cookfire wrote:
There is already a policy on the English Wiktionary to redirect words that are very often misspelled to their correctly spelled counterparts. If somebody asks for such a page, it will say 'redirected from ...' at the top. This will teach people who thought the wrong spelling was correct, how to properly write those words. I'm not in favour or against deleting the redirects, but there was somebody who said that there were probably a lot of sites (en.wikipedia comes to mind but it certainly isn't the only one) linking to the capitalised versions of the words. It would be a very bad idea to break all those links. I think it is wise not to take out those redirects right away.
Polyglot
As I said in my direct response to Sabine I believe that a statement like "common error for [[...]]" is more meaningful than a redirect, because it makes them pause to see that they have made an error.
As a person who would prefer to minimize the number of redirects, I agree that there is no rush to do this.
The question of inter-project links is an interesting one. I believe that each project should be free to develop its own capitalization policies. This understandably leads to problems when inter-project links are desirable. The fact that the English Wikipedia does not yet use Unicode also implies an entire range of problems. When one project makes a link to another project the link should follow the rules of the target project rather than its own rules. To this end there have been no problems in creating inter-Wikipedia links between languages for personal names. Some projects use middle names, but others don't. The Esperanto Wikipedia puts surnames in all capitals, and that does not appear to carry any problems. My suggestion for links, when there is no ambiguity, would be for a link from Wikipedia to default to whatever form exists on Wiktionary. The ambiguous cases may need further consideration.
Ec