Steve Bennett wrote:
On 5/31/06, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Going through redlinks is how you create pages on a wiki.
It's not the only way... It's just that the interface apparently does some primitive case resolving when there *aren't* too separate articles - type NOSTRADAMUS in the search box and it will take you (silently) to "Nostradamus". Make a link to [[NOSTRADAMUS]] in an article, and it will be a redlink (and clicking it will definitely not redirect silently).
Although there is another way to get there -- just type NOSTRADAMUS into the browser's address bar.
Personally, I'd like it if the interface did a little *more* of that "primitive case resolving", because creating all those redirects seems like a waste of time, a task which could better be handled in software. Some work has been done on this over at en.wiktionary, although in a somewhat ad-hoc way.
[[Lyon Métro]] is a good example, because a hypothetical more-than-primitive search resolution process ought to handle presence/absence of diacritics, too. On the one hand this can quickly get nontrivial, but on the other hand the Unicode consortium has published some pretty concise normalization and collation algorithms which directly address this problem. (See e.g. UAX 15 "Unicode Normalization Forms" at http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr15/, and UTS10 "Unicode Collation Algorithm" at http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/.)