On 13 May 2011 14:34, Carl (CBM) cbm.wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 12:25 AM, Jay Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
They're not the same page. Wikipedia page titles are case sensitive -- except that the first character is forced to upper case by the engine.
Does that search not return both? Why would we have both?
Like you said, the system is case sensitive. These redirects are created because the software doesn't handle case changes correctly otherwise. For example the following link leads to a "no such page" error because the appropriate redirect does not exist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_heights,_Michigan .
It would be possible to code around this, so that the redirects would be simulated if they don't exist, but it hasn't happened. In practice, people like me like to type a title in all lower case, and so we have redirects to make it work.
Indeed on the English Wiktionary we do have some JavaScript which runs when on a page which would be a redlink. It checks all casing combinations of: all lowercase, all uppercase, first letter uppercase and the rest lowercase. If one of those exists it automatically redirects after a couple of seconds.
With the different nature of Wikipedia titles you would probably want to check sentence case and title case but would still miss quite a few where only proper nouns within the title are capitalized.
And some people would probably hate such a feature too (-:
Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)
- Carl
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