Steve Bennett wrote:
On 6/1/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Although there is another way to get there -- just type NOSTRADAMUS into the browser's address bar.
No good for accents, punctuation etc.
No? It tends to work for me -- must be a browser thing. (But I think I agree, the "Go" box ought to work just like the address bar.)
Personally, I'd like it if the interface did a little *more* of that "primitive case resolving"...
Yep, but there is a fundamental issue which is that in *some* cases case is significant, and in others it isn't.
Yup.
Without looking, do you know whether "Bell Tower" is the same thing as "Bell tower"? (no, I don't either).
Well, the simplistic answer (but I would think the answer to go with) is that if they both exist they're different, but if not they're probably the same.
On the other hand, there are definitely cases where case should be more significant: I noticed today that someone had linked to [[foreland]], whereas [[Foreland]] came up.
But of course there, if nothing else, you're butting up against Wikipedia's special-casing (er, special uncasing) of the first character.
There is currently no way to force [[foreland]] to give a redlink.
Hmm.
You either have to unlink it entirely, link it and hope that someone will realise that they're not at the right article, or go to [[Foreland]] and add a red dablink (a very weird concept). All bad solutions.
I see what you mean, although I have to wonder if perhaps this is a problem that's not worth solving (law of diminishing returns, and all that).
The best solution would: a) be consistent between typing in the search box, and following a [[link]] b) propose choices when the exact choice wasn't found, involving diacritic and case allowances
Strictly speaking there are at least four cases: the search box when hitting "Go", the search box when hitting "Search", wikilinks, and incoming external links (or, equivalently, users typing directly into the address bar). At some point I want to sit down and map out exactly how these are the same and different, and exactly which sorts of fuzziness ought to apply where. (It's tempting to suggest that three out of the four ought to be identical in every respect, but there are enough weirdnesses lurking nearby that I'm not ready to make that assertion yet.)
There are also nuances depending on how likely it is that the user is searching for something that ought to exist, versus preparing to create something that doesn't exist. (This distinction is mostly aligned with wither the user is hitting the Noarticletext or Newarticletext page.) For example, if you map case too aggressively in the case where only one variant exists, you can make it impossible for anyone to ever create the other ones.
I'm sure we've all gone "name fishing" before - you don't know what a thing is called, but hope to use the most canonical name by adding (film) or (food) or something afterwards. In such cases you do definitely want some name resolving. If a thing by that name existst and it' sthe wrong thing...you'd like to turn it off somehow...
Well, when I go fishing in that way and get a false positive, it's always from the Go/Search box, and I just go back and hit Search instead of Go.