On 10/22/07, William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com> wrote:
Steve Bennett wrote:
#ALIASES [Dr] Grace [Smith|Jones]
A beginner user might simply write:
#ALIASES [Dr Grace Smith|Dr Grace Jones|Grace Smith|Grace Jones]
or even:
#ALIASES Dr Grace Smith
#ALIASES Dr Grace Jones
#ALIASES Grace Smith
#ALIASES Grace Jones
That's a great point.
Would we need a little more in the syntax to suggest whether blocks
could be optional?
A UI tool would obviously help, but that would be
a slight departure for
MediaWiki. There's nothing else like that atm (afaik), so it's hard to
picture how it would fit in exactly.
Yeah, it would be a departure for sure. On the other Wiki-driven project
I've been working on, which we coded from scratch, we've been adding
more JavaScript UI for metadata and it has been a big hit, especially
for things that have complicated structure.
I agree with Mr. Dalton that the database load of scanning for
"reverse redirects"/"aliases"/whatever would be outlandish.
A partial solution, to eliminate the need for a large percentage of
existing and potential redirects, is quite simple. Make wikilinks
case-insensitive by default. Except in cases where two titles exist
with the same spelling (but different capitalization).
This way if somebody links to "[[least weasel]]" mid-sentence (because
they don't realize it is our convention to capitalize the species
name), the link would automatically point to [[Least Weasel]], whether
a redirect existed or not. For lesser known species where no redirect
exists yet, this would eliminate the duplicate effort associated with
accidentally creating a redundant article. Icing on the cake? Have the
link automatically capitalize itself when the page is saved, to ensure
correct typography in article space.
—C.W.