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).
--
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]