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Naming conventions
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When naming an article, you should typically use a singular noun and only capitalise the first word. The main exceptions to this rule are story titles and proper nouns. You should typically try to represent the name of a thing or a story faithfully, but some technical restrictions may prevent exact duplication.
The core naming conventions of this wiki are that:
- Article names should be in singular form, not plural. So: Time Lord not Time Lords. An exception would be a group such as The Beatles, or an organisation such as the United Nations, as the official, legal names of these are in plural form.
- Unless the name of the article contains a proper noun, only the first word should be capitalised.
Technical limitations
- Ampersands (&) should never replace the word "and", unless the credit actually contains one, or the title actually uses one. For instance, the ampersands in Northwest Imaging & FX and Love & Monsters are fine, but Mad Dogs & Englishmen is incorrect, since the title is Mad Dogs and Englishmen. (The deciding forum discussion is here.)
- Article names cannot contain the characters |, #, <, >, {, }, [, and ]. For advice about how to handle a page which should include one of these characters, like 2|entertain or Man #1, please see this discussion.
- While article names can usually contain a colon (:), they cannot always do so, if the words preceding the colon have a meaning. The most pertinent example on this wiki are the various Big Finish articles beginning with Project:, like Project: Twilight. Because Project: refers to the project namespace, what you're really saying if you type [[Project: Twilight]]'' is equivalent to typing [[Tardis: Twilight]]. Thus, in order to properly represent the title of the audio on this wiki, you have to rather laboriously type ''[[Project Twilight (audio story)|Project: Twilight]]'' to italicise and pipe trick it to the correct name. But the proper page name must be sans colon.
- Articles cannot have more than one set of parentheses, because this inhibits proper pipe tricking, which a number of automatic templates depend upon. A good example is The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot (TV story). Since the (TV story) is necessary to the operation of many templates, the (ish) must be dropped, in favour of the following approximation: The Fiveish Doctors Reboot (TV story). Likewise, there are cases in which multiple colons (:) or hyphens (-) may be restricted.
- It is technically possible for article titles to contain single quotation marks, and it usually works without incident. After all, a single quotation mark is simply an apostrophe. However, it's recommended that single quotation marks be replaced by double quotation marks, especially when the article title needs to be italicised. This is because the single quotation mark has a meaning in wiki markup, whereas the double quotation mark does not.