On Fri, 4 Feb 2005 11:01:38 -0500, Muzaffer Ozakca <mozakca(a)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).
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]