Rowan Collins [IMSoP] wrote:
it's kind of central to the concept of a wiki that
it uses real page names as the unique identifier
Imagine that the software had a way to recognize disambiguation pages.
When a page is saved and contains the {{disambig}} tag, the software
could set cur.cur_is_redirect = 2. Then assume that [[Napoleon]] is
such a disambiguation page.
Now, when I write an article and link to [[Napoleon]] and preview my
edit, the system consults the cur table to see if the link should be
red or blue. But in the case of a disambiguation page, it could
instead harvest that page for links and insert an HTML form selector
(a drop down menu) where I can select which one of the people I want
to link to. In the next step (save or preview), the edited text would
be disambiguated to [[Napoleon I of France | Napoleon]].
This link harvesting would only take place on preview, and not during
the normal display of an article. I think this could be implemented
without compatibility problems. In fact, the same link disambiguation
during preview could also be performed for links to redirects. In a
way, a redirect is merely a disambiguation page with just one link.
This is how I imagine that the editing user interface to IMDb works.
I don't think the IMDb editors open a separate browser window to find
out that Pierce Brosnan is "nm0000112" before creating a new link. I
think such ideas can be incorporated into a wiki without killing the
wiki spirit. At one time, some people said that CamelCase was an
essential part of a wiki, and we proved that they were wrong.
(Today in the English Wikipedia, [[Napoleon]] is a redirect to
[[Napoleon I of France]], and the disambiguation page is called
[[Napoleon (disambiguation)]]. That disambiguation page contains a lot
more than links to the non-ambiguous terms.)
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se/