----- Original Message -----
From: "David Gerard" dgerard@gmail.com
On 13 May 2011 08:42, Jay Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
Repeat after me: "Not all Mediawikiae are Wikipedia; Wikipedia is merely *the most important* customer of the project, not the only one". No, it would *not* be good to make the base package page-title-case-folding.
While your first sentence is the case, this says nothing about these other users.
What is your actual basis for asserting that case-insensitivity is worse than case-sensitivity? What is your data? Where did your statement come from?
25 years experience in software design.
Assuming case-folding is acceptable is imposing your assumptions about other people's use cases upon the software, and hence them. Not doing so, well, isn't.
Every MediaWiki I've ever had cause to set up would have benefited spectacularly from case-insensitivity, for example.
And having it available as an option's a great idea. But forcing it *absolutely* rules out some potential use-cases, which is rarely a good idea in software design; especially in the case of *tools* design, which is what Mediawiki is: it's a tool as much as it's an application.
Ask someone who's tried to implement a parser that will deal with all of Wikipedia's templates if you don't believe me. :-)
Cheers, -- jra