Article naming conventions

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This page describes the rules you must follow when creating new articles or moving existing ones.

In general, try to use Wikipedia's Naming conventions except when these differ from what is described below.

Specifying the application

For some articles, you should specify the application to which the article applies by putting "Firefox", "Thunderbird", or "Mozilla Suite" after a dash at the end of the name of the article. Please do this only if the article applies exlusively to one application and needs to be distinguished from similarly titled articles for other applications (see examples below). Do not include the application name if the article applies to two or more applications, or if the article is about a feature that exists in only one application. If you are not sure if the application name should be included in the title, just leave it out and someone else can add it later if necessary.

Examples where the application name is included in the article title:

Examples where the application name is not included in the article title:

Note: this is a change from the old naming convention, in which article titles indicated whether articles were "FAQs", "Tips", or "Issues" (e.g., Thunderbird : FAQs : Global Inbox). Many of the existing articles were created under the old naming system and have not yet been renamed. Please do not follow this old naming system when creating new articles.

Application names

Application name links should only use the application name, such as "Firefox", "Thunderbird", "Nvu", "Sunbird", or "Camino" and not "Mozilla Firefox", "Mozilla Thunderbird" or "Linspire Nvu". The exception is the Mozilla Suite, which should be linked to and called "Mozilla Suite", not "Mozilla", "Suite", or any other name.

  • Bad: [[Bookmarks - Mozilla Firefox]]
  • Bad: [[Profile locked - Suite]]

Layout issues or other things should use Gecko as the application name.

Use short titles, with key words at the beginning

When possible, use short page titles. There's no need for a link to include the entire grammatically complete form of a question, especially when a few descriptive words would suffice.

  • Good: [[Send page or link - Mozilla Suite]]
  • Bad: [[Use Send Page or Send Link to tell your friends about a great webpage - Mozilla Suite]]

Try to avoid putting a word like "using" or "changing" at the beginning of the title when title will work fine without it. This will help as we move to categories, in which articles will be sorted alphabetically by title.

  • OK: [[Using keyword searches]]
  • Better: [[Keyword searches]]

Capitalization

Do not capitalize The First Letter of Each Main Word in the Title.

  • Good: [[Importing and exporting your mail]]
  • Bad: [[Importing and Exporting Your Mail]]

Exception: terms such as Search Bar and Junk Mail Controls, which refer to named product features and function as proper nouns, should be capitalized in article titles. See In-house style for a list of common terms to be capitalized.

Punctuation marks or symbols

Avoid using punctuation marks or typographical symbols in article names, since exclamation points, parentheses, apostrophes, commas, question marks, and other symbols may cause broken links when the article's URL is used on web forums or in mail and newsgroup messages, unless percent-encoding is used. [1]

  • Bad: [[Yahoo! Music videos don't work]]
  • Bad: [[Standard diagnostic (Thunderbird)]]

Exceptions include article names that contain file names (e.g., [[Corrupt localstore.rdf]]), articles named for preferences or about:protocols (e.g., [[about:config]]), and when using a dash (hyphen) as in those cases noted above when specifying the application.