Дана Tuesday 28 July 2009 19:16:22 Brion Vibber написа:
On 7/28/09 10:04 AM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 12:52 PM, Mark Williamson<node.ue(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Case insensitivity shouldn't be a problem for any
language, as long as
you do it properly.
Turkish and other languages using dotless i, for example, will need a
special rule - Turkish lowercase dotted i capitalizes to a capital
dotted İ while lowercase undotted ı capitalizes to regular undotted I.
And so what if a wiki is multilingual and you don't know what language
the page name is in? What if a Turkish wiki contains some English
page names as loan words, for instance?
Indeed, good handling of case-insensitive matchings would be a big win
for human usability, but it's not easy to get right in all cases.
The main problems are:
1) Conflicts when we really do consider something separate, but the case
folding rules match them together
2) Language-specific case folding rules in a multilingual environment
Turkish I with/without dot and German ß not always matching to SS are
the primary examples off the top of my head. Also, some languages tend
to drop accent markers in capital form (eg, Spanish). What can or should
we do here?
Similar to automatic redirect, we could build an authomatic disambiguation
page. For example, someone on srwiki going to [[Dj]] would get:
Did you mean:
* [[Đ]]
* [[DJ]]
* [[D.J.]]
A nearer-term help would be to go ahead and implement
what we talked
about a billion years ago but never got around to -- a decent "did you
mean X?" message to display when you go to an empty page but there's
something similar nearby.
Was thinking a lot about this. The best solution I thought of would be to add
a column to page table "page_title_canonical". When an article is
created/moved, this canonical title is built from the real title. When an
article is looked up, if there is no match in page_title, build the canonical
title from the URL and see if there is a match in page_title_canonical and if
yes, display "did you mean X" or even go there automatically as if from a
redirect (if there is only one match) or "did you mean *X, *X1" if there are
multiple matches.
This canonical title would be made like this:
* Remove disambiguator from the title if it exists
* Remove punctuation and the like
* Transliterate the title to Latin alphabet
* Transliterate to pure ASCII
* Lowercase
* Order the words alphabetically
What could possibly go wrong?
Note that this would also be very helpful for non-Latin wikis - people often
want Latin-only URLs since non-Latin URLs are toooo long. I also recall a
recent discussion about a wiki in a language with nonstandard spelling (nds?)
where they use bots to create dozens or even hundreds of redirects to an
article title - this would also make that unneeded.
