[Mediawiki-l] case insensitive links

Muzaffer Ozakca mozakca at indiana.edu
Fri Feb 4 16:01:38 UTC 2005



> -----Original Message-----
> 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...)
> 

I think an article title should be however the first creator assigns it to
be. If the first person gives "Microsoft windows xp" it should be titled
that way until somebody moves it to the correct title. However, all
references (links) to "Microsoft windows xp", "microsoft Windows XP" should
point to the only page existing. We can't assume people know the correct
capitalization all the time, even then they will make mistakes. So, search
in the database should be case insensitive but the correct capitalizations
should be achieved manually. 

> 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).

Maybe instead of this, the same approach above can be taken. Nothing is
automatically capitalized and if there are mistakes somebody else corrects
it. Isn't it how the wiki concept works, anyways.


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