Scratchpad:Italic titles

Changing the displayed title
It is possible to change the way a page title is displayed at the top of its page. This should only be done if the article meets the criteria for a non-standard title format, as detailed in the Article titles policy. The displayed title format is changed using the magic word DISPLAYTITLE. Under the present software configuration, only limited modifications can be made: the displayed title must still resolve to the true name of the page (i.e. if the displayed title is copied and pasted into a wikilink, the link should point to the original page). DISPLAYTITLE allows many formats: changing an initial letter to lower case, adding initial colons, changing spaces to underscores, adding a space after a namespace prefix, and adding formatting (italics, bolding, superscripts, subscripts, etc.). The forbidden characters are not supported by DISPLAYTITLE.

The syntax for DISPLAYTITLE is. However it is often applied through a template. Currently available templates are lowercase title, used on such articles as eBay and iPod, and italic title, commonly used for scientific names. Both of these templates will work irrespective of where they are placed in the wikitext, but it is normal to place them at the beginning. There are also some infoboxes (such as Infobox film) which include a built-in DISPLAYTITLE to italicize the page title.

If there is more than one instance of DISPLAYTITLE and they do not all specify the same title, only the last instance is enacted with an error message generated. For example:

Warning: Display title "Desired title" overrides earlier display title "Desired title".

The preferred solution to this problem is to remove or disable one of the instances of DISPLAYTITLE. If this is not possible due to template limitations, etc., then the error message may be suppressed by using the "noerror" parameter, i.e. . If you use this technique, you should be aware that the last instance of DISPLAYTITLE overrides the previous ones. This means that if the DISPLAYTITLE automatically generated by an infobox template needs to be overridden, then an explicit DISPLAYTITLE must be placed after the infobox to make it work.