JAXXWiki:Naming Restrictions |
From JAXXWiki
Some article titles cannot be named correctly due to limitations in the MediaWiki software. Currently known limitations are listed below in this article, though there may be others.
If this is the case (except for a lower case first letter as explained below), insert the following before the opening paragraph of the article:
{{wrongtitle|title=Correct Title}}
This will produce the text:
- The correct title of this article is Correct Title. It appears incorrectly here due to technical restrictions.
For a list of articles that are subject to these limitations, see Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Wrongtitle.
Contents |
Excluded characters
Characters not allowed at all in page titles
The following characters are not allowed in page titles:
# < > [ ] | { }
and the ASCII character codes 0...31 and 127.
Attempting to use disallowed characters will result in a "bad title" error.
Forward slash
The forward slash (/) is allowed, but if it is the first character of the title then normal links to it will not work as expected (they will prepend the title of the current page); a workaround is to prepend a colon, or to use a html entity as the beginning of the link, e.g. [[:/dev/null]], [[/dev/null]] or [[/dev/null]] to get to /dev/null.
Slashes elsewhere in page titles can have some largely harmless side-effects as they are treated as subpages.
Question mark
Special attention should also be paid to the use of the question mark (?).
A page like Switch? (The Price is Right pricing game) can be created as usual by following the link. However, when typed into the address bar of a browser, everything following the question mark will be cut off. For example, typing in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switch?_(The_Price_is_Right_pricing_game)
will cause you to be direct to switch. Instead, use
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switch%3F_(The_Price_is_Right_pricing_game)
This is a consequence of web server software treating everything after a ? as a query string. Whilst it would be possible to glue the url back together this would cause issues with urls like http://www.jaxxframework.org/wiki/Switch?action=edit which is equivalent with http://www.jaxxframework.org/w/index.php?title=Switch&action=edit
Plus
The symbol + can sometime confuse external links.
Spaces and underscores
In links spaces and underscores (_) are treated equivalently. The underscore is used in the url while the space is used in displayed titles. This was done to make the urls for page titles containing spaces more readable. Leading and trailing spaces and/or underscores are stripped, multiple spaces and/or underscores are squashed together to a single underscore and page names consisting of only spaces and/or underscores are not allowed at all.
Dot
Pages named . or .. and page names starting with ./ or ../ are not allowed at all.
Percent
MediaWiki supports percent-encoding in wiki links, in which a percent followed by two hexadecimal digits is converted to a single character. Thus, %25 is the same as %. Article titles containing a percent-encoded sequence are not allowed. For example, [[%2542]] should link to "%42", but doesn't link anywhere. A possible workaround would be to use non-ascii characters that look the same as the ones required; however this may create issues with older browsers.
If the two characters following the percent do not form a valid pair of hexadecimal digits, it works as expected.
Subscripts and superscripts
Currently, there is no way to directly include subscripts or superscripts in a page name, unless you use the unicode characters (which do not work well in some browsers), the way they would normally be included in an article (using <sub> and <sup>).
Attempting to workaround using Unicode subscripts and superscripts does not work on all browsers (depending also on the installed fonts and operating system), and only a small number of subscript and superscript characters exist on Unicode.
However, superscripts ¹, ², and ³ (which also exist on ISO 8859-1) do not have the same browser support limitations and can be used without problems, as long as a redirect from the title without the superscript is used.
Title length
Titles must be less than 256 characters long.
Configuration related limitations
The following limitations are not due to the MediaWiki software but to the settings of the JAXXWiki installation.
Lower case first letter
JAXXWiki is set not to accept a lower case character as the first letter of a page title. Summary: Since links can be at the start of a sentence, and thus be forced into capitalization, it only makes sense logistically to make the first character's case ambiguous.
Note: The template Template:Lowercase has been created as an alternative to Template:Wrongtitle for this limitation.
Colon
Article titles with a colon preceded by the title of a namespace are interpreted as being articles in that namespace so can't be used for articles in the main namespace. Article titles that would clash with an interwiki link prefix are also disallowed by the software (with a "bad title" error).
Also, article titles cannot begin with a :.
