On Fri, 4 Feb 2005 11:01:38 -0500, Muzaffer Ozakca mozakca@indiana.edu wrote:
I think an article title should be however the first creator assigns it to be. If the first person gives "Microsoft windows xp" it should be titled that way until somebody moves it to the correct title. However, all references (links) to "Microsoft windows xp", "microsoft Windows XP" should point to the only page existing. We can't assume people know the correct capitalization all the time, even then they will make mistakes. So, search in the database should be case insensitive but the correct capitalizations should be achieved manually.
I guess my general opinion is that any reference to "microsoft windows xp" is incorrect and needs fixing *anyway*, so why bother making the link work? I know in many cases it's not as clear-cut as that, but on any site that's aiming for a reasonable consistency of style, even a phrase like "list of software design companies" will have a "correct" capitalisation.
I guess I should have thought that the obvious system is to have a particular capitalisation stored as the title, with only *links* being case insensitive - and hope that someone will spot that it needs moving. But how you could ever track down incorrectly typed instances under such a system, I'm not sure - links to "microsoft windows xp" would be buried in "what links here" along with all the correct references. At least under the current system you can create a redirect, or move the page leaving a redirect behind, and then the incorrect pages can be identified as linking to that redirect.
In other words, I think such a system would just encourage sloppy style, whereas MediaWiki (due to its primary role of running Wikipedia et al) is largely designed to aid in authoring "professional-looking" content (I would claim the very existence of [[free links]] as opposed to CamelCase, as well as things like seperation of discussion pages, as examples of this design goal).