On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 3:14 PM, Casey Brown lists@caseybrown.org wrote:

On 5/21/10, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:

...

now need to try typing the title of the longest article (which was mentioned somewhere recently) to see if that will break the new gizmo. :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_word_in_English ;-)

Well, what do you know? I cut and pasted "Lopadotemachosela" and the search box autocompleted the full word (well, the full word with a '...' in the middle). So it does work!

For the chemical one (over 189,000 letters) the redirect is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminy...

The first four chemical groups and truncating it so it ends in "lala"? :-) I guess the redirect name had to end somewhere, but there is an inconsistency between the end of that redirect and the part of the name listed at the "longest words page". I wonder if it is worth finding out if that redirect is incorrect? Redirecting to "Titin" is much more sensible.

*Sigh* Wikipedia doesn't give the rest of the name anywhere. I suppose the "sum of all knowledge" doesn't extend to protein databases? Ah, actually, look in the history of that redirect and I think all 189,819 letters are there and it was marked as a copyvio by CorenSearchBot as a copy of a Yahoo Answers page? :-)

Well, I suppose protein names are protected in some ways, but I'm not sure what happened here and what should have happened. But it reaffirms my suspicions that you only have to scratch the surface anywhere in Wikipedia and you find interesting histories and discussions.

I summarised a bit here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Titin#Redirect_spelling_and_copyvio

The main argument for not having redirects like this is that no-one checks the spelling...

Carcharoth