....., the instances where it would *actually* be a problem are vanishingly small. I've yet to hear of or think of an example, in fact (although I'm sure there are a few).
Here is some previous discussion and some examples (its all been said before); http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Feature_requests&o...
And the instances where capitalisation causes
problems are many.
Khendon (Jason Williams)
I can think of many more reasons why it is better to enforce proper capitalization via the software than there isn't. For example, [[united states]] and [[UNITED STATES]] shouldn't work unless a human has taken the time to make a redirect (which would be waste of a redirect BTW). If the software automatically links to our article [[United States]] then there is little reason for users to be careful about correctly capitalizing and naming their links. There are also many hundreds, if not more, encyclopedic terms that have generic meanings that are lower-cased and then specific legal meanings that are capitalized ([[environmental protection agency]] vs [[Environmental Protection Agency]] or [[space shuttle]] vs [[Space Shuttle]]). Many books, movies, and plays have as their tiles terms that are of encyclopedic interest ([[Quantum Leap]] vs [[quantum leap]] or [[Red Dwarf]] vs [[red dwarf]]).
If an article is Incorrectly Capitalized Or Otherwise MisNamed Or Missspelt Then fix the title by moving the article and fix any incorrectly titled edit links. Several months ago I fixed many many hundreds (probably thousands) of incorrectly capitalized and pluralized pages and edit links. Since then I've really only seen the occasional newbie mis-titling a page and most of the time somebody else fixes the capitalization before I do.
As one other person mentioned, this is even more important in other languages -- and it should be stressed that changes to the software will effect all languages.
Only proper nouns and some other terms should be capitalized -- anything else is just incorrect grammar. We needn't encourage incorrect grammar.
--- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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On Thu, 2002-10-03 at 14:29, Daniel Mayer wrote:
....., the instances where it would *actually* be a problem are vanishingly small. I've yet to hear of or think of an example, in fact (although I'm sure there are a few).
Here is some previous discussion and some examples (its all been said before); http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Feature_requests&o...
And the instances where capitalisation causes
problems are many.
Khendon (Jason Williams)
Only proper nouns and some other terms should be capitalized -- anything else is just incorrect grammar. We needn't encourage incorrect grammar.
One of the reasons for the automatic capitalization is that first words of sentences are capitalized. [[Capitalization]] should work the same way as [[capitalization]]. If we just added case sensitivity without extending other capabilities, then the previous sentence would have to be written "[[capitalization|Capitalization]] should work..." which is a bigger problem than the ones caused by lack of case sensitivity.
However, I too am annoyed by the lack of case sensitivity, so the addition of case sensitivity with automatic methods of avoiding [[uncap|Cap]] might be nice. For example, the software could render "[[capitalization]] should work..." as "Capitalization should work..." if it can tell that "[[capitalization]]" is at the beginning of a sentence. But that's difficult to do right 100% of the time.
Other solutions would have similar complexities.
In short, the status quo isn't perfect, but its consequences are simple and well-understood.
Other languages may have different priorities, of course.
--tc
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