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?
ie, some folks want http://wiki.example.com/wiki/my_main_page to match http://wiki.example.com/wiki/My_Main_Page while others may not. For what it's worth, I'm not sure why this can't be a per-site-programmable, but I thought I'd educate myself first by reading a little bit...and maybe I'll find that this is address in future revs (beyond my 1.4.0 site)?
-Matt
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.
On 9/20/05, Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com wrote:
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...
Which I seem to have triggered. Actually I was asking for something subtly different, which would be a new "pipe trick" to lowercase what appeared in the article, so that I could use what I'd always thought of as the "correct" capitalization style for titles. This was before I grokked that the standard practice on Wikipedia made sense and I stopped trying to buck it.
The rationale for why most Wikipedia article titles should have only the first word capitalized are laid out in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_conventions#Lowercase_second_a... although, I think you need to read between the lines a bit. I beleive that the intent is to allow links within articles to read "correctly." Although it's a common title style to put other than trivial words in intial caps, within body text, it's common style (in English at least) to reserve initial caps (mostly) for proper nouns, and for the first word in a sentence. And this is why mediawiki works the way it does. If folks follow the style guide suggestion of only using initial caps for the first word in an article title or letters in the title which would ALWAYS be capitalized when the title was used in a sentence, then the mechanism of mediawiki uppercasing the first character of all titles means that I can write both:
[[Patio furniture]] is a lovely enhancement to your back yard.
and
[[Fred Forkenstein]] was the designer of what is considered the ugliest [[patio furniture]] ever designed.
Both links to the article "Patio furniture" work, and the contributor of the llinks doesn't need to worry about how the article is capitalized, he just relies that the author followed the normal convention.
Luckily for me, I twigged to this before I had put too many articles in MY wiki and adjusted article titles to go with the flow, and I've been happy about this particular issue ever since.
The thread, however, seemed to have quickly turned from the link presentation issue to case insensitive article names.
Matt England 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?
There is no support for case-insensitive titles at this time.
It may be added some day in the future, requiring database changes to move case-normalized titles out into another table and provide proper matching.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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