On 13 May 2011 17:31, M. Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
I still don't think page titles should be case sensitive. Last time I asked how useful this really was, back in 2005 or so, I got a tersely-worded response that we need it to disambiguate certain pages. OK, but how many cases does that actually apply to? I would think that the increased usability from removing case sensitivity would far outweigh the benefit of natural disambiguation that only applies to a tiny minority of pages, and which could easily be replaced with disambiguation pages.
There has been talk from time to time over the years to add full "case folding" whereby page titles preserve a certain case of each letter but ignore such info for internal operations. A lot like the filesystem on Microsoft Windows. It would be a third setup option in MediaWiki alongside "case-sensitive" and "first-letter". But there's never been enough interest and it's never been important enough and no developer has ever stepped up. It would take a bit of work to implement.
Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)
2011/5/12 Carl (CBM) cbm.wikipedia@gmail.com
On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 12:25 AM, Jay Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
They're not the same page. Wikipedia page titles are case sensitive --
except
that the first character is forced to upper case by the engine.
Does that search not return both? Why would we have both?
Like you said, the system is case sensitive. These redirects are created because the software doesn't handle case changes correctly otherwise. For example the following link leads to a "no such page" error because the appropriate redirect does not exist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_heights,_Michigan .
It would be possible to code around this, so that the redirects would be simulated if they don't exist, but it hasn't happened. In practice, people like me like to type a title in all lower case, and so we have redirects to make it work.
- Carl
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