On 10/24/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, I'm undecided whether nesting (aka iteration) is a good idea or not. Quite possibly it's a good idea to force people to explicitly state all the variations they intend. If iteration/nesting is not allowed, then multiple #ALIASES statements *should* be allowed, imho, for readability.
I was assuming nesting would be allowed (although it might quickly run into alias number limits, of course). Iteration is the term my formal languages book uses for the * operator, indicating "repeat the preceding item zero or more times". Next time I'll just say "the * operator" instead of trying to be fancy. :)
Anyway, we surely don't want the * operator, as I remarked, so we don't need full regular expressions, is the point.
Because when articles get merged, one is turned into a redirect with the history of all the edits that were made. If we kill that redirect, we lose that history, including attribution. Ergo, non-compliance with GFDL.
Of course, the correct way to fix this is to actually implement real merging. For now, why don't people just do a history merge, by deleting one page, moving another on top of it, and undeleting? Is that viewed as too confusing in terms of the history display?
That would be even better, but I wasn't that ambitious. Do you have any ideas? Even better would be something that redefines the concept of disambiguation, which is again, a huge amount of manpower to set up and maintain.
Well, I'm not considering disambiguations for now. They're conceptually related, but I'd view it as a different discussion. One thing at a time.
Are you thinking in terms of a special GUI, or a wikitext language feature?
As I said, a special page.