Page Names

Page names in DokuWiki are converted to lowercase automatically. Allowed characters are letters, digits, and in name internal position ¹⁾ the “special characters” ., - and _²⁾. All other special characters (i.e. other than letters and digits) are converted to underscores³⁾ . Colons (:) are used to identify or, if necessary, create namespaces.⁴⁾

When the deaccent config option is enabled (on by default) local and accented characters are converted to their descriptive equivalents (ü becomes ue) or deaccented versions (á becomes a).

An implicit constraint on length and beginning of pagenames is set by backlinks (first three characters must be letters).

Most templates, including the default, present the full pagename and the namespaces in its path, at the top left corner of the page. For example this page's name is pagename. ⁵⁾

When linking to other Wikis using InterWiki links the name restrictions of these Wikis apply.

Even when CamelCase or WikiWord is enabled in the config file the pagenames will remain lowercase.

Pagenames and Namespaces

You may picture namespaces as directories and pagenames as files inside them.

Therefore the a:b:c pagename can be pictured as:

root namespace (always present)
     |
     +-- 'a' namespace
           |
           +-- 'b' namespace
                 |
                 +-- 'c' pagename

Note that you can have a pagename and a namespace with the same name, at the same time, within any namespace. Back to the above example, the a:b pagename can be pictured as:

root namespace (always present)
     |
     +-- 'a' namespace
           |
           +-- 'b' pagename (not to be confused with the 'b' namespace above)

This doesn't lead to conflicts, because DokuWiki treats the final token (the one after the last colon) as the name of the page itself, while all other tokens are namespaces.

In a:b:c, a and b are namespaces while c is a page.
In a:b, a is interpreted as a namespace and b as a page.

See namespaces for more details.

¹⁾ i.e. you cannot start or end names with them, resp. they will be eliminated at start or end of names

²⁾ effectively, only ”.” and ”-” can be used since for “_” it will become unclear if the user or the system have put it, see next sentence in text

³⁾ or to ”-” if you have changed your sepchar setting

⁴⁾ you may get a “Permission Denied” error if your planned pagename contains a ”:” which would - unintentionally - result in trying to create a namespace and / or a page where you have no rights to do so; this may happen if, e.g., a German user would aim for a page title like “Geheim: DokuWiki bereitet Übernahme von MediaWiki vor” (Secret: DokuWiki prepares MediaWiki takeover) on this server; compare this to “Geheim – DokuWiki bereitet Übernahme von MediaWiki vor”

⁵⁾ This can be changed. See, for example, the useheading setting.