On 8/4/09 12:11 PM, Alex wrote:
- The API consistently uses Title:newFromText to resolve the title.
This function is used all over mediawiki, however, so changing it makes {{}} a valid construct. This changes parser behaviour, which is (iirc) not acceptable. The alternative would be to add a conditional for every call to newFromText. Mediawiki normally uses Wiki::checkInitialQueries to resolve '', but it's not possible to use that function.
This would probably be the easiest, I don't really see any problems, unless we're worried about it being a breaking change for people who might rely on an empty string being an invalid title. Changing it in the API rather than Title would make more sense (since we only want the behavior change for the API).
"" does not ever mean "Main Page".
When a visitor reaches the web site, but no title is specified, we have nothing to display -- so we send them to the locally defined main entry page.
This is a user interface activity.
There is no time or place that we would or should ever interpret "empty title" to mean "Main Page" in any other kind of interaction or i/o. To do so would be egregiously wrong and would be very likely to cause strange, mysterious, hard to track down breakage.
-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)