correct title|Correct title|reason=#}} for

titles containing #
 {{Correct title|Correct
title|reason=bracket}} for titles containing < > [ ] { }
 {{Correct title|Correct title}} for cases not
covered by any one of the above. Use {{!}} to represent
the | character within the correct title.
Examples:

 "Song #3" is located at Song 3

 #willpower is located at Willpower (will.i.am album)
 Point #1 is located at Point No. 1
 C# (programming language) is located at C Sharp
(programming language)
 Cygnus OB2 #12 is located at Cygnus OB2-12
 [A→B] Life is located at (A→B) Life
 <|°_°|> is located at Robot Face
 while(1<2) is located at while(1 Is Less Than 2)
 [title of show] is located at Title of show

Other problematic characters

Forward slashes and periods
Shortcut

 WP:NC-SLASH
In namespaces where the subpage feature is enabled, the
forward slash (/) separates a subpage name from its main
page name. However subpages are disabled in the main
namespace, so article names can contain slashes if
appropriate, as in Providence/Stoughton Line – 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 discussions. 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:Providence/Stoughton Line has a link
to Talk:Providence 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 an 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 {{correct title}} should
be used. As a result of this, the abbreviation of Slashdot, /.,
does not redirect to the page.
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 behavior (except for the last restriction)
can generally be made to display correctly using
the DISPLAYTITLE magic word.
Colons
 Shortcuts

 WP:NC-COLON
 WP:NC-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. (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 will not help. Examples:
 DK: Jungle Climber is located at DK Jungle
Climber (dk: is a prefix for the Danish Wikipedia)
 Portal: No Escape is located at Portal - No
Escape (Portal: is a prefix for Wikipedia Portal
Pages)
 Project: Mersh is located at Project
Mersh (Project: is an alias for the Wikipedia
namespace)
 V: The New Mythology Suite is located at V – The
New Mythology Suite (v: is a prefix for Wikiversity)
In the case of aliases a redirect can be created. In the third
example above 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 {{correct title|correct
title|reason=:}}.
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 &#47; and &ndash; , 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).
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.)
Three consecutive tildes
Titles cannot contain 3 or more consecutive tildes (~~~),
as strings of tildes are used to create
editors' signatures on talk pages.

Title length
Shortcut

 WP:TITLELENGTH
Titles must be fewer than 256 bytes long when encoded
in UTF-8. Therefore, the full title of When the
Pawn... cannot be displayed properly.

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 wiki markup are treated just as groups of
apostrophes if they appear in titles. Other wiki markup 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. For guidance on when this
technique should be used, see WP:ITALICTITLE.

Pictorial names
Titles cannot contain images (which would require
forbidden characters in order to be displayed),
only Unicode characters. For example, the recycling
symbol ♲is encoded in Unicode as U+2672, so it can be
included, but some proprietary emojis are not Unicode
characters and so cannot appear in a page title.

Browser support limitations

See also: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (standard letters
with diacritics) § Printability
Use precomposed characters when possible.
Use the text normalization NFC [1].

Restrictions on usernames
See also: Wikipedia:Username policy
Usernames are subject to the same technical restrictions
as page titles (see Forbidden characters above), in
particular that the symbols # < > [ ] | { } are not
allowed. There are also additional restrictions:

 The username must not already exist, including in

the single unified login system.
 It may not contain the / character.
 It may not contain various control characters, unusual
whitespace, or UTF-8 private use characters:
U+0080–U+009F, U+00A0, U+2000–U+200F,
U+2028–U+202F, U+3000, or U+E000–U+F8FF.
 It may not contain '@' or ':'
(unless $wgInvalidUsernameCharacters is
changed).
 It may not be an IP address, nor may it look like an IP
address (for example, "564.348.992.800" is not a valid
IP address, but since it looks like one, it is an invalid
username).
 It may not be one of a list of configured reserved
usernames (e.g. "MediaWiki", "default").
 It may not have a namespace or interwiki prefix.
 It may not be more than 85 bytes long.
Additionally there are the restrictions tested
by mw:Extension:AntiSpoof, which includes more
blacklisted characters (various '/'-lookalikes and
characters from unusual scripts such as Runic, Ugaritic,
and so on) and checks against mixed scripts. There are
also limitations placed by meta:Title blacklist, both the
normal blacklisting rules and those
 tagged <newaccountonly> . Among the more notable of
these are that accounts containing strings implying
advanced permissions (e.g. "admin") or impersonating
high-profile users are blocked.
Categories:
 Wikipedia naming conventions
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