WikiQueer:Manual of Style/Titles

This part of the Manual of Style covers the format or style used for titles of things, such as whether the title is placed in italics or quotation marks.

Italics
Italic type (text like this) is generally used for the following categories of titles:


 * Certain scientific names
 * Genera and all lower taxa (but not higher taxa)
 * Genes (but not proteins encoded by genes)
 * Court case names (Case citation or law report information is presented in normal font.)
 * Named vehicles
 * Trains and locomotives
 * Ships (ship prefixes (USS, HMS, M/S, etc.) and classification symbols (DD-820, DE-695, etc.) are not italicized)
 * Ship classes (example: Gearing class destroyer)
 * Works of art and artifice
 * Art exhibitions
 * Books
 * Cantatas and motets
 * Comic strips and webcomics
 * Computer and video games (but not other software)
 * Films (including short films) and documentaries
 * Long or epic poems
 * Musical albums
 * Musicals
 * Operas, operettas, oratorios
 * Orchestral works, but only "true titles" (e.g. Symphonie fantastique), not generic titles (e.g. Piano Concerto No. 5)
 * Paintings, sculptures and other works of visual art
 * Periodicals (newspapers, journals, and magazines)
 * Plays
 * Television and radio series and serials (individual episodes should appear in quotes)

Abbreviations of the above should also be italicized.

Website titles may or may not be italicized depending on the type of site and what kind of content it features. Online magazines, newspapers, and news sites with original content should generally be italicized (such as Salon.com or The Huffington Post). Online encyclopedias and dictionaries (like Scholarpedia or Merriam-Webster Online) should also be italicized. Other types of websites should be decided on a case-by-case basis.

Examples
To display text in italics, enclose it in double apostrophes.
 * The Mary Tyler Moore Show is produced by.
 * The New York Times is produced by.

If the title is also a wikilink but only part of it should be italicized, use a piped link to properly display the title.
 * Casablanca is produced by  or.
 * Without piping, this wikilink would display—and incorrectly italicize—the disambiguation term, which is not part of the film title.


 * USS Toledo (CA-133) is produced by.
 * Ship and locomotive names are italicized, but prefixes and ID numbers are not.


 * Baltimore-class cruiser is produced by.
 * Ship class names are often italicized, but ship types are not.

If the title of a WikiQueer article requires italicization, use a template to properly display the title.
 * Place Italic title at the top of the page.
 * The titles of WikiQueer articles for genera and species in the Tree of Life Wikiproject should be italicized. For other articles, see the Italics and other formatting guideline for acceptable usage.

Quotation marks
Italics are generally used only for titles of longer works. Titles of shorter works should be enclosed in double quotation marks ("text like this"). It particularly applies to works that exist as a smaller part of a larger work. Examples of titles which are quoted:


 * Articles, essays or papers
 * Chapters of a longer work
 * Entries in a longer work (dictionary, encyclopedia, etc.)
 * Franchises (including series of books, games, and other releases, other than serials releases such as comics and TV shows, which are italicized)
 * Single episodes of a television series or Web-distributed video series
 * Single named story lines in comic books or graphic novels
 * Short poems
 * Short stories
 * Songs and singles

Additional markup
If a title is enclosed in quotation marks, do not include the quotation marks in any additional formatting markup. For example, if a title in quotation marks is the subject of a WikiQueer article and therefore displayed in boldface in the lead section, the quotation marks should not be in boldface because they are not part of the title itself. For further information, see WikiQueer:Manual of Style – Punctuation.

Examples

 * "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
 * "Goober and Gomer Change a Tire"
 * "Do's and Don'ts of Dating"
 * "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"
 * "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "She's Leaving Home" appear on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
 * "The Germans" is an episode of the television programme Fawlty Towers

Neither
There are a few cases in which the title should be in neither italics nor quotation marks:


 * Scriptures of large, well-known religions (see details below)
 * Legal or constitutional documents
 * Traditional games
 * Software other than games
 * Commercial products other than media works
 * World's fairs and other large-scale exhibitions, which are capitalized

Scripture
Scriptures of large, well-known religions should not normally be italicized. For example, the Bible, the Quran, the Talmud, the Bhagavad Gita, the Adi Granth, the Book of Mormon, and the Avesta are not italicized. Their constituent parts, such as the Book of Ruth, the New Testament or the Gospel of Matthew are not italicized either, as such titles are generally conjectural rather than original ones. However, the titles of specific published versions of sacred texts should be italicized, such as the Authorized King James Version or the New Edition of the Babylonian Talmud. Many relatively obscure sacred texts are also generally italicized, particularly if the work is not likely to be well-known to the WikiQueer reader, if the work was first published in modern times and has not undergone substantial changes, or if it might be unclear that the title refers to a book. For example, The Urantia Book, The Satanic Bible, and Divine Principle should be italicized. Norse pagan scriptures, such as Gylfaginning, are also italicized.

Punctuation
Place adjacent punctuation outside any italics or quotation marks unless the punctuation is part of the title itself.


 * Johnson spoke often of Huckleberry Finn, his favorite novel. – The comma is not part of the title and therefore is not italicized.
 * George Orwell's well-known essay, "Politics and the English Language", condemned the hypocrisy endemic in political writing and speech. – The commas are not part of the title and are therefore outside the quotation marks.
 * O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a 2000 adventure film. – The comma and question mark are both part of the title and are therefore italicized.

Composition titles

 * see MOS:CT

English titles of compositions (books, songs, films, paintings etc.) are presented with "title-style capitalization". Titles in other languages follow the capitalization rules of the language of the title, often "sentence-style capitalization".