Hello to all of my fellow WikiPedia fanatics! :-)
I'm the author of the UseModWiki software currently running the WikiPedia. While I was skeptical at first, I think the wiki approach could work very well for a collaborative encyclopedia. I've decided to focus most of my near-term efforts on new features and supporting tools for WikiPedia (most of which will also help the other UseModWiki sites).
If any of the readers of this list have any questions about the wiki software, I'd be glad to try to answer them. My "permanent" email address is caadams@usemod.com, but this frontiernet.net address should work for awhile (I'm not planning on moving).
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I've done a lot of thinking about WikiLinking recently, and I'm not sure that the WikiName (capital letters) convention is a good fit for the encyclopedia. The AccidentalLinking is a nice feature, but it has a price in harder-to-read links and confusing conventions.
For instance, when I recently wanted to link to "democracy", I first did a search to see if someone else had linked the name (I thought someone might have already used "DemoCracy"). I found that nobody else had linked that name, so I made the link "DemocracY" (to follow the new convention of last-letter-capitalized). In short, it took me far more time to make that link than it would have to just type [[democracy]]. Someone unfamiliar with the local wiki conventions might guess otherwise on another page and link to a separate "DemoCracy" or even "DeMocracy". Ick.
To make a longish story short, I added code (about 150 new lines of Perl) to my development copy to allow (site-optional) "Free" linking within [[double brackets]]. You can use spaces, numbers, commas, dashes, and the period character in these kinds of links. Valid link names include [[George W. Bush]], [[China-Soviet Relations]], [[Physics]], [[music]], and [[Year 2000 bug]]. User names can also use these new links. Internally and within URLs the spaces are replaced with _ (underline) characters, which are translated back to spaces for display purposes.
Visit http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/um9.pl?FreeLinks to see these links in a live wiki, and feel free to edit pages to try it out. (Note that this is a test/development wiki, and is sometimes unavailable when I'm developing. I will soon (a few days at most) make a more stable version available to the public.)
Tomorrow I will start working on a semi-automatic conversion tool which should allow the entire WikiPedia to be converted in a couple hours.
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[SkI vs. SkIing, etc.] Do one of these alternative ways offer a solution to this problem, allowing for different links to point to the same subject page?
I've had similar concerns wrt ist and ism. E.g., Communist and Communism. I don't have a good solution for within this particular wiki.
And yes, other wiki's have capabilities that help here, but there's usually a trade-off in the form of having to construct the links a tad more deliberately than you'd like... I would wager there is in fact some way to kludge around it in this one...
That would be a good wager--there is already a "redirect" feature made for this circumstance. To use the page-redirect feature, simply type
#REDIRECT NewPageName
...at the beginning of the page you want to redirect. (The command must start at the first character of the first line of the page. REDIRECT must be in FULL CAPS.) For example, to make "CommunIst" redirect to "CommunIsm", you would edit the CommunIst page and add:
#REDIRECT CommunIsm
to the top of the page. You can see this feature in action at http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/um9.pl?CommunIst (you will be redirected to the CommunIsm page).
You can use this feature right now on the current WikiPedia site. Yes, I'm aware of the SubOptimal state of the current wiki DocumentatioN. :-)
--Cliff