Page Names

Page names in DokuWiki are converted to lowercase automatically. Allowed characters are letters, digits and, within names¹⁾, the “special characters” ., - and _. All other special characters (i.e. other than letters and digits – whitespace, plus, slash, percent, etc.) are converted to underscores. Colons (:) are used to identify namespaces ²⁾.

Accented characters are converted to their descriptive equivalents (ü becomes ue) or deaccented versions (á becomes a).

An implicit constraint on pagename lengths is set by backlinks (pagenames need to have 3 chars at least to be considered in backlinks).

Most templates, including the default, present somewhere the full pagename and the namespaces in its path. The 'dokuwiki' template places it in the tab on the top right corner of the page. For example this page's name is pagename.

Note All restrictions given here for pagenames apply to media files as well!

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.