Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Titles of works

Competing proposals for change to MOS:THETITLE

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#"The" and periodicals. There are at least four different change proposals floating around in that not very coherent thread, all predicated on the notion that it's confusing to use The New York Times but Los Angeles Times to match the actual titles of the publications (plus a claim that it's somehow too hard to figure out what the actual title of the publication is).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:15, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

MOS:TITLECAPS footnote to handle symbols substituting for words

Resolved

 – Implemented

MOS:TITLECAPS says (in part):

Always capitalized: When using title case, the following words should be capitalized:

• The first and last word of the title (e.g. A Home to Go Back To)

The proposal here is to add a foonote to address unusual cases that MOS presently does not account for, leading to some confusion about what "word" means in the above instruction:

Always capitalized: When using title case, the following words should be capitalized:

• The first and last word of the title (e.g. A Home to Go Back To)

[... rest of page ...]

Notes

[... other footnotes ...]

This follows on from a fairly extensive discussion at Talk:Sex (I'm A...)#Proposed rename – to "Sex (I'm a ...)" and "Talk:Sex (I'm a ...)", to comply with both MOS:ELLIPSIS and the actual intent of MOS:TITLECAPS (which was never to capitalize mid-sentence usage of the indefinite or definite articles, or short prepositions). It is desirable to clarify the MoS on this point before the WP:RM discussion, since MoS's lack of clarity on the question would likely result in the RM's failure to come to consensus in the first place, though the pre-RM discussion there has been productive. I've attempted to account for every variation of this sort of thing, so that no other edge cases come up without MoS addressing them already (including emoji, which are increasingly showing up in titles of songs, videos, social media posts, even articles).

The one thing it does not do is recommend that a title that starts with an ellipsis should treat that ellisis as the first word: "... and Justice for All". This is because "... And Justice for All" clearly dominates in independent source material (when it bothers to include the ellipsis at all) [1], most likely because it is more recognizable as a title that way, and it does not lead to the problem of lower-cased "... and" beginning a sentence about the song. Someone has already semi-researched matters like this [2] with Chicago Manual of Style, AP Stylebook, and usage in The New York Times, which all agree on the "What in the Name of ...?" format given above, i.e. treating "the" as not the last "word" – but without addressing a leading ellipsis. The author of that particular article suggested using "...and Justice for All". However, the case for doing that seems very weak when independent source usage is examined; the only thing it has going for it is a rather artificial consistency with ellipsis at the end (which no one would notice except in a weird two-ellipses title like "... The Lambs, and Sloths, and Carp, and Anchovies, and Orangutans, and..."), but coming at the very high cost of consistency with all other titles which of course start upper-case (even in sentence-case citations, in which a final word in a title would not). PS: Our own article on the Metallica song is at "...And Justice for All (song)", but should move to "... And Justice for All (song)", with a space, to comply with MOS:ELLIPSIS.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:53, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

This all makes perfect sense to me. I think the way you've written this is comprehensive enough to cover all the cases, or at least all the ones I can think of, so thanks for putting in the effort. I hope other editors agree with this suggested enhancement to the style guide. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 01:08, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

SMcCandlish, I sign off on this also, it's well-reasoned and well-written. Remsense留 17:57, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

I would like to encourage other editors to take the time to read through SMcCandlish's proposal above. It's actually pretty straightforward. An example would be the article title that started this discussion. "Sex (I'm A...)" should be renamed to "Sex (I'm a ...)", with a lowercase "a", and a space after the "a". The three periods stand in for a word, so it's as if "a" is not the last word of the title. The rest of the proposal elaborates on this and covers other, similar situations. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 23:25, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

No one seems to have issues with or questions about it, but it's still mid-holidays for a lot of people, and there is no hurry. I figure let this sit for a week or so longer, before implementing it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:56, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

Okay, waited another week with no issues raised, so I've implemented this, exactly as given above.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:36, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

Weird exception (that we don't need to codify a rule about)

I recently ran across a permissible (call it WP:IAR) exception to not capitalizing "a" "an" or "the" in mid-title: It is Index, A History of the, in which the first word has been transparently moved to the middle for humorous effect. Per WP:MOSBLOAT, we have no reason to codify this in MOS:TITLES even as a footnote, since there is not likely to be another case of this any time soon, and there's no evidenced dispute about it. Just thought it worth mentioning here "for the record".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:15, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

The case for newspaper articles

What case should the titles of newspaper articles be in - title or sentence? And does it make a difference if they are quoted in an article or used as a source? Examining MOS:TITLECAPS hasn't helped me decide, so perhaps that could be tweaked, to help those like me who are slow of wit. Thanks. Gog the Mild (talk) 16:46, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Either is acceptable (aiming for consistency within the article); see MOS:ALLCAPS: "Reduce newspaper headlines and other titles from all caps to title case – or to sentence case if required by the citation style established in the article." Doremo (talk) 17:50, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Example does not match article

§ Neither lists "Dangerous World Tour" as an instance where the word "Dangerous" should be italicised, but the Dangerous World Tour page does not italicise it. This page or the DWT page should be edited to reflect the other. LightNightLights (talk • contribs) 18:55, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

@LightNightLights: I've tried to remedy that omission; now okay? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:19, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

Software titles

Current guidance is MOS:NEITHER italics nor quotation marks for software other than games and MOS:ITALICTITLE for video gaming software. There is an old undiscussed complaint about the arbitrariness between the two software types. The current guidance is insufficient because often software titles are common or short words that need special formatting for proper interpretation, such as in compress: "Files compressed by compress..." Without a reasonable guidance, we're seeing other types of formatting being adopted in practice, such as in traceroute (using code tags) or ed (using small letters). I'd like to propose amending the style guide to recommend using {{codett}}, which is less visually intrusive that {{code}} and semantically richer than {{mono}}: compress, tracerout, ed. fgnievinski (talk) 14:57, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

"Mos:TITLES" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Mos:TITLES has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 April 25 § Mos:TITLES until a consensus is reached. Utopes _{(talk / cont)} 21:49, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

Websites

The article states "Website titles may or may not be italicized in running text depending on the type of site and what kind of content it features." Well, that couldn't be more vague! I am editing an article with a website that is mentioned many times. I don't want to mention which one because I don't want us to get off on my singular situation. However, one editor italicized and as you might expect, another simply wrote it plain with capital letters. Can we get some clarification, or if that was a bit of a throw-away statement because policy has not yet been established, can we have that discussion now and come up with a consensus to establish policy on how to handle websites? I have no opinion (which is very rare), but I am a black/white kind of person. I like rules to be established and then I like to follow them, whatever they are. Who wants to start the conversation? MarydaleEd (talk) 02:00, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

Punctuation and spacing in non-English titles

MOS:CONFORM says:

When quoting text from non-English languages, the outer punctuation should follow the Manual of Style for English quote marks. If there are nested quotations, follow the rules for correct punctuation in that language.

Does this apply to non-English titles of minor works (including in citation templates?). For example, see this discussion about whether a French title in a ref should have spacing before colons and use guillemets (« ») instead of single quotes? --Yodin^T 13:23, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

In cs1|2 citation templates ({{cite web}} in this example – should be {{cite news}}) the use of html entities is discouraged because such use corrupts the citation's metadata; see Template:Cite web § COinS. As it reads in the current version (permalink), the value in |title= corrupts the citation's metadata because it includes multiple   entities:

Aya Nakamura : " On dit que je suis hautaine. Moi, je vois ça comme de l'assurance "

The example template appears to have been added at this edit 28 November 2023. In that addition, the source article title is:

Aya Nakamura : « On dit que je suis hautaine. Moi, je vois ça comme de l’assurance »

That agrees with the title provided by the source. I can see no reason for the removal/replacement of the guillemets. The only change that needs be made to that title is to convert the curly apostrophe to typewriter apostrophe per WP:CURLY.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 14:05, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

Thanks @Trappist the monk: would using actual non non-breaking space unicode character " " be acceptable (as French Wikipedia recommends), or would the HTML renderer turn these into HTML entities anyway, and break the COinS metadata in the same way? --Yodin^T 15:03, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

This is the English Wikipedia. MOS:NBSP applies:

Insert non-breaking and thin spaces as named character reference (  or  ), or as templates that generate these ({{nbsp}}, {{thinsp}}), and never by entering them directly into the edit window from the keyboard – they are visually indistinguishable from regular spaces, and later editors will be unable to see what they are.

In keeping with that, cs1|2 checks |title= for nbsp and other invisible characters. When found, cs1|2 emits an error message:

{{cite book |title=Title with nbsp}}

Title with nbsp. {{cite book}}: no-break space character in |title= at position 6 (help)

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:26, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

Mention of podcasts?

I was surprised, while doing a GA review where the article had titles of podcasts in quotation marks, to find that the MOS contains no mention of the word podcast anywhere that I could point the nominator to. {{Infobox podcast}} and common usage italicize the titles of these works. I don't generally think this would be controversial, but I shouldn't be the one to add it or similar.

My proposed edit would change

• Television and radio programs, specials, shows, series and serials

to

• Television and radio programs, specials, shows, series and serials, including podcasts

Thoughts welcome. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 16:26, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

I agree that this shouldn't be controversial. A podcast is a major work which contains episodes which are minor works. Gonnym (talk) 17:19, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Italicising short advertisement films

What's preferred as far as italics vs quotes when it comes to, say, 30-60 second films made for use as advertisements? The manual isn't exactly clear on this and I'm not either; they could most likely be considered "minor works" since they're just commercials, but some could also be considered "short films" depending on how artistic they're considered. There aren't a huge amount of those with their own articles, but the ones there are seem very inconsistent, half of them are italicised while half are in quote marks. Whether or not they could be considered part of a series seems to have no influence on this. Ringtail Raider (talk) 06:02, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

I don't have an answer for you, but just want to comment on they could most likely be considered "minor works" since they're just commercials, a minor work is classified as works that exist as a smaller part of a larger work. So if the commercials are part of a bigger campaign then I guess they are a minor work, but the commercial is a stand-alone one, then major. A bit strange, I guess. Gonnym (talk) 12:29, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

Case when translating MOS:NONENGTITLEs

It says: Retain the style of the original for modern works. But it does not say that in reference to translating, say, from French into English. "Retain" there means don't change the original form. English sources invariably use title case for news articles etc. When not applying title case, the result is highly unnatural. Translating changes the original from one language to another. The logic is different. When translating a title of a French newspaper article, and French does not have English-style title casing, should the result be title-cased or not? This is not particular to French, I am just taking French as an example. —Alalch E. 16:00, 25 September 2024 (UTC)