Last modified: 2014-05-01 11:18:38 UTC
When a title of a page is in LTR characters, it may be displayed incorrectly, because the punctuation will jump to the wrong end of the line. For proper display on the page itself it can be solved by using something like [[Template:Correct title]], but when the title is listed in a category, this template has no effect. So, for example, the title of [[Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)]] is displayed in categories in the Hebrew Wikipedia as "(Good Riddance (Time of Your Life". Adding LRM in the end of the title would solve this problem; a redirect from a title without the LRM could be created for easy linking. LRM is not allowed in page titles, however; see Bug 3696.
Addition: They are also displayed incorrectly on special pages, such as Special:AllPages.
There is nothing we can do about the fact Unicode bidi algorithm is just an awful thing. Not as long we don't know in which languages titles are written in. With the following CSS rule they at least show wrong in "a beatufiful way": a { unicode-bidi: bidi-override; }
It's not so awful if LRM, dir="ltr", or other solutions can be used. But in this case LRM is not allowed and there's currently no way to know whether a title is RTL or LTR. Maybe LRM can be allowed? And a big warning will be displayed if it is used in a title? And maybe only admins will be allowed to save a title with LRM? I tried applying "a { unicode-bidi: bidi-override; }" using Firefox' DOM inspector and it became "(efiL ruoY fo emiT) ecnaddiR dooG".
Yep, like I said it will display wrong with that rule. LRM and other characters are not allowed in titles because they break lots of things (including users typing the titles manually, possibly search..)
To solve the manual typing problem, redirects can be created. They can even be created automatically.