[Mediawiki-l] case insensitive links

[Rich Holton]

> 
> 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).
> 

How about the following resolution:
1. Use some newly defined markup for the page title, if present
2. Search the first paragraph/n words for a match to the link name
ignoring case, in bold. If found, use that as the page name.
3. Default to the case of the link name (including redirect links). 

I don't yet know enough about the guts of the code to say if this is
easy, hard, or impossible. But it seems like it could work
conceptually.

One question is how to deal with already existing pages where the name
differs only in case.

-Rich Holton

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