On 8/7/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
That's the one I can't understand - putting "ISBN xxx" in the piped part of a link only overrides the actual link if it it's to an ISBN page. This is most unexpected. I suppose it has some strange "prevent misleading ISBN links" benefit, but it's just...odd.
To be honest, the fact that the piped label gets "interpreted" for magic words at all just looks like a bug, or an oversight, or a misfeature or whatever. From some more testing it looks like some "magic word" behaviour gets interpereted in piped links and some doesn't - http:// links *don't* override the actual link for instance.
It's desirable in some situations that piped text should be parsed, for example to include ''italics'' or '''bold text''' in the link (naval ships, for example, use a mix of plain and italic text in their links). The extent to which it gets parsed is interesting however, and some of these behaviours may be unexpected, perhaps this should be forwarded to Wikitech-l?
You should ask the developers why this was implemented as a magic word in the first place, I'm not really sure of their reasons.
Most likely it was a very quick and easy way to make a large number of existing ISBN numbers suddenly come to life.
Yes, I would imagine that that would be why. That's probably why so many variations will actually work and produce viable links, to account for inconsistent usage in the past.