Adisplay title is the preferred title associated with a wiki page.It typically provides the string of text that is shown in the title header of a page.It is conceptually and technically distinct from thepage title, i.e. the title by which a page is recorded and made accessible over the web.By default, a display title is synonymous with the page title but can be customised to suit your needs.

Different wikis use different naming conventions for the page title and display title.For instance, the convention on a site like Wikipedia is that the page title of an article should be descriptive of the subject, while the display title may be customised only to take on some formatting that page titles don't support (lowercase initial, italics, superscript).Other wikis may prefer to use short, hash-generated page titles and leave the descriptive part to the display title only.Either approach is possible.

• The display title is usually visible as the title header of a page. A more reliable method of checking it, however, is by looking at the summary table that is usually known asPage information.
• Unless the option$wgAllowDisplayTitle is set tofalse, the magic wordDISPLAYTITLE lets you set a custom display title for a page. To an extent, it allows for HTML formatting options such as italics.
  • In addition, the main page's display title can be overridden with theMainpage-title/Mainpage-title-loggedinsystem messages, described atManual:Main Page.

Configuration settings:

• The display title is stored in rows of thepage_props table wherepp_propname equals'displaytitle'. Its value is stored inpp_value.
• It can be retrieved in PHP. See e.g.
  • PageProps::getProperties() - PageProps can be called usingMediaWikiServices.
  • TheParserOutput class offers the methodsgetDisplayTitle() andgetPageProperties().
• It can be set in theParserOutput usingsetDisplayTitle() orsetPageProperty().
• It can be retrieved over the API. See e.g.
  • API:Pageprops

Being able to store a custom display title does not automatically mean it is shown inpage links (e.g.[[Mypagehere]]). This is usually achieved by installing theDisplayTitle extension. If a dependency on this extension happens to be undesirable, extensions could similarly use theHtmlPageLinkRendererBegin hook.

• Extension:DisplayTitle - builds on the use of the magic word DISPLAYTITLE by making sure that a wiki link to a page uses the display title as the default link text. It also provides a parser function to query a page's display title as well as an equivalent function for use in Lua.
• Extension:PageProperties - lets you edit the display title and other page properties with the aid of a form
• Extension:Semantic MediaWiki - builds on DISPLAYTITLE by automatically assigning the display title to a special property called "Display title of". Seehttps://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Display_title

• MediaWiki concepts