This template is used on approximately 274,000 pages. To avoid major disruption and server load, any changes should be tested in the template's /sandbox or /testcases subpages, or in your own user subpage. The tested changes can be added to this page in a single edit. Consider discussing changes on the talk page before implementing them.
Template:Italic title italicizes page titles. Article titles cannot contain wiki formatting, such as '', so article titles cannot be italicized in the normal way. This template has the following effects:
Titles with no parentheses() are fully italicised:
Foo → Foo
Talk:Foo → Talk:Foo
Titles which contain parentheses are italicised before the first opening parenthesis:
Foo (bar) → Foo (bar)
Talk:Foo (bar) → Talk:Foo (bar)
Italicization can be forced on parenthesized text with the |all=yes parameter.
This template should only be used in articles that meet the criteria for italic titles given in the Article titles policy.
Meta templates which use this template should place ((Auto italic title)) in their documentation.
Location on page
If the page has a ((Short description)) template, this template should go immediately underneath it, normally as the second item on the page. If there is no ((Short description)) template, add this template at the very top of the page, above everything else. There ought to be no blank line after ((Italic title)) because that will cause an extra blank line in the page's rendered appearance.
((Italic title|noerror|string=text in title|all=yes))
Parameters
|1=: if this is set to |1=noerror, error messages are suppressed. See #Errors for more details.
|all=: if this is set to |all=yes, text in parentheses is italicized.
|string=: instead of italicizing the whole title, italicize only some specific text. For example, using |string=Ally McBeal on the page "List of Ally McBeal episodes" would result in "List of Ally McBeal episodes".
((DISPLAYTITLE:Desired Title)) can be used instead in cases not covered by the parameters, e.g. two substrings with italics, or italics combined with lowercase first character.
Errors
Sometimes you may see red error messages like this at the top of the page:
Warning: Display title "<i>Article title (disambiguation)</i>" overrides earlier display title "<i>Article title</i> (disambiguation)".
This usually means that there is another instance of ((Italic title)) on the page, usually added by one of the infoboxes. Certain infoboxes, for example ((Infobox album)), add ((Italic title)) by default. Check the template documentation for any infobox used on the page; it may have instructions about how to deal with italic titles. You may be able to adjust the italics from the infobox instead of using ((Italic title)) at the top of the article. Or if that doesn't work, you may be able to disable the infobox's italics code altogether.
If you are still having problems, try putting ((Italic title)) after the infobox. You can suppress the error message by using the code ((Italic title|noerror)).
Technical details: this template uses the DISPLAYTITLE magic word to italicize the title. Error messages can be produced by any two templates which use this magic word, and are not limited to this template. If you are unsure why you are getting a particular error message, you can ask about it at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical).
