Lars Aronsson wrote:
One approach could be to assign unique numbers to each person, e.g. Winston Churchill = [[person 17]], Napoleon = [[person 18]], and always to link to these, e.g. [[person 17 | Winston Churchill]], [[person 17 | Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill]] or [[person 18 | Bonaparte]]. This approach would not be user friendly, but it would be free from ambiguity. I don't know any wiki that uses this particular approach. Do you?
No, but I know plenty of *non*-wiki sites that do (h2g2.com and imdb.com spring to mind). I think it's kind of central to the concept of a wiki that it uses real page names as the unique identifier for an entry - the whole idea of "accidental linking", and linking to pages that don't exist yet, arise from the fact that you can predict the location of a page without having to look it up. That's not to say we have to do it just because it's always been done that way, but I think there are genuine advantages that outweigh the disadvantages of doing it this way.
This is one of the key points I've been meaning to raise on meta: in response to the various biography / family tree / etc proposals that have turned up there. If your ideal database includes 500 people called "Dave Gorman", you can no longer use the advantages of the name-as-ID convention; you could use an arbitrary ID and still have the pages editable, but it wouldn't really be a wiki any more (IMHO).