2008/6/26 Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com:
Obviously, somewhere in the mediawiki software there is a list of non-whitespace characters which can follow the end of a link and still be part of it. e.g. "[[fish]]es" links to "[[fish]]" but looks like "[[fishes]]", which is good because one is the plural form, which redirects to the singular form anyway.
Yep, it is a so-called "linktrail" definition, and it is dependent on content language.
i don't know when or why the behavior was changed, but I recently noticed that apostrophes are now being sucked into the link, thus "[[Arby]]'s" links to "[[Arby]]" but looks like [[Arby's]], which is bad because one is a swedish housing project and the other is an american restaurant chain.
In short, a feature intended for easy plural links now also creates confusing possessive links. I do hope this is an accidental side effect which can easily be corrected.
I don't think it has been an "accidental side effect", as it is mentioned in the commit message; this change has been made by Daniel Friesen about 14 days ago, see http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki?view=rev&revision=36253 and it has also been shortly discussed on this list, see http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/38639/...
Regards, -- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]]