Mav149 wrote:
Brion VIBBER wrote:
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?
Yes that would be much more sensible and unless there is an objection I say go ahead and implement it (with the proper announcements to Wikipedia News on meta of course).
Given that it's just a pipe each way, we shouldn't switch the behaviour of the trick. People are used to writing [[Kingdom (biology)]] (in disambiguation pages and disambiguation blocks), and most people will never see the announcement that the behaviour of this has been changed. This idea would work at the beginning, but changing it now will confuse the majority of participants, who don't read the mailing list or meta.
What would also be nice is to extend the pipe trick for comma titles. IMO to follow the logic of your proposed change [[Auburn, California]] would automatically become [[Auburn, California | Auburn]] but that may brake many links that already intend to display the whole link name. So just to make linking easier for at least those in the know perhaps [[Auburn, California | ]] could be displayed as just <u>Auburn</u> but in the wiki code it could still be [[Auburn, California | ]] so that newbies can figure out the trick. Yeah I know this would be inconsistent with the proposed change in how the pipe trick works with parentheticals but it is still tedious to type [[Auburn, California | Auburn]] all the time.
In the case of [[Auburn, California]], [[German language]], and other situations where our naming conventions don't follow the usual rules for disambiguation with parentheses, you can set up redirects like [[Auburn (California)]] and link to those with the pipe trick [[Auburn (California)|]]. Of course, the first time that you do this, the redirect won't exist, and you'll have to create it; and if [[Auburn, California]] doesn't exist yet (cities always do, but languages and other things don't), then you won't be able to do this.
-- Toby