On 10/23/07, Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I agree with Mr. Dalton that the database load of scanning for
"reverse redirects"/"aliases"/whatever would be outlandish.
I don't think it's possible to say that without talking about a
concrete implementation. I mentioned a possible data structure which
allow a good tradeoff between size and speed.
A partial solution, to eliminate the need for a large percentage of
existing and potential redirects, is quite simple.
Make wikilinks
case-insensitive by default. Except in cases where two titles exist
with the same spelling (but different capitalization).
I've raised a very similar issue before. Basically, these three use
cases are very different:
- User types "least weasel" in the search box and presses "go"
(MediaWiki
attempts a couple of different capitalisations before giving up)
- User directly types /wiki/least%20weasel (MediaWiki converts %20 to space,
attempts to match, fails, then takes you to a page letting you search)
- User follows a (red) link to [[least weasel]] - link actually goes
directly to an edit page.
Having consistent behaviour for these three would be great.
This way if somebody links to "[[least weasel]]" mid-sentence (because
they don't realize it is our convention to
capitalize the species
name), the link would automatically point to [[Least Weasel]], whether
There are problems with this approach. Should the link be red or blue?
What if the capitalisation is blatantly wrong? How should a link to
[[OATS]] be treated? As a mis-capitalisation
for "Oats", or as a non-existent acronym OATS?
It might be better to have the redlink return some search results by
default, if they are highly pertinent (ie, extremely similar name), then
show the "create a new page" screen.
a redirect existed or not. For lesser known species where no redirect
exists yet, this would eliminate the duplicate effort
associated with
accidentally creating a redundant article. Icing on the cake? Have the
link automatically capitalize itself when the page is saved, to ensure
correct typography in article space.
I really don't like the idea of respelling someone's edit without
their knowledge. In my example above, they could really have meant to
redlink to [[OATS]] and instead their wikitext is converted to
[[Oats]] - very bad.
Steve
—C.W.
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