I think you've pretty much got a solution, so a couple more minor followups.
Steve Bennett wrote:
Here we're
extending the user's power, so that the effect of their work
is out of proportion to the effort. That's a classic opportunity for
trouble.
Yay for wikis.
Not in the sense I'm talking about here. Most Wikipedia edits have an
effect proportional to the effort required. If I put a few naughty words
in a page, I've disturbed one page out of millions. Because cleaning up
is generally even easier than vandalizing, the balance of power stays on
the side of the angels.
But when you amplify someone's power, you create opportunities for
trouble. A guy with a backhoe can do a lot more damage than a guy with a
shovel, often without even knowing it.
The effect is
also almost invisible; you can see that a page is
bad, but a possibly overlapping network of
millions of aliases is hard
to grasp. So I the obvious choices are between noisy rejection (which is
almost never done now) or silent failure (which would be painfully
mysterious).
Can you give me a concrete example? What's the worst that can happen? Say
you have two separate articles with two sets of aliases, but they happen to
create an overlap. That's just a standard case of disambiguation, isn't it?
A searching user just types "John Smith" and that matches 30 different
aliases - so you get shown a page with those 30 different choices. Sounds
like a good, useful behaviour, not a disaster?
Well, I you should let the alias creator know when the collide with
existing articles, as touching the articles would be wrong, and silent,
invisible failure is not so good either. I think you could
auto-disambiguate when aliases cross, but you'd probably want a hint to
write the needed text. You should also tell people when they encounter
the technical limitations of Wikipedia (by by violating WP:NCTR).
Or are we still talking about the case of an overly
broad aliases pattern,
which I think we agreed should be rejected by the software?
That's definitely another case. I think our options for all of these are
1. silent failure (accept #ALIASES line but do nothing or do it only
partially)
2. noisy rejection (refuse to save, give error message)
3. noisy failure (accept save, but put an error message in the page)
4. special tool (JavaScript widget that gives continuous feedback)
And I can make cases for and against any of them. I'd think what really
matters is what the core MediaWiki team prefers, but I'd lead towards #3.
Overall, though, it sounds like a great feature. I'd say go for it!
William
--
William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri