Well, if you've checked any number of active wiki, you're likely to run into the {{Title}} hack. Last I checked wiki like Wookiepedia and Uncyclopedia which are only second to the Wikimedia wiki in size have been using it for ages. And there are a few bugzilla entries asking for the functionality to. So it's not something void of examples, use, or demand: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Wars_Episode_III:_Revenge_of_the_Sith http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/NR-N99_Persuader-class_droid_enforcer http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Acclamator_I-class_assault_ship http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Communism http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Game:Zork/knife http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Death https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12998
I can go for allowing MediaWiki to handle case, space/underscore, and extra padding issues (Extra padding as in titles like _Summer, which have valid uses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underbar_Summer) natively in a title rewrite. And having an extension handle the extra cases like WikiMarkup in titles (Italics, Bolding, and class/styling of titles), stripping ()'s, allowing # for display, and other off uses which would require the use of a subtitle. However, to reduce the complaints and negative comments. Perhaps we should actually build that extension along-side a proper title rewrite as a Proof of Point, that it can be done without making it an absolute hack like it is. Also, it would let us compile a full list of all the possible and already desired features for Titles, and then dictate which ones MediaWiki should support natively, and which ones should be something only allowed with an installed extension. Keep the code clean, but give the public the features they want.
Btw, DISPLAYTITLE did previously allow for off titles and did add the subtitle. Some wiki were actually making use of that as a feature awhile back and complained when it was /Fixed/ to never allow that whatsoever. Without even letting people allow it using a config variable.
On a similar note, there's another feature which is used in some cases: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Ascii_Translit That idea of allowing extensions to change the normalization process would void out the use of that extension, and allow for that kind of functionality without making it a hack, or needing to use redirects or double pages.
~Daniel Friesen(Dantman) of: -The Gaiapedia (http://gaia.wikia.com) -Wikia ACG on Wikia.com (http://wikia.com/wiki/Wikia_ACG) -and Wiki-Tools.com (http://wiki-tools.com)
Simetrical wrote:
On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 7:06 PM, DanTMan dan_the_man@telus.net wrote:
However, I'm not a fan of storing both a normalized underscore version of the title, and a un-normalized space version of the title. I'm thinking display title for display, and normalized title for all the handling and other things. I think having the {{DISPLAYTITLE:}} function store the display title inside of the page table would be best. And if we made the normalized version depend on the display title then it wouldn't be possible for someone to remove the requirement that the displaytitle needs to normalize to the actual title. Some wiki would like to have that not there, and have a subtitle added when they don't match.
First of all, DISPLAYTITLE is a hack that should be removed in favor of just using the move function, if this gets implemented and that becomes possible. (Thanks to Rob, it's a much better hack than what we used to have, but it's still a hack.) The interface for adding it makes no sense -- to change the title you should move the page. Having your perfectly sensible new page name be mangled in terms of capitalization and '_' => ' ' is uninituitive, and DISPLAYTITLE is not discoverable as a mechanism for evading it. It should Just Work when you create a page with an underscore in its name.
Its implementation is also horribly incomplete. *Everything* in the user interface should know about the display title, and use it. Because it's currently stored in the page text, nothing knows about it except when the page itself is actually being displayed. The display title *has* to be stored in its own normalized database field for arbitrary parts of code to have access to it.
As for wikis that want the normalized title displayed in a subtitle or something, that's something an extension can implement using hooks as an entirely separate mechanism. It's not relevant to this discussion, IMO, especially if no one has any examples.
On Sat, Mar 1, 2008 at 5:42 AM, subscribe@divog.com.ru wrote:
Is there many of them - such things? The only one I found was LinkCache class. Parser, Linker, Title use only methods of LinkCache, when it's about Good|BadLinks. Maybe there are no other cases of use title string as keys of associative array?
It could be. But the general principle is, everyone's assumed titles are case-sensitive until now, so you're probably going to find lots of random places where that assumption is built in in various ways. Hopefully not an unmanageably large number, but probably more than just one or two.
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l