Wikipedia:Manual of Style (titles)

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"WP:MOSTITLE" redirects here. For the guideline on article-naming conventions, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions.
✔ This guideline is a part of the English Wikipedia's Manual of Style. Editors should follow it, except where common sense and the occasional exception will improve an article. Before editing this page, please make sure that your revision reflects consensus.
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These are guidelines for presentation of titles of things referred to within Wikipedia articles. For guidelines relating to the naming of Wikipedia articles, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions.

You may also be looking for Wikipedia:Manual of Style (lists of works).

Contents

[edit] Italics

Italics should be used for:

  • Scientific names for genera or species
  • titles of the following:
    • Art exhibitions
    • Books
    • Comic strips and webcomics
    • Computer and video games
    • Court cases
    • Films
    • Long or epic poems
    • Musical albums
    • Named trains and locomotives
    • Orchestral works
    • Paintings and other works of visual art
    • Periodicals (newspapers, journals, and magazines)
    • Plays
    • Ships
    • Ship class
    • Television series

Abbreviations of the above should also be italicized. If the title is also a link, you should usually place the italic markup outside the brackets, but see the Titanic example below for a special case.

[edit] Examples

[edit] Quotation marks

Italics are generally used for titles of longer works. Titles of shorter works (particularly those that exist as a smaller part of a larger work), such as the following, should be enclosed in double quotation marks:

  • Articles, essays or papers
  • Chapters of a longer work
  • Singular episodes of a television series
  • Short poems
  • Short stories
  • Songs and singles

[edit] Examples

The quotation marks should not be bolded in the lead section when the title of an article requires quotation marks, as they are not part of the title. See WP:Manual of Style#Punctuation.

[edit] Neither

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

[edit] Punctuation

Whether the title is in italics or quotes, added punctuation – such as a comma following a title in a series of titles, as contrasted with the novel and television series

I, Claudius

or the film

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

– belongs outside the markup, as can be seen in the series of titles above: the comma is not part of the title. For example,

Huckleberry Finn,

is not the title of the book, so referring to the book and following the reference by a comma must look like

Huckleberry Finn,

while

Huckleberry Finn,

(with the comma italicized) is a mistake.