On 9/20/05, Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com wrote:
There is no current plan to change this behaviour any time soon.
As for previous discussion, I dug through the archives a bit and found this thread: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2005-February/thread.html#32...
Which I seem to have triggered. Actually I was asking for something subtly different, which would be a new "pipe trick" to lowercase what appeared in the article, so that I could use what I'd always thought of as the "correct" capitalization style for titles. This was before I grokked that the standard practice on Wikipedia made sense and I stopped trying to buck it.
The rationale for why most Wikipedia article titles should have only the first word capitalized are laid out in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_conventions#Lowercase_second_a... although, I think you need to read between the lines a bit. I beleive that the intent is to allow links within articles to read "correctly." Although it's a common title style to put other than trivial words in intial caps, within body text, it's common style (in English at least) to reserve initial caps (mostly) for proper nouns, and for the first word in a sentence. And this is why mediawiki works the way it does. If folks follow the style guide suggestion of only using initial caps for the first word in an article title or letters in the title which would ALWAYS be capitalized when the title was used in a sentence, then the mechanism of mediawiki uppercasing the first character of all titles means that I can write both:
[[Patio furniture]] is a lovely enhancement to your back yard.
and
[[Fred Forkenstein]] was the designer of what is considered the ugliest [[patio furniture]] ever designed.
Both links to the article "Patio furniture" work, and the contributor of the llinks doesn't need to worry about how the article is capitalized, he just relies that the author followed the normal convention.
Luckily for me, I twigged to this before I had put too many articles in MY wiki and adjusted article titles to go with the flow, and I've been happy about this particular issue ever since.
The thread, however, seemed to have quickly turned from the link presentation issue to case insensitive article names.