WikiFur:Naming conventions (technical restrictions)

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, insert the following before the opening paragraph of the article:

 

This will produce the text:



For a list of articles that are subject to these limitations, see Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Wrongtitle.

Lower case first letter
The English language encyclopedia is set not to accept a lower case character as the first letter of a page title.

For example, the article on nothingkat is found at Nothingkat.

(Note: This is due to the present lack of infrastructure for case-insensitive title matching with sane case-preserving semantics in the MediaWiki software. The first letter of any link is forced to be upper case in order to allow links to work naturally both at the beginning of a sentence and in the middle.  In the future, there may be a way added to make the initial letter appear lower case without breaking hundreds of thousands of links on the wiki or creating new avenues of abuse; however, there is currently not a way to do this.)

Characters not allowed at all in page titles
The following characters are not allowed in page titles:


 * 1) + < > [ ] | { }

and the character codes 0 through 31 and 127.

Forward slash
The following character (forward slash) is allowed, but it is impossible to link if it is the first character of the title:

/

Question mark
Special attention should also be paid to the use of the question mark (?).

A page like Apple? or Orange 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.wikifur.com/wiki/Apple?_or_Orange

will direct you to apple. Instead, use

http://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Apple%3F_or_Orange

This is a consequence of web server software treating everything after a ? as a query string. While it would be possible to glue the URL back together this would cause issues with URLs like http://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Apple?action=edit which is equivalent to http://en.wikifur.com/index.php?title=Apple&action=edit

Spaces and underscores
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
A percent followed by two hexadecimal digits is treated as an escape character, and not really allowed (%40 results in @). Attempting to escape the percent (using %25) does not work, since it (probably due to a bug) is unescaped twice (%2540 also results in @). Attempting to triple-escape (%252540) gives a "bad title" error.

If the two characters following the percent do not form a valid pair of hexadecimal digits, it works as expected. 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.

(Note: there are some pages on the database with invalid percent escapes on the title. They mostly show up on categories, and can only be fixed by a developer renaming them directly on the database.)

Namespaces
Articles whose names coincide with namespaces are problematic.