Hi,
As newbie to wiki's, and MediaWiki, I am searching how to make words that were linked once appear as links everytime someone enters them. I found this feature in "VoodooPad", a notepad-like application based on wiki on Mac OS X. For instance : A user marks the word "wiki" as internal link. Is it afterwards possible to let MediaWiki mark every occurance of "wiki" automatically, and point to the corresponding page ? Or is it necessary to create every link manually ?
Met vriendelijke groeten
Rik Serpentier adjunct-afdelingschef Informatica Gewestelijke Directie West-Vlaanderen Roggelaan 2 8500 Kortrijk +32 (0)56 23 17 43 (rechtstreeks nummer) Bezoek onze website : www.vmw.be
Rik Serpentier Rik.Serpentier@vmw.be wrote:
A user marks the word "wiki" as internal link. Is it afterwards possible to let MediaWiki mark every occurance of "wiki" automatically, and point to the corresponding page ? Or is it necessary to create every link manually ?
No, every link has to be manually marked as such, and there are several good reasons for this: * some article names may happen to be very common words, and linking every instance of them would be ugly; not to mention that some of those links would probably be irrelevant, referring to a different meaning of the term. * if an article name can be any number of words long, a given set of words could be linked in multiple ways: "[[North]] [[America]]" versus "[[North America]]", for instance; or "to [[kill]] a [[mockingbird]]" versus "[[to kill a mockingbird]]".
Some wikis (including the very first) link everything that's WrittenInCamelCase, so that just typing the title of a page creates a link to it. But since typing ToKillAMockingBird isn't really any more natural than [[To Kill a Mockingbird]], this doesn't really amount to anything more "automatic" than what MediaWiki does. And, indeed, it puts rather artificial contraints on what your page titles can be, and what kind of links you can have pointing at them.
HTH
On Tue, Dec 28, 2004 at 01:17:32PM +0000, Rowan Collins wrote:
Rik Serpentier Rik.Serpentier@vmw.be wrote:
A user marks the word "wiki" as internal link. Is it afterwards possible to let MediaWiki mark every occurance of "wiki" automatically, and point to the corresponding page ? Or is it necessary to create every link manually ?
No, every link has to be manually marked as such, and there are several good reasons for this:
Rowan, i agree to you that these are good reasons, but i think Rik rise a question that we should think more about. Automatically linking should help to maintain the "connectivity" of the graph that represents the wiki and its pages, id est, auto linking avoid people start writing about a subject without knowing that another one is writing about the same or related subjects. I say this because i already started writing a wikipedia article seemed to another existing one (yes, the fault was mine, i didn't make a good search for the subject, but we should avoid assuming that people are not lazy :) ... Some workaround i could suggest:
- some article names may happen to be very common words, and linking
every instance of them would be ugly; not to mention that some of those links would probably be irrelevant, referring to a different meaning of the term.
maybe linking only the first occurence.
- if an article name can be any number of words long, a given set of
words could be linked in multiple ways: "[[North]] [[America]]" versus "[[North America]]", for instance; or "to [[kill]] a [[mockingbird]]" versus "[[to kill a mockingbird]]".
give the editor an optional list (maybe i misundestood you so you meant "such tool would generate a heavy work in the server, since finding the possibilities is expensive").
Do you have more reasons? :)
Riba
ps - its very easy to tell developers what to do, but to do is very hard, so this discussion could lead to nothing if the developers have more important things to do; even so it's funny discussing about tools that could exisit, but for a long time they will not.... if this is not funny for you, you could prefer not to reply me :)
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