Wikipedia talk:List of pages whose correct title is not allowed by MediaWiki

Should the title of this page include the word(s) lower case or lowercase? Which does everyone prefer? -- Mattworld 03:35, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)

*NSYNC has been added, which is incorrect because the first character is not a letter at all, and the first letter is supposed to be capitalized. Wikipedia does not allow the asterisks in article titles, however. Perhaps this should be moved to Wikipedia: List of pages whose correct title is not allowed by the Wikipedia software or something less verbose. If so, The '5' Royales should be added, because it should have double quotes, not apostrophes. I know there are more, but can't think of them right now... Tuf-Kat 04:38, Dec 8, 2003 (UTC)

Yes, SETI at home comes to mind, which it should be at [[SETI@home]] Or, similarly, something like [[C++]] has to be at C Plus Plus. --Minesweeper 12:32, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I'll make the move, and add Too $hort. Tuf-Kat 18:12, Dec 10, 2003 (UTC)

C++

I don't think C++ should be spelt c++. -- Sverdrup (talk) 11:56, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

No, it should be spelt C++, but we can't have +s in page titles at the moment, else things'll go screwy. (Apologies if you already knew that, and I'm answering your question out of context, but nobody else had replied.) - IMSoP 13:34, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Name of page

MediaWiki confused me with a possible bug while I moved this page. What links here seems to have to some caching problems (though it's always hard to tell where those come from) despite my best efforts to reload the page. Please point out if I have missed any double-redirects or other problems in moving this page. --Ellmist 07:07, 21 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Spinal Tap

What's the Unicode for that? :) - Hephaestos 23:52, 8 Jan 2004 (UTC)

N, followed by U+308. Your browser displays this like -> 'n̈'. I dunno how that looks, mine just displays the combining diaeresis as a spacing one, instead. Morwen 23:54, Jan 8, 2004 (UTC)

This page specifies that it uses ISO-8859-1, not UTF-8, so it's not surprising that the character does not show up right to you or me (I'm using Safari and Firefox to check the rendered page). I would think that all output from wikimedia would be Unicode (UTF-8 or UTF-16). I also tested using the actual combining diaresis mark ('?' and '?'). --Bill 16:46, 2004 Oct 13 (UTC)

No that doesn't quite explain it because my personal Esperanto sandbox renders as UTF-8 and the diaeresis mark still does not show up correctly... I briefly checked monobook.css for a font specification but only saw that it specified a san-serif font. The rendered page must be getting a font specification from somewhere to a specific font that does not have the diaeresis mark. --Bill 17:18, 2004 Oct 13 (UTC)

Nope, it's just a browser bug! 'n̈' looks like an n with two dots on top just fine under Mozilla and Firefox, but breaks under IE; actually, IE displays the second character as a "default glyph"-type square, so there could be something font-ish involved as well. But it's definitely a browser issue, not a MediaWiki one. - IMSoP 19:49, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Why these titles don't work

Are there technical reasons why these titles are not allowed? It seems rather bizarre that certain characters can't be in titles -- I'm sure there are plenty of valid reasons to automatically capitalize the first letter, but the rest of them... Would putting the + in article titles really break something, or is it just developmental intertia? Tuf-Kat 08:49, Mar 12, 2004 (UTC)

The short answer is "yes". The long answer varies depending what character is being disallowed, but here are a few reasons:

+ is used in web addresses to represent a space (e.g. when you type more than one word into a search engine). Using it in article names would potentially make parts of the system see their name wrong.
@ also has a special meaning in URLs, as a way of adding a username and password, and would have even more drastic consequences.
[, ], {, }, |, and probably some of the others listed at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (technical restrictions) have special meaning within Wikipedia's syntax, which are processed before the pagename is determined. (e.g. [[{{CURRENTYEAR}}]] points at 2024, not a page called {{CURRENTYEAR}}.
$, \, ", ` (and some others) have special meaning in other bits of the software, and allowing them would create potential security flaws which would take a lot of effort to insure against.
Really weird characters, like the Spinal Tap case above, can only be represented using Unicode, whereas the English Wikipedia just uses ISO 8859-1 (I think). I guess that one's partly just "developmental inertia", arguably.

HTH - IMSoP 13:34, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. Tuf-Kat

Stopping forced capitalization (from Village Pump)

[moved from Wikipedia:Village pump by IMSoP 23:38, 17 Mar 2004 (UTC)]

The Pillows (a Japanese rock band) should actually be "the pillows" -- I've never seen their name capitalized on any official source. It would be easy enough to change this in the text, and I was about to, but first I tried to move the article to "the pillows." However, Wikipedia forced the capitalization of the T: "The pillows." Is there a way to force Wikipedia to keep that T lowercase? Garrett Albright 04:44, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Nope. There's a page on Wikipedia somewhere that lists the articles that can't have a proper name because of Wikipedia limitations. Other things like the iMac and the iPod are also incorrect, but so is L'Arc~en~Ciel (can't use tildes). RadicalBender 04:46, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Yes it can. L'Arc~en~Ciel is entirely possible. It's currently under review for a move, as the destination (with ~s) already exists. - ^demon 18:25, 10 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Take a gander at Wikipedia:List of pages whose correct title is not allowed by MediaWiki. --Minesweeper 04:53, Mar 12, 2004 (UTC)

Created template

I have created the template {{wrongtitle}}: {wrongtitle} I have put it on C Plus Plus and will let it bake a bit to see if people like it before moving it onto other articles on this page (and mentioning the template on the page itself). Feel free to edit it at Template:wrongtitle. --TreyHarris 16:52, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)

It's possible to pass on parameters to the template and use them, e.g. {{idealtitle|pH}} would expand to something like:

pH is the correct title, but can't be used to due to technical limitations. The text below uses the correct terminology.

-User:Docu

I have made this change and filled it in for the articles using the template. You can say {{wrongtitle|title=correctTitle}} to get: {wrongtitle|title=correctTitle} --TreyHarris 22:49, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Janacek

What about Leoš Janácek, currently at Leos Janacek? Hyacinth 22:04, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Computer command-line programs

bash

The bash home page does not seem to be consistent on whether the correct usage is BASH, Bash, or bash. I think we can remove bash from the list since Bash is an accepted spelling. --Bill 16:15, 2004 Oct 13 (UTC)

A Proposal

This idea is in my head for some time: the real problem is the title shown in the article, not in the URL. The title is automatically set from the article name in the URL and the first letter is capitalized. While this is normally perfect and should not be changed due to incompatibilities, dangling links a.s.o, it could help if the title can be set or suppressed in the article contents. My proposal would be to be able to set the title in an article, so one could create an article named C plus plus and show a title C++. One could create a tag <tilte>C++</title> which suppresses the normal title generated and replaces this with the contents of the title tag. Or one could create a __NOTITLE__ magic (like __NOTOC__) and use =....= (first entry inside toc) as title. This would lead to

free setting of title inside article including small letter at the beginning, all characters
No change in links, since the URL, Linkrefs is unchanged. One links to [[C plus plus|C++]] (C++) as usual an gets an article with C++ as title
All articles can show the correct title, if it is expressible in wikipedia syntax, even in foreign languages
only addition of NOTITLE and and correct heading in article required

The C++ article would start like this

__NOTITLE__
=C++=
...

--Hubi 11:25, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Thousands of articles

The "What links here" appears to have a limit of 500 articles. Any way to modify the function in case thousands of Wikipedia articles have the template?? Georgia guy 14:49, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

It's not a hard limit; you can get the next 500 by clicking on the text "next 500". I have added Category:Articles with unsupported titles to the template, so you can use that instead, if you prefer. (It's sorted alphabetically, which is nicer.) -- Beland 05:51, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]