Several of us on the English Wiktionary are trying to resolve an issue and we could use some advice.
(This is my frist post to this list, so apologies if I restate the obvious.)
What's the best way to rig it up so that when you interlink to [[Foo]] on a caseful Wiki project, where "Foo" does not exist but "foo" does, to give the user a convenient shortcut to [[foo]]?
Background: unlike most Mediawiki projects, the English Wiktionary honors case in the first character of article titles . (That is, I assume it has $wgCapitalLinks set to false.) This can cause problems with links to Wiktionary from other Mediawiki projects, and from the outside world (such as Wiktionary mirrors), since those incoming links are often to the capitalized version of a word, on the assumption that Wiktionary works like Wikipedia. (As, in fact, it once did.)
Even since it switched over to casefulness, Wiktionary has evidently been trying to "solve" this problem by having an explicit, capitalized redirect in place for every lower-case entry. But that's clearly a huge nuisance and waste of time.
Instead, some of us have been thinking it Would Be Nice if we could adjust the behavior on a missing page ("broken link") slightly. Instead of saying "Wiktionary does not have an entry for this word yet", in the case where Wiktionary does have an alternate-case version of the word, perhaps it should display an explicit "Did you mean?" link right up front (along with but ahead of the other search and create options).
There are probably several ways of approaching this. I've already implemented one way, but I'm curious as to this list's opinion of the most appropriate approach.
1. I added some code (in a test wiki) to getContent() in Article.php to optionally display "Did you mean ___?" before displaying 'noarticletext', in the case where an alternate-case version does exist. In some ways this is the right approach, but it's awkward, because it has to prepend its text to the 'noarticletext' boilerplate. Someone editing MediaWiki:noarticletext would reasonably expect to see the "Did you mean?" text there, and might want to integrate it with the rest of the boilerplate, but wouldn't be able to.
2. It might also be possible to implement the test and optional text right there in 'noarticletext', using the new in-line conditional expressions. (But I'm not sure they're quite powerful enough.)
3. Arguably, this is a problem that doesn't need solving, and the typical, already-existing "You can search for this article in Wiktionary" link should suffice.
4. Arguably, this is a problem that does need solving, but in an even more general case, whenever there are other kinds of near matches, that aren't appropriate to handle with redirects or with the automatic case mapping that happens when $wgCapitalLinks is on.
(Someone might ask, "Why provide an interactive question and a link; why not just quietly redirect?" But that defeats the purpose of being caseful and makes it difficult or impossible to create a second entry with the other case. If you're going to redirect in this case, you might as well turn on $wgCapitalLinks and be done with it.)
Another way of thinking of this is that the proposed "Did you mean?" question is a little like a disambiguation page, in a case where user confirmation is required (i.e. in cases where a more implicit Wiki redirect or 302 redirect is not appropriate).
For all I know this issue has been discussed already and some consensus reached. But does anyone have any advice or suggestions? Thanks.