Draft:Character limitations
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NUTSHELL: This page outlines tools and guidance for handling character limitations in page titles.
Due to the MediaWiki software that Bulbapedia operates on, the following characters cannot be used in article titles: # < > [ ] | { } _. Other characters such as colons and periods may also cause technical issues in certain contexts. The {{Wrongtitle}} template should be used at the top of the page when the title is inaccurate due to these restrictions.
Display title
The {{DISPLAYTITLE}} magic word can be used to apply specific formatting to a page's display title. Some templates automatically apply formatting this way when placed on the page. For example, the page Pokémon Horizons: The Series uses an italicized title; since italics cannot be applied directly to the page title, this is handled by placing {{italics}} at the top of the page. If the desired title for an article cannot be represented with {{DISPLAYTITLE}}, place {{Wrongtitle}} at the top of the page.
Note that the first letter of page titles is displayed with a capital letter by default. Place the {{lowercase}} template on the page to make the first letter display as lowercase instead, such as for e-Reader. Additionally, while not a valid character in the raw page title, the underscore _ can still be displayed in place of a space or at the beginning or end of a page title via {{DISPLAYTITLE}}.
Redirects
When non-standard characters not found on most keyboards are included in a title, create redirects for ease of search. For example, the article Nintendo Switch – OLED Model uses an en dash – in its title, so a redirect was created from Nintendo Switch - OLED Model, which uses the more common hyphen-minus symbol -.
Note that some characters, like the e-acute é, do not require redirects with a regular e, as the MediaWiki software will treat them as the same character. In these cases, a redirect is not needed.
Link templates
In cases where titles use unusual formatting that cannot be typed out conveniently, a link template may be used. For instance, the template {{DetPikMov}} displays the title of the Detective Pikachu movie as follows: POKÉMON Detective Pikachu. Similarly, the {{aniseries}} template can be used to link to a specific series of the animated series while automatically applying italics, e.g. {{aniseries|HZ}} will display Pokémon Horizons: The Series.
For a full list of link templates, see Help:Link templates.