(this was originally a post on my message wall but I felt it was better served as a blog post)
If your page's title includes characters besides the ones in the following list, rename your page.
If your page name uses ASCII characters besides
- "a-z" (lowercase letters a to z)
- "A-Z" (uppercase letters a to z)
- "0-9" (numbers 0 to 9, avoid except when used inside parenthesis as a username or when it's an Artificially Created OC)
- "(" (opening parenthesis, used to represent ownership, should otherwise be avoided)
- ")" (closing parenthesis, used to represent ownership, should otherwise be avoided)
- "_" (underscores, represents spaces on MediaWiki)
- "-" (dashes)
- "/" (forward slashes, only use on subpages such as "example/gallery". Causes linking issues when used at the start of page names.)
such as full stops ("."), colons (":"), or tildes ("~") you should strongly consider renaming your page.
yes, that means ".:fancy pagename:.". Don't do that. Why not you ask? Primarily for searchability; people will remember the page "fancy pagename", but they won't remember if you used tildes or dots or dots and tildes or equal signs or dots and equal signs and so on. They can't remember, so they can't search. As a result, no one ever manages to get back to your page and make a comment.
Also don't use spaces to split the letters of the name up like "D R E A M K E E P E R". That looks weird and no one can search for the page unless they remember spaces were used in the title. Spaces should only be used to separate words from each other, never to split a single word up for the aesthetic.
Even worse are page titles like ๐ฝ๐ฃ๐ ๐ค๐ฅ, ะโฮฑยขะบ-ัฯัั, or ๐น๐๐ถ๐๐ฝ๐๐พ๐๐น because
- ๐ฝ๐ฃ๐ ๐ค๐ฅ literally means "mathematical double-struck capital f, mathematical double-struck small r, mathematical double-struck small o, mathematical double-struck small s, mathematical double-struck small t", not Frost like you meant it to, so anyone using a screenreader is going to be extremely confused,
- congratz, now no one can search for your page, because no one can type those on a keyboard, and
- people without font support for those characters just see squares like "เงค" or "๏ฟฝ"
Forward slashes designate a directory on Unix-like systems, meaning that "Example OC/Gallery" is a subpage of "Example OC" called "Gallery". Pages that use forward slashes for other reasons, like "/~\Example OC/~\" (aesthetic), or "Foo/Bar" (forward slash acting as an alternative to "and" such as with Lily and Primrose) can cause issues such as misbehaving links.
If you really like the a e s t h e t i c and can't bear to part with it, I don't care. Do it anyway.
You can use {{DISPLAYTITLE:.:my fancy pagename:.}} to let people search for your page properly but still have a fancy display. e.g. the page's name is "my normal pagename". So you search for that, and upon loading you see the fancy page title (".:my fancy pagename:."). An irl (if you can call it that) example is Vera.
If you don't want to manually check your page's title but still want to know if it's a Good Page Title(tm), paste it into the "Your test string" box on this website. In the the "Match result" box all characters should be highlighted in blue; If there are some that aren't you need to remove or replace them per the allowed characters listed above.
This is sort of a living document; I update it when I see a new example that hasn't been covered yet or when I have a new opinion. Feel free to follow to get notified when I make changes.