Forum:DISPLAYTITLE working differently on different wikia

is a standard Magic Word for MediaWiki sites. The standard behavior of this Magic Word is the following:

"Format the current page's title header. The value must be equivalent to the default title: only capitalization changes and replacing spaces with underscores."

However, on many Wikia wikis this is not the case. On Community Central, Aion Wiki and possibly others, can actually change the entire text of an article's title.


 * Examples
 * Changing the displayed title of Community Central:Sandbox to 'Hello world':
 * Changing the displayed title of Aion Wiki:Community Portal to 'Test':
 * Changing the displayed title of Aion Wiki:Community Portal to 'Test':

I already reported this to Wikia several weeks ago. and was given a promise that they would "investigate that further". However, a recent blog comment by Uberfuzzy points out that Wikia has trouble fixing their problems unless the community does all the investigative work for them.

Thus, I hope that someone in the community has more of an inkling about this odd behavior of DISPLAYTITLE than Wikia does. ~ Gardimuer { ʈalk } 19:05, May 10, 2011 (UTC)


 * Can you give an example where it doesn't work the way it does in the two you listed above?


 * You can see an example of it working differently here: BioShock Wiki:Content Policy. ~ Gardimuer { ʈalk } 18:41, May 11, 2011 (UTC)


 * I would suggest doing a careful comparison of w:Special:Version (Community) and w:c:bioshock:Special:Version (Bioshock Wiki) and see if there are any notable differences. I saw some other differences, but they should not affect something like DISPLAYTITLE, but who knows. The only obvious thing I saw that only Wikia could tell you about was Internals city_id: 177 on Community and Internals city_id: 3490 on Bioshock. -- Fandyllic (talk &middot; contr) 11 May 2011 6:00 PM Pacific
 * City id is a wiki-specific tag number, which is only used for actions that have to pick one wiki out of the 300,000 total. I think it's mostly just used in wiki deletion, and wikifactory stuff. Although, both of those numbers are fairly low, so I could be wrong.
 * What is the difference on the BioShock Wiki:Content Policy page? I see the page name exactlky as it normally is.


 * The display name on that page should simply be Content. Rappy 16:53, May 12, 2011 (UTC)


 * I just noticed - the page title (document.title) is "fail" on this page, because  is on the page.

(reset indent) It's supposed to show Fail., although I am not seeing it here. Are you seeing Fail. as the title Monchoman? Rappy 17:06, May 12, 2011 (UTC)
 * @Rappy: I don't see Content, I see BioShock Wiki:Content Policy. I see fail, but only in the title bar of the browser.


 * Same. The title of the page itself should be Fail. both in the titlebar and the h1. Look at the contrast between this and this. Both are changed the same way; only one displays correctly (the first link). Rappy 17:10, May 12, 2011 (UTC)


 * Yes, the period is there. The h1 remains unchanged, however.
 * To me, there doesn't seem to be a pattern on whether the thing works, sorta works, or doesn't work at all.
 * That's kind of the point of this forum thread. =) Rappy 17:17, May 12, 2011 (UTC)
 * What I mean to say is sometimes it works for me and sometimes it doesn't on the same page.

Could it be that there are differences in the way it functions between different namespaces on some wikis? That could explain why on Community Central it works completely in the Project namespace but only partially in the Forum namespace. On BioShock Wiki, DISPLAYTITLE only works the MediaWiki default way, regardless of namespace. ~ Gardimuer { ʈalk } 18:54, May 12, 2011 (UTC)


 * It's possible. On Aion Wiki, however, it works on all the namespaces I have tested thus far. I doubt it would be some obscure setting that would be changed per wiki basis. Rappy 19:01, May 12, 2011 (UTC)

Guys, I think Sactage might have solves this; copy paste THIS template over, it should hopefully fix it. If not then just make yourselves a new template with that in it. Smuff[ The cake is a lie  ] 19:44, May 12, 2011 (UTC)


 * That looks a lot like Sikon's original code (converted to jQuery by joeyaa then updated by Grunny). Not only that, but you need the appropriate JS for this to work. DISPLAYTITLE was borked in MW 1.15. MW 1.16 fixed the problem. The fact that it is not working completely is a Wikia issue as vanilla MW doesn't have this same issue. Obviously using a custom template/JS would fix this issue, but that's not the main point of this forum. MW is supposed to correctly change the title via the DISPLAYTITLE magic word without the need/use of custom JS to handle it. Rappy 19:50, May 12, 2011 (UTC)


 * I have tried using a version of Template:Title from Wookiepedia with the appropriate js script in my wikia.js, but it has never worked for me on BioShock Wiki. Gardimuer { ʈalk } 20:28, May 12, 2011 (UTC)

Following Fandylic's sugestion of comparing Special:Version:

~ Gardimuer { ʈalk } 20:28, May 12, 2011 (UTC)


 * Seems like it is Special:Contact-using time. -- Fandyllic (talk &middot; contr) 13 May 2011 5:37 PM Pacific


 * I suppose I could bug them about it again, but as I mentioned in my first comment on this topic, Wikia doesn't seem to be devoting much (if any) attention to it. ~ Gardimuer { ʈalk } 02:32, May 14, 2011 (UTC)


 * Tagging Staff needed. Maybe some Wikia staff will at least say, this is so low priority they will probably never do anything about it. -- Fandyllic (talk &middot; contr) 6 Jun 2011 2:01 PM Pacific


 * Untagging. If you have specific reports, please report them. Things have changed much in the month since this was reported. I'm not saying we wont look into things, or file tickets, but we need current/clear/singular reports of this, not a forum that has trailed way off. --Uberfuzzy 07:59, June 15, 2011 (UTC)


 * Also leaving these here, please read, and make sure you understand exactly what DISPLAYTITLE does/doesnt do, and what it should be doing "by default". Not all wikis are the same.
 * http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgAllowDisplayTitle
 * http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgRestrictDisplayTitle