On 20/09/05, Matt England mengland@mengland.net wrote:
I'm sure this has been debated many times, so I simply ask:
Where's the best place to read about the current state of affairs with respect case sensitivity for MW URLs?
Well, first of all, the "current state of affairs", as such, is very simple: page titles are entirely case sensitive, except for the first letter (so [[Asteroid]] and [[asteroid]] are treated the same) unless a variable is set to suppress even this (so that things like dictionaries which want articles beginning with a lowercase letter can do so).
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... and this one: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2005-March/thread.html#4188 which carries into the next month: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2005-April/thread.html#4341
Basically, issues include (but are not limited to): * what would the "normalised" article name be, for doing DB lookups and binary comparisons * how would you determine what the "correct" capitalisation was (i.e. the one displayed as the top heading) * are there situations where you want two articles differing only in case; and situations where you don't want alternative capitalisations to create valid links
Nothing insurmountable, but nothing that easy either, and nobody's yet had enough conviction that it's the right thing to do to actually go ahead and do it.