Guidelines for title Identification

1. Deciding on article title:

There is often more than one appropriate title for an article. In that case, editors choose the best title by consensus based on the considerations that this page explains. A good article title has the five following characteristics:

Sr.No	Characteristics	Description
1.	Recognizability	Name or subject that someone familiar with e.g. Mahatma Gandhi (Not Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi)
2.	Naturalness	Titles that readers are likely to look or search for or editors would naturally use to link to other articles
3.	Precision	The title unambiguously identifies the article's subject and distinguishes it from other subjects.
4.	Concision	The title is no longer than necessary to identify the article's subject and distinguish it from other subjects. i.e eliminating the redundancy. The goal of concision is to balance brevity with sufficient information to identify the topic to a person familiar with the general subject area.
5.	Consistency	The title is consistent with the pattern of similar articles' titles.

	Do’s	Don’ts
1.	Use sentence case	Do not enclose titles in quotes
2.	Use Singular form	Do not create subsidiary articles
3.	Avoid ambiguous abbreviations
4.	Avoid definite and indefinite articles
5.	Use nouns
6.	Follow reliable sources for names of person

1. Recognizability – The title is a name or description of the subject that someone familiar with, although not necessarily an expert in, the subject area will recognize.

The following are examples of the application of the concept of commonly used names in support of recognizability:

- Mahatma Gandhi (Not Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi)

- Germany (Not Deutschland)

- Aspirin (Not Acetylsalicylic acid)

- Windows XP (Not Windows NT 5.1)

2. Naturalness – The title is one that readers are likely to look or search for and that editors would naturally use to link to the article from other articles. Such a title usually conveys what the subject is called in English.

3. Precision – The title unambiguously identifies the article's subject and distinguishes it from other subjects.

4.Concision – The title is no longer than necessary to identify the article's subject and distinguish it from other subjects.

5. Consistency – The title is consistent with the pattern of similar articles' titles. Many of these patterns are listed (and linked) as topic-specific naming conventions on article titles, in the box above.

These should be goals, not as rules. For most topics, there is a simple and obvious title that meets these goals satisfactorily. If so, use it as a straightforward choice. However, in some cases the choice is not so obvious. It may be necessary to favor one or more of these goals over the others. This is done by consensus. For instance, the recognizable, natural, and concise title United Kingdom is preferred over the more precise title United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

When titling articles in specific fields, or with respect to particular problems, there is often previous consensus that can be used as a precedent. Look to the guideline pages referenced. When no previous consensus exists, a new consensus is established through discussion, with the above questions in mind. The choice of article titles should put the interests of readers before those of editors, and those of a general audience before those of specialists.

Redirects should be created to articles that may reasonably be searched for or linked to under two or more names (such as different spellings or former names). Conversely, a name that could refer to several different articles may require disambiguation.

Do’s and Don’ts:

Use sentence case

   Titles are written in sentence case. The initial letter of a title is almost always capitalized by default; otherwise, words are not capitalized unless they would be so in running text. When this is done, the title is simple to link to in other articles: Northwestern University offers more graduate work than a typical liberal arts college. Note that the capitalization of the initial letter is ignored in links. For initial lowercase letters, as in eBay.

Use the singular form

   Article titles are generally singular in form, e.g. Horse, not Horses. Exceptions include nouns that are always in a plural form in English (e.g. scissors or trousers) and the names of classes of objects (e.g. Arabic numerals or Bantu languages).

Avoid ambiguous abbreviations

   Abbreviations and acronyms are often ambiguous and thus should be avoided unless the subject is known primarily by its abbreviation and that abbreviation is primarily associated with the subject (e.g. PBS, NATO, Laser). It is also unnecessary to include an acronym in addition to the name in a title. Acronyms may be used for parenthetical disambiguation (e.g. Conservative Party (UK), Georgia (U.S. state)).

Avoid definite and indefinite articles

Do not place definite or indefinite articles (the, a, and an) at the beginning of titles unless they are part of a proper name (e.g. The Old Man and the Sea) or otherwise change the meaning (e.g. The Crown). They needlessly lengthen article titles and interfere with sorting and searching.

Use nouns

   Nouns and noun phrases are normally preferred over titles using other parts of speech; such a title can be the subject of the first sentence. One major exception is for titles that are quotations or titles of works: A rolling stone gathers no moss, or "Try to Remember". Adjective and verb forms (e.g. elegant, integrate) should redirect to articles titled with the corresponding noun (Elegance, Integration), although sometimes they are disambiguation pages, like Organic and Talk. Sometimes the noun corresponding to a verb is the gerund (-ing form), as in Swimming.

Do not enclose titles in quotes

   Article titles that are quotes (or song titles, etc.) are not enclosed in quotation marks (e.g. To be, or not to be is the article title, whereas "To be, or not to be" is a redirect to that article). An exception is made when the quotation marks are part of a name or title (as in the TV episode Marge Simpson in: "Screaming Yellow Honkers" or the album "Heroes" (David Bowie album)).

Do not create subsidiary articles

Do not use titles suggesting that one article forms part of another: even if an article is considered subsidiary to another (as where summary style is used), it should be named independently. For example, an article on transport in Azerbaijan should not be given a name like "Azerbaijan/Transport" or "Azerbaijan (transport)", use Transport in Azerbaijan.

Follow reliable sources for names of persons

   When deciding whether to use middle names, or initials, which means using the form most commonly used by reliable sources (e.g. John F. Kennedy, J. P. Morgan, F. Scott Fitzgerald), with few if any exceptions. See also the Concision section above.

Special characters

The following characters cannot be used at all: # < > [ ] | { } _

Also avoid using:

1.Characters not on standard keyboard

2.Quotation marks

3.Symbols

4.Characters not supported on all browsers

Italics and other formatting

Use italics when italics would be necessary in running text; for example, taxonomic names, the names of ships, the titles of books, films, and other creative works, and foreign phrases are italicized both in ordinary text and in article titles.

Standard English and trademarks

Article titles follow standard English text formatting in the case of trademarks, unless the trademarked spelling is demonstrably the most common usage in sources independent of the owner of the trademark. Items in full or partial uppercase (such as Invader ZIM) should have standard capitalization (Invader Zim); however, if the name is ambiguous, and one meaning is usually capitalized, this is one possible method of disambiguation.

Exceptions include article titles with the first letter lowercase and the second letter uppercase, such as iPod and eBay.