On Fri, 4 Feb 2005 11:54:23 -0500, Muzaffer Ozakca mozakca@indiana.edu wrote:
Just a quick comment here, even if "microsoft windows xp" is incorrect it still works. It will create a link to an empty page. Then somebody has to notice it and correct it. By the time, somebody else could have typed some text and there are two versions of the same thing.
That's a good point - although at least an experienced user would know that the page might exist at another capitalisation. In fact, the simplest solution to this would be to add some logic to the non-existent page display: in addition to the [[MediaWiki:Newpagetext]] warning users to do this themselves, the software could search for pages with the same name but different capitalisations - if it found one, it could add an extra message, such as:
NOTE: You are about to create a page called "microsoft windows xp", but there is already a page called [[Microsoft Windows XP]]. Please make sure you are not creating a duplicate of this page before proceeding. If you followed a link in another article, you might want to edit that page to refer to the correct name; if you think this is likely to be a common mistake (or if there are already many pages [[Special:Whatlinkshere/{{PAGENAME}}|linking to this title]]) you might also consider creating a [[Help:Redirect|redirect]] to the correct title.
While this would add the burden of an automatic search every time a red link was followed, this would logically be less than having to search case-insensitively for *every* link.
Meanwhile, my point stands about how you would find and correct links which had been typed wrong if they were all treated as references to the same page - there's no obvious mechanism for using "what links here" to see which pages use "[[microsoft windows xp]]" and which "[[Microsoft Windows XP]]" if those titles are not treated as distinct.
But perhaps I should be more open-minded and offer solutions as well as problems. If the links tables were all id->name pairs (as seems sensible, and could perhaps be brought in along with unifying them w/ a link_type field), the references in the database could conserve the exact capitalisation of the link. Assuming an efficient case-insensitive DB query is possible elsewhere, it would then be no stretch for Special:Whatlinkshere to look up all variant capitalisations at once. Then, it could sort its output by how the link was typed, and those which represented "incorrect" capitalisations could be identified, and the pages corrected.
(Btw, sorry, for copying e-mails to your personal e-mail address)
*shrug* it happens. I filter on the subject field anyway, so I barely notice. :)