[Mediawiki-l] case insensitive links

[Rowan Collins]

On Thu, 3 Feb 2005 21:40:25 +0100, solo turn <soloturn at gmail.com> wrote:
> an option to ignore case would solve our problems. in which place/file
> would it fit best?

One problem that occurs to me with this is that if everything in the
code treats titles as case insensitive, where do you define what the
"normalised" version of the title is - e.g. how do you display it when
the user goes to the page? You could have "uppercase first, rest
lower", but then you'd get things like "Microsoft windows xp", which
is just wrong; alternatively, you could have "uppercase first of each
word", but that would look odd in other circumstances, particularly if
you didn't special case words like "of", "the", "and", etc (which, in
turn, would be a nightmare for l10n...)

It's been suggested [bug 469*] that (because even the current system
"guesses" that you want the first letter capitalised, causing a few
nuisances, such as "H2g2") there should be markup to override the
display of the title - but nobody's actually coded it yet. If they
did, you could probably come up with a capitalisation default that was
"good enough for most cases", but it would mean people would have to
go round overriding titles - so they might just as well go round
correcting badly capitalised links (as Jamie says, either "Framis
Bulkhead" is a proper name, or it shouldn't be written like that
anyway).

* http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=496
-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]