Category talk:Pages with disallowed DISPLAYTITLE modifications

Cleanup question[edit]

Lots of user pages are in this category either because of

Not knowing that DISPLAYTITLE is restricted.
Page is a draft for the article space. DISPLAYTITLE becomes valid when moved to the article space.

The first one is pretty easy to solve by removing DISPLAYTITLE and notify the user of it.

The second case is more problematic. There seems to be a lot of user pages in this case that never becomes an actual article and becomes stale instead. However, removing DISPLAYTITLE outright is not a good option because they are part of the draft and there are legit uses of DISPLAYTITLE in the article space.

I am not so sure how we should handle the second case, or whether we should even care about cleaning it up in the first place. Any ideas?

– Ase1este^t@lk_c0ntribs 17:55, 16 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

By far the most common legit use is italicising all or part of the title, which is usually better done using {{italic title}}. --bdijkstra (talk) 00:23, 17 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Replacing manual DISPLAYTITLES {{italic title}} does work if the title contains the intended article name, but some of the pages does not, like using the sandbox page as a draft. Attempting to use {{italic title}} results in the page being added to Category:Pages using italic title with no matching string instead. – Ase1este^t@lk_c0ntribs 01:21, 17 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

There are also other cases to consider. A new template that is a wrapper around DISPLAYTITLE that only uses DISPLAYTITLE if the article is in the article space should solve most if not all cases. I am not sure whether there is a better idea than this though. – Ase1este^t@lk_c0ntribs 01:27, 17 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Aseleste: Two common mis-uses I've seen is people trying to "rename" their sandbox and people trying to get rid of the "Draft:" or "User:usernamegoeshere/" in the page title. In these cases, well, removal is the best option.

In cases where italics or other changes are desirable and a template like {{infobox book}} or {{italic title}} won't do the trick, prepending the {{NAMESPACE}}: Magic Word to the intended DISPLAYTITLE works, but only for "Draft:" pages not user-space drafts (the user's username causes a title-mismatch). Better yet, it doesn't break anything if the page is moved back and forth between "Draft:" and mainspace.

Example: {{DISPLAYTITLE:{{NAMESPACE}}:''Pages'' with disallowed DISPLAYTITLE modifications}} works for this "Category talk:" page. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 01:34, 17 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

For renaming, I also think removal is the best, preferably with a notification on the user's talk page.

For the draft namespace, I am aware that NAMESPACE can work and is probably the best option for that.

For the user namespace, NAMESPACE won't work obviously, though with more complex wikitext it could work but it is probably hard to understand the wikitext and will likely break if the page moves to the article namespace. There are also pages that does not contain the intended name as its substring, so no amount of wikitext can make DISPLAYTITLE work there. My current idea to this is to use an #if or {{Namespace detect}} to detect the namespace and only uses DISPLAYTITLE if the page is in the article namespace. Ideally a specialized template is used so that whoever working on the draft can understand it like {{DISPLAYTITLE main|desired DISPLAYTITLE markup}}, similiar to how they use DISPLAYTITLE.

– Ase1este^t@lk_c0ntribs 02:01, 17 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Aseleste: This may be something that the Articles for Creation Helper Script used by WP:WikiProject Articles for Creation would be able to incorporate. It might be as simple as using a new template similar to {{draft categories}}, maybe Template:Draft displaytitle. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 03:01, 17 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Davidwr: That would be very helpful. This way, the same template can be used for the draft and user namespace. The template can also handle the draft namespace specially since unlike categories, DISPLAYTITLE does not need to be disabled in the draft namespace. The code for the template might be something like this:

 {{Namespace detect
  |main={{DISPLAYTITLE:{{{1|{{FULLPAGENAME}}}}}}}
  |draft={{DISPLAYTITLE:Draft:{{{1|{{PAGENAME}}}}}}}
  |other=<!-- disable DISPLAYTITLE -->
  }}

– Ase1este^t@lk_c0ntribs 03:17, 17 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I have just started this over on AfC: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Articles for creation#Draft DISPLAYTITLE template proposal. – Ase1este^t@lk_c0ntribs 03:44, 17 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Followup question[edit]

Okay, so I know there are good reasons for having this tracking category, but other than updating article titles (e.g. first letter lowercase) is there any reason to keep track of non-article space uses (valid or not)? If they work they work and if they don't they don't, but there are a LOT of pages in this category that probably fit into the "who cares" department. Am I missing something obvious, or could DISPLAYTITLE/this category be tweaked to only check NS0? Primefac (talk) 15:29, 17 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

A useful "side effect" is that, because an outsized proportion of uses are in by promotion-oriented editors, it is a useful tracking category to watchlist. That said, splitting the category by namespace would make it more useful. As an interim measure I created the collapsed "API calls by namespace including recent-first" list early last year for this and other large tracking categories. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 17:19, 17 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

{{DISPLAYTITLE}} is a magic word in MediaWiki and not a template we can edit. The category is automatically added by MediaWiki with the name determined by MediaWiki:Restricted-displaytitle-ignored. We cannot exclude namespaces or place them in other categories. I added this to the category page when the MediaWiki tracking started in 2016:

"This category is sorted by page name and ignores the namespace. This search only displays articles in the category (may include recently removed articles)."

The link makes page and edit links for the results so I prefer it over the API call. We could make a new template and ask users to use it instead of the magic word, but some users would still learn about the magic word somewhere and use it. We could then get a bot to periodically replace all uses of the magic word with the template. But I think the current situation is OK when we have ways to only show articles, or another chosen namespace. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:53, 17 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]