Wikipedia:Manual of Style (titles)

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This guideline is a part of the English Wikipedia's Manual of Style. Use common sense in applying it; it will have occasional exceptions. Please ensure that any edits to this page reflect consensus.

Shortcuts: WP:MOSTITLE MOS:TITLE WP:MOST MOS:T

[edit] Italics

Italic type (text like this) is generally used for the following categories of titles:

• Certain scientific names
  • Genera and all lower taxa (but not higher taxa)
  • Genes (but not proteins encoded by genes)
• Court cases
• Named vehicles
  • Trains and locomotives
  • Ships
  • Ship classes
• Works of art and artifice
  • Art exhibitions
  • Books
  • Cantatas and motets
  • Comic strips and webcomics
  • Computer and video games (but not other software)
  • Feature-length films and documentaries
  • Long or epic poems
  • Multi-episode television serials
  • Musical albums
  • Musicals
  • Operas, operettas, oratorios
  • Orchestral works
  • Paintings, sculptures and other works of visual art
  • Periodicals (newspapers, journals, and magazines)
  • Plays
  • Television series and serials

Abbreviations of the above should also be italicized.

[edit] Examples

To display text in italics, enclose it in double apostrophes.

• The New York Times is produced by ''The New York Times''.
• The Mary Tyler Moore Show is produced by ''[[The Mary Tyler Moore Show]]''.

If the title is also a wikilink but only part of it should be italicized, use a piped link to properly display the title.

• Casablanca is produced by ''[[Casablanca (film)|Casablanca]]''.

Without piping, this wikilink would display—and incorrectly italicize—the disambiguation term, which is not part of the film title.

• USS Toledo (CA-133) is produced by [[USS Toledo (CA-133)|USS ''Toledo'' (CA-133)]].

Ship and locomotive names are italicized, but prefixes and ID numbers are not.

• Baltimore class cruiser is produced by [[Baltimore class cruiser|''Baltimore'' class cruiser]].

Ship class names are often italicized, but ship types are not. For further information, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (ships).

[edit] Quotation marks

Italics are generally used only for titles of longer works. Titles of shorter works should be enclosed in double quotation marks ("text like this"). This particularly applies to works that exist as a smaller part of a larger work. Examples of titles which are quoted:

• Articles, essays or papers
• Chapters of a longer work
• Entries in a longer work (dictionary, encyclopedia, etc.)
• Short films and documentaries
• Single episodes of a television series
• Short poems
• Short stories
• Songs and singles

[edit] 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 Wikipedia 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:Manual of Style – Punctuation.

[edit] Examples

• "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
• "Goober and Gomer Change a Tire"
• "Do's and Don'ts of Dating"
• "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"
• "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "She's Leaving Home" appear on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
• "The Germans" is an episode of the television programme Fawlty Towers

[edit] Neither

There are a few cases in which the title should be in neither italics nor quotation marks:

• Scriptures of large, well-known religions (see details below)
• Legal or constitutional documents (example: Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms)
• Traditional games (example: hopscotch)
• Software other than games (example: iTunes)
• Commercial products other than media works (example: Cheerios)

[edit] Scripture

Scriptures of large, well-known religions should not normally be italicized. For example, the Bible, the Qur'an, the Talmud, the Bhagavad Gita, the Ādi Granth, the Book of Mormon, and the Avesta are not italicized. However, the titles of specific published versions of sacred texts should be italicized, such as the Authorized King James Version or the New Edition of the Babylonian Talmud. Many relatively obscure sacred texts are also generally italicized, particularly if the work is not likely to be well-known to the Wikipedia reader, if the work was first published in modern times and has not undergone substantial changes, or if it might be unclear that the title refers to a book. For example, The Urantia Book, The Satanic Bible, and Divine Principle should be italicized. Norse pagan scriptures, such as Gylfaginning, are also italicized.

[edit] 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.