On Fri, Aug 04, 2006 at 09:59:29AM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
MediaWiki has a fairly useful case-guessing
heuristic where if you
search for "foo boo moo" it attempts, if that fails, to match "Foo Boo
Moo" and "FOO BOO MOO".
Would it be possible to do something similar for templates? The
heuristic for "template:foo boo moo" would be:
1. If that page is not found, try "template:foo-boo-moo"
2. If that page is not found, try "template:fooboomoo"
This may just be useful for English Wikipedia, but the lack of naming
convention there makes it really difficult to remember the names of
multi-word templates.
My instinct is to say that's a Bad Idea, and on reflection, I know why.
I can't locate it just now, but there's an Eric Allman paper that ships
with the sendmail distribution, that explains why mailbox-name-generation
protocols are a bad idea: because (among other things) they can
*reveal* collisions, making things that weren't broken break as the
environment (invisible to a mail sender) change.
Case folding is inherently a wart, because (unless you use it
*everywhere*), it can make things break. That is, if you permit pages
whose names differ only in case, then you cannot safely automatically
fold case *anywhere else*, because you open the possibility that, for
example, someone will pick a template that has been included in
hundreds of pages -- with the wrong case -- and create the template to
which that *actually* points.
Look! Computer Assisted Vandalism!
Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com
Designer Baylink RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA
http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274
The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.