Sorry I'm going to bother you again: :-)

Why undersores appear? Wikisoftware generates them itself. Users indeed look and copy from the location bar. That's what it was invented for. Overkill? Translating 1 character to another is about the simpliest and fastest CPU-operation one can imagine: 1 table lookup, that's 2 or 3 clockcycles for an indexed MOVE operation in assembly! If you find it no problem to apply this rule at the input:

' ' --> '_'

what then is the problem with translating it back again?:

'_' --> ' '

Am I missing something? Users are not to blame for underscores. The software design is to blame: you choose that the name of the article HAD to be 'nicely' visible in the URL, and that 's maybe the 'error'. Adding 1-cpu cycle to the code is better than keeping correcting users forever.

Hope this doesn't sound too ... how does one say in English... too harsh maybe?.... It's just to get it clear for myself. Am I really missing something here?

Thanks, Pieter

Brion Vibber wrote:

On lun, 2003-01-27 at 14:20, Erik Moeller wrote:

...

I've seen this a lot: People write links [[like_this]]. Does anyone have an idea what makes them do this? Is there anything in the way articles are displayed that suggests underscores should be used? Are that many people looking at the browser's status bar, where the underscores are visible?

Probably. Also, some automatically created links (moved pages, usemod-era subpage links) have underscores in them.

...

Can we do anything to prevent this?

Tell them "don't do that"? It seems overkill to automatically filter input looking for links and replacing underscores with spaces.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

---

                   Name: signature.asc

signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Description: This is a digitally signed message part

Thanks for replying Erik,

Please solve it elegantly: never complain to the user about the designer's own mistakes: just translate back while receiving a text submitted by a user. It is a 'design-uglyness' of the Wikipedia perhaps, but never the user's fault.

It is the software who started this *silent translating* in the first place, now don't blame that innocent user for adopting these (hardly visible!) habits! Let's instead be nice. Please don't frighten people with bold warning messages, they are really unnessesary. It would pollute GUI in my opinion.

Somewhere in the code, it is detected if somethin is between [[ ]]... Hopefully that code resides somewhere in the part where the Article-text from the user is received. Must not be too hard to put in a simple find-and-replace-command there, would it?

Kind regards Pieter

Erik Moeller wrote:

...

Sorry I'm going to bother you again: :-)

No problem -- you are probably correct that we should just convert the stuff, preferably before saving. OTOH, this has a probable negative side- effect: People might continue to type [[foo_bar_baz_boo_bad]] without us even noticing; that is, they might spend more effort than necessary.

Perhaps, if underscores in links are detected, a bold warning message should be prepended on the page: "You have used underscores in your links. This is not necessary. See .. for more information. The underscores have been filtered".

Regards,

Erik _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

On 28 Jan 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:

...

Somewhere in the code, it is detected if somethin is between [[ ]]... Hopefully that code resides somewhere in the part where the Article-text from the user is received. Must not be too hard to put in a simple find-and-replace-command there, would it?

No, it would be trivial, and I am in fact working on this part of the code anyway. But as I said, I don't think it's a good idea to let people adopt bad habits. The warning message can be friendly, but I think it's useful, similar to a spellchecker.

I really don't see what the two of you are making a fuss about. What's so bad about those underscores in the first place? It's not like the links get any worse or better from them.

Andre Engels