UniWiki:Manual of Style/Titles
This part of the Manual of Style covers title formats and style for works of art or artifice, such as capitalization and italics versus quotation marks.
Italics
Italic type (text like this, marked up with pairs of apostrophes as ''text like this'') should be used for the following types of names and titles, or abbreviations thereof:
Major works
- Audio albums (musical or spoken-word)
- Books, multi-volume works (e.g. encyclopedias), and booklets
- Computer and video games (but not other software)
- Films (including short films) and documentaries
- Periodicals (newspapers, journals, magazines)
- Officially named series of major works: The Lord of the Rings film series (see § Series titles below)
- Syndicated columns and other features republished regularly by others
- Television and radio programs, specials, shows, series and serials
Actual medium of publication or presentation is not a factor; a video feature only released on video tape, disc or the Internet is considered a "film" for these purposes, and likewise an e-book is a book, a webcomic is a comic strip, a music album only available from the artist on a limited-edition USB drive is a real album, a TV series only available via streaming services is still a series, etc.
Minor works (any specifically-titled subdivisions of italicized major works) are given in quotation marks. (See UniWiki:Manual of Style/Text formatting § When not to use italics for details.)
Website titles may or may not be italicized depending on the type of site and what kind of content it features. Online magazines, newspapers, and news sites with original content should generally be italicized (Salon.com or The Huffington Post). Online encyclopedias and dictionaries should also be italicized (Scholarpedia or Merriam-Webster Online). Other types of websites should be decided on a case-by-case basis.
These cases are well-established conventions recognized in most style guides. Do not apply italics to other categories or instances because you feel they are creative or artful (e.g. game or sport moves, logical arguments, "artisanal" products, schools of practice or thought, Internet memes, aphorisms etc.).
Similar cases
Some similar cases that are not titles of works include:
- Specific, named transportation vehicles (but not prefixes, classifications, identifying numbers or other designations for them), including ships, spacecraft, trains, and locomotives (but not smaller conveyances such as cars or buses). (See UniWiki:Manual of Style/Text formatting § Vessels for details.) Example: USS Baltimore (CA-68), the lead ship of the Baltimore-class cruisers.
Link formatting
To display text in italics, enclose it in double apostrophes.
- The Mary Tyler Moore Show is produced by italicizing around (not inside) the link:
''[[Wikipedia:The Mary Tyler Moore Show]]''.
If the title is also a wikilink but only part of it should be italicized, use italics around or inside a piped link to properly display the title:
- Casablanca is produced by
''[[Wikipedia:Casablanca (film)|Casablanca]]''or[[Wikipedia:Casablanca (film)|''Casablanca'']].
- Without piping, this wikilink would display – and incorrectly italicize – the disambiguation term, which is not part of the film title.
Italicizing UniWiki article titles
If the title of a UniWiki article requires italicization, use the {{DISPLAYTITLE}} magic word for more nuanced titles, as at List of Sex and the City episodes and USS Baltimore (CA-68) (see Wikipedia:Page name § Changing the displayed title for technical details).
Quotation marks
- This section is about the use of quotation marks in titles of works of art or artifice. For use of quotation marks generally, see Wikipedia:Quotation marks.
Minor works
Italics are generally used only for titles of longer works. Titles of shorter works should be enclosed in double quotation marks ("text like this"). It particularly applies to works that exist as a smaller part of a larger work. Examples of titles which are quoted but not italicized:
- Articles, essays, papers, or conference presentation notes (stand-alone or in a collected larger work): "The Dos and Don'ts of Dating Online" is an article by Phil "Dr. Phil" McGraw on his advice site.
- Chapters of a longer work (they may be labeled alternatively, e.g. sections, parts, or "books" within an actual book, etc.)
- Entries in a reference work (dictionary, encyclopedia, etc.)
- Single episodes or plot arcs of a television series or other serial audio-visual program: "The Germans" is an episode of the television programme Fawlty Towers
- Sections within a periodical, including features, departments, columns (non-syndicated), titled cartoons (not syndicated comic strips)
- Segments of a play, film, television show, etc., including named acts, skits, scenes, and the like
- Short stories (textual or graphic): "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce
- Songs, instrumentals, album tracks, singles, and other short musical compositions: The Beatles' song "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" appears on the album also titled Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
- Speeches, lectures, and conference presentations (only if given a specific title)
This convention also applies to songs, speeches, manuscripts, etc., with no known formal titles but which are conventionally referred to by lines from them as if they were titles: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.[1]
The formatting of the title of a pamphlet, which is on the divide between a booklet or short book on the one hand and a leaflet or brochure on the other - specifically, whether to italicize the title or place it within quotation marks - is left to editorial discretion at the article in question. Anything that has been assigned an ISBN or ISSN should be italicized. Another rule of thumb is that if the work is intended to stand alone and to be kept for later reference, or is likely to be seen as having merit as a stand-alone work, italicize it. Use quotation marks if the item is entirely ephemeral, trivial, or simply promotional of some other work or product.
Additional markup
If a title is enclosed in quotation marks, do not include the quotation marks in any additional formatting markup. For example, if a title in quotation marks is the subject of a UniWiki article and therefore displayed in boldface in the lead section, the quotation marks should not be in boldface because they are not part of the title itself. For further information, see Wikipedia:Punctuation.
Neither
There are cases in which the title should be in neither italics nor quotation marks (though many are capitalized):
- Legal or constitutional documents: temporary restraining order, Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Bill of Rights
- Descriptive titles: a reference to or description of a work or part of a work when not using its actual or conventional title: 137th graduation address, conference keynote speech, an introductory aria, Satie's furniture music, State of the Union address, Nixon's Checkers speech; also: the season finale of Game of Thrones, not the "Season Finale" of Game of Thrones (for media franchises such as series of books, films, etc., see § Series titles below)
- Software other than games: iTunes, traceroute, Sobig
- Commercial products other than media works Cheerios, Sportivo Coupe, Silly Putty
- World's fairs and other large-scale exhibition events (e.g. with their own grounds and spanning more than one building), and concerts or other large media events: Expo 2010, Cannes Film Festival, Burning Man, Lollapalooza
- Works named by a generic title: Symphony No. 2 by Gustav Mahler ..., Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 ..., The Magnificat by Schütz, ... the Adagio sometimes attributed to Albinoni.
- Smaller parts of larger works when they are simply numbered sequentially, and the title appears that way in the work (or a preponderance of reliable sources about the work): To Kill a Mockingbird, Part One, Chapter 1
Series titles
Descriptive titles for media franchises and fictional universes (including trilogies and other series of novels or films) should not be placed in italics or quotation marks, even when based on a character or feature of the works (Tolkien's Middle-earth writings, the Marvel and DC universes in comics, Sherlock Holmes mysteries). However, the following should be set in italics:
- Actual titles of a series declared by the author or publisher (Les Rougon-Macquart, The Chronicles of Narnia)
- The name of an individual work within the series name (The Star Wars franchise named for the Star Wars film, The Three Colors trilogy named for films with the prefix Three Colors).
Punctuation
Place adjacent punctuation outside any italics or quotation marks unless the punctuation is part of the title itself.
- Johnson spoke often of Huckleberry Finn, his favorite novel. – The comma is not part of the title and therefore is not italicized.
- George Orwell's well-known essay, "Politics and the English Language", condemned the hypocrisy endemic in political writing and speech. – The commas are not part of the title and are therefore outside the quotation marks.
- O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a 2000 adventure film. – The comma and question mark are both part of the title and are therefore italicized.
Capital letters
In English-language titles, every word except for articles, short coordinating conjunctions, or short prepositions is capitalized, as is the first or last word within the title. Capitalization of non-English titles varies by language. See UniWiki:Manual of Style/Capital letters § Composition titles for more detailed information and examples.
However, for names of UniWiki articles and of section headings in articles and pages, generally only the first word and all proper names are capitalized in titles. See UniWiki:Manual of Style/Capital letters § Composition titles for details.)
After a hyphen, follow the capitalization rule for each part independently (resulting in, e.g., The Out-of-Towners), unless reliable sources consistently do otherwise in a particular case (The History of Middle-earth).
Typographic effects
Do not attempt (with HTML, Unicode, wikimarkup, inline images, or any other method) to emulate any purely typographic effects used in titles when giving the title on the UniWiki, though an article on a work may also include a note about how it is often styled, e.g. in marketing materials. When giving such a stylization, it is not italicized or placed in quotation marks as a title; this confuses readers, who are apt to think such markup is part of the stylization when it is not.
- Right: Eve Online (stylized as EVE Online) is a space MMO published by Icelandic gaming company Crowd Control Productions.
- Wrong: EVE Online occupies a unique niche among MMOs.
For typographic effects that do not represent actual mathematical or scientific usage, it is preferable to use HTML or wiki markup, not Unicode equivalents, for superscript and subscript. When giving a stylization, do not attempt to mimic specific fonts, font size quirks, uneven letter placement, coloration, letters replaced with images, unusual upper- or lower-casing, or other visual marketing (see UniWiki:Manual of Style/Capital letters).
If a stylization that readers might look for can be created as an article title, redirect it to the actual article.
Semantic markup in titles may be preserved if it conveys meaning not just decoration, especially if omitting it would make the title difficult to understand or cause it to not copy-paste correctly:
- E=mc²: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodani (2001)
Abbreviation of long titles
- Main article: UniWiki:Manual of Style/Abbreviations
When it is impractical to keep repeating a long title in the same article, it is permissible to use a commonly-used abbreviation of it. This is usually introduced on second mention, with a parenthetical "hereafter": "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" (hereafter "ITEOTWAWKI"). Some other examples include OED for The Oxford English Dictionary, LOTR for The Lord of the Rings, and STII:TWOK for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (it is not necessary to use camel case, as in LotR, unless common usage prefers such a spelling). Such an abbreviation need not be mentioned in the lead section of the article unless the work is very commonly known by the abbreviation (e.g., GTA for the Grand Theft Auto video game series), or the lead is long and the abbreviation is needed in the lead. Such abbreviations follow the italics or quotation-marked style of the full title.
A common convention in literary and film reviews is to use the first major word or two from the title (or subtitle, for franchise works) in the same manner, e.g. Roger Ebert gave Eternal Sunshine a rating of ...", for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Although this approach may be also used on the UniWiki, it can seem unencyclopedically colloquial if used for works that have short titles to begin with. Also avoid this usage if confusion could occur, as when the abbreviated form could refer to another element in the same franchise that is also mentioned in our article (Shannara adapts literary high fantasy ... would not work well at the Wikipedia article on The Shannara Chronicles, because "Shannara" appears in the titles of the books on which the TV series is based). Abbreviated forms should be retained as-is in direct quotations (and may be clarified if necessary with square-bracketed editorial insertions).
It is common to shorten a reference to a work in a series to just its subtitle on second and later mention, or when the context already makes it clear what the overarching title is.
Notes
- ^ The title given to Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech appears in quotation marks because it is derived from a line in the speech; the title given to Nixon's Checkers speech does not appear in quotation marks because it is derived from the name of a dog mentioned in the speech, rather than a passage quoted from the speech.
