The solution to this is to only use lowercase letters except in proper names. ie, the names of the two articles would be "Farbulator overflow valve" and "Framis bulkhead". Now if there was a band called Framis Bulkhead, you could have two seperate articles: one for the band and one for the mounting location. On Mon, 31 Jan 2005 13:39:11 -0500, Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- http://endeavour.zapto.org/astro73/ Thank you to JosephM for inviting me to Gmail!

I agree with Solo. I can help to make necessary changes. It doesn't really make sense to have two articles with different letter cases when they mean the same thing. I think this should be included in the newer versions of Mediawiki, too.

On Thu, 3 Feb 2005 21:40:25 +0100, solo turn <soloturn(a)gmail.com> wrote: One problem that occurs to me with this is that if everything in the code treats titles as case insensitive, where do you define what the "normalised" version of the title is - e.g. how do you display it when the user goes to the page? You could have "uppercase first, rest lower", but then you'd get things like "Microsoft windows xp", which is just wrong; alternatively, you could have "uppercase first of each word", but that would look odd in other circumstances, particularly if you didn't special case words like "of", "the", "and", etc (which, in turn, would be a nightmare for l10n...) It's been suggested [bug 469*] that (because even the current system "guesses" that you want the first letter capitalised, causing a few nuisances, such as "H2g2") there should be markup to override the display of the title - but nobody's actually coded it yet. If they did, you could probably come up with a capitalisation default that was "good enough for most cases", but it would mean people would have to go round overriding titles - so they might just as well go round correcting badly capitalised links (as Jamie says, either "Framis Bulkhead" is a proper name, or it shouldn't be written like that anyway). * http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=496 -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]

On Fri, 4 Feb 2005 06:50:16 -0800 (PST), Rich Holton <rich_holton(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Not an easy step, but possible I guess. Of course, it assumes, as does the rest of this, that you can guarantee a clean case-insensitive search (think different character encodings, etc) - and also that the title as written in the page is *punctuated* identically to that of the title. Of course, a page like [[acid]] would end up with its title displayed in all lowercase that way, which isn't necessarily a good thing, but it would lend some degree of consistency I guess. Note that there is no way of knowing what *link* you came in by, only what *URL* - it might not have been an internal link at all. But yes, you could use that. Again, things like "acid", referred to in the middle of sentences, wouldn't become "Acid" as they do atm. An additional thought to throw into the ring is how to deal with the title in *generated* text, like Special:Watchlist, Special:Recentchanges, etc. Perhaps the 'display title' would have to be stored in the database, and updated whenever the page was edited. Come to think of it, that would make the checks a lot more efficient, too, because they could just be skipped on most views. And that all assumes that Brion's comment about assumptions inherent in the code doesn't prove too huge an obstacle. That would be a problem if, say, the English Wikipedia switched to using the feature, but I think that's unlikely to happen for all sorts of reasons (it would have such far-reaching consequences, that pages with only case difference would the least of our worries). For smaller existing installations, it should be possible to craft a SQL query to find the titles which need changing, and then follow the backlinks to change references to them too. -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]

On Fri, 4 Feb 2005 11:01:38 -0500, Muzaffer Ozakca <mozakca(a)indiana.edu> wrote: 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]

On Fri, 4 Feb 2005 11:54:23 -0500, Muzaffer Ozakca <mozakca(a)indiana.edu> wrote: 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. *shrug* it happens. I filter on the subject field anyway, so I barely notice. :) -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]

Rowan Collins wrote: I can confirm this behavior in Firefox 1.0 (Mac OS X). Please file a bug report at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

where could i replace this "first letter capitalization" with a "force to lowercase"? this would have the same effect, and therefor it would not need to be case insensitive. On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 22:35:36 -0800, Brion Vibber <brion(a)pobox.com> wrote: