On Thu, 3 Feb 2005 21:40:25 +0100, solo turn soloturn@gmail.com wrote:
an option to ignore case would solve our problems. in which place/file would it fit best?
One problem that occurs to me with this is that if everything in the code treats titles as case insensitive, where do you define what the "normalised" version of the title is - e.g. how do you display it when the user goes to the page? You could have "uppercase first, rest lower", but then you'd get things like "Microsoft windows xp", which is just wrong; alternatively, you could have "uppercase first of each word", but that would look odd in other circumstances, particularly if you didn't special case words like "of", "the", "and", etc (which, in turn, would be a nightmare for l10n...)
It's been suggested [bug 469*] that (because even the current system "guesses" that you want the first letter capitalised, causing a few nuisances, such as "H2g2") there should be markup to override the display of the title - but nobody's actually coded it yet. If they did, you could probably come up with a capitalisation default that was "good enough for most cases", but it would mean people would have to go round overriding titles - so they might just as well go round correcting badly capitalised links (as Jamie says, either "Framis Bulkhead" is a proper name, or it shouldn't be written like that anyway).
* http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=496