Wikipedia:Page name

This is an information page. It is not an encyclopedic article, nor one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels of consensus and vetting.

Shortcut WP:PNAME

Page name is a term that is used to refer to any page that is sent from a Wikipedia database. It does not usually refer to virtual namespaces, like Special or Media pages. The page name is normally the same as the displayed title, shown on the title line, near the top of the page, in a large font size. The displayed title can, however, be altered slightly from the page name without affecting things much; see Changing the displayed title below.

Page names are used to title pages, to navigate to pages, to search for pages, and for things like transclusion and substitution. Page names also conveniently serves as link names in wikitext, if enclosed in double square brackets, like [[Page name]]. If a page is moved, the page name will also move.

Page names are also the same as the last part of the URL of Wikipedia pages, that is, after the last slash (/); except that some translation occurs, such as spaces being replaced with underscores. For example, the Main page of Wikipedia has no title, but a link can be formed from the last part of the URL, such as [[Main_Page]] or [[Main Page]]. The MediaWiki software, which drives Wikipedia, will interpret all the possible URL characters correctly; see Spaces, underscores, and character encoding, below. But with pages in the revision-history database, URLs are different, and only the full URL can be linked; the URL includes the page name, but also an oldid value, in the permanent and unique form Page_name&oldid=value. See Help:Page history for more details.

The MediaWiki software set in motion the terminology of page names when they stored aspects of the page name in three "magic words": {{NAMESPACE}}, {{PAGENAME}}, and {{FULLPAGENAME}}. We now write that a fullpagename is "namespace:pagename" to refer to those aspects of a page name. Their content management uses namespaces, and it embeds the namespace name in the title for each page except for the main content, for which the namespace aspect is hidden. Wikipedia articles have no namespace because they are the main purpose.^[1] In Wikipedia, then an article's page name has a fullpagename of pagename, but outside the main namespace, the MediaWiki titles don't hide the namespace name, so there the page name (or fullpagename) show as namespace:pagename with a colon between. This makes a few restrictions on pagenames, which we fully cover.