|This page documents a Basilicus policy, a widely accepted standard that all editors should normally follow. Changes made to it should reflect consensus.|
The title of an article should be based on the article titles policy. The principal criteria are that a title be recognizable (as a name or description of the topic), natural, sufficiently precise, concise, and consistent with the titles of related articles. If these criteria are in conflict, they need to be balanced against one another.
The following points are critical:
- Use "sentence case", not "title case"; that is, the initial letter of a title is capitalized (except in rare cases, such as pH). Otherwise, capital letters are used only where they would be used in a normal sentence (Cresian calendar, not Cresian Calendar).
- Do not use A, An, or The as the first word (Congress of Cresia, not The Congress of Cresia), unless by convention it is an inseparable part of a name (The Hague) or it is part of the title of a work (A Clockwork Orange, The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien).
- Titles should normally be nouns or noun phrases: Early life, not In early life.
- The final visible character should not be a punctuation mark unless it is part of a name (Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!) or an abbreviation (Inverness City F.C.), or a closing round bracket or quotation mark is required (Cresia (region)).
The Manual of Style applies to all parts of an article, including the title.
Only proper nouns and proper titles should be capitalized. For example:
- Proper noun: Cresian System, not Cresian system
- "System" is part of the proper noun "Cresian System".
- Common noun: Cresia (region), not Cresia (Region)
- "region" is not part of the proper noun "Cresia".
- Proper title: Main Page, not Main page
- "Main Page" is the proper title of the homepage of Basilicus.
- Common title: Category:Basilicus policies and guidelines, not Category:Basilicus Policies and Guidelines
- "Basilicus policies and guidelines" is not a proper title.
The first letter is automatically capitalized.