On 4/11/06, Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
I suggest the implementation of a new magic template: {{DISPLAYTITLE|HTML-encoded title}} which will change the display of the title. I am aware that it would be a potential target for vandals, but hey, what on wikipedia isn't?
I'd be willing to implement it if there's no major objection.
I love the idea. I agree that notes like "The correct title of this article is eBay. It's shown incorrectly due to technical restrictions" are, um, suboptimal".
What kind of restrictions could you put in to ensure that oldlimitations(HTML-encoded title) = actual title? In other words, you don't want to allow someone to make "PKb" display as "Jerry's huge cock", or even worse, "Abortion" or something. Actually, a more likely problem is people using it as a loophole around page-move-protection ("what? you won't let me move it? I'll just rename it!")
That problem is probably not too hard, right? Rip out all formatting and punctuation, and case-insensitive compare against actual title?
Although it occurs to me that you don't really want to allow HTML coded titles (colors, images, blinking, underlines...), either. You really only want treat the major specific technical limitations: * punctuation * lower case first letter * superscript/subscript
Otherwise there will be a whole new grey area of what should and shouldn't be kept in the page title. Should Google appear in different colours? Can a company title have certain letters in bold? Are different font sizes acceptable?
So it might be better to define a special markup (possibly resembling real HTML markup), and simply ignore the entire template tag if it fails any requirement.
Just brainstorming...
Steve