As those in the know, er, know, on Wikipedia there's a preprocessor syntax trick known as the 'pipe trick' which strips parentheticals, usually disambiguators, from the display of a link:
[[kingdom (biology)|]] turns into: [[kingdom (biology)|kingdom]]
so that it shows in the text as simply "kingdom", which is usually what you want.
It's a nice trick, but there are two things wrong with this system:
First, since the replacement is done at save time instead of at display time, newbies (who learn the finer points of wiki syntax primarily by looking at how existing articles are written) can't learn the trick without hearing about it or poring through the documentation. The tilde signature system has the same problem; we have to tell newbies about it.
Second, and more importantly, *it's backwards.*
The overwhelming majority of the time we link to a page whose title has a parenthetical in it, we want to hide the parenthetical and let the main word stand alone. I'd be very hard pressed to think of a counter-example that isn't a demonstration of the pipe trick or a discussion about how to phrase a disambiguation.
Wouldn't it be more sensible if [[kingdom (biology)]] _automatically_ displayed as "kingdom", and in the much rarer cases we had to add a pipe to force the long form?
After all, we don't need to add a special character to hide the brackets! They're just part of the markup, telling the wiki parser that it's dealing with a link. Parentheticals are essentially just more markup, telling the parser that the link should point to one of several otherwise ambiguously identified pages.
Thoughts, comments?
What about handling of namespaces and interwiki links? Currently they're displayed be default, and the pipe trick strips them just like parentheticals.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)