On 10/22/07, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
Steve Bennett wrote:
#ALIASES [Dr] Grace [Smith|Jones]
A beginner user might simply write:
#ALIASES [Dr Grace Smith|Dr Grace Jones|Grace Smith|Grace Jones]
or even: #ALIASES Dr Grace Smith #ALIASES Dr Grace Jones #ALIASES Grace Smith #ALIASES Grace Jones
That's a great point.
Would we need a little more in the syntax to suggest whether blocks could be optional?
A UI tool would obviously help, but that would be a slight departure for MediaWiki. There's nothing else like that atm (afaik), so it's hard to picture how it would fit in exactly.
Yeah, it would be a departure for sure. On the other Wiki-driven project I've been working on, which we coded from scratch, we've been adding more JavaScript UI for metadata and it has been a big hit, especially for things that have complicated structure.
I agree with Mr. Dalton that the database load of scanning for "reverse redirects"/"aliases"/whatever would be outlandish.
A partial solution, to eliminate the need for a large percentage of existing and potential redirects, is quite simple. Make wikilinks case-insensitive by default. Except in cases where two titles exist with the same spelling (but different capitalization).
This way if somebody links to "[[least weasel]]" mid-sentence (because they don't realize it is our convention to capitalize the species name), the link would automatically point to [[Least Weasel]], whether a redirect existed or not. For lesser known species where no redirect exists yet, this would eliminate the duplicate effort associated with accidentally creating a redundant article. Icing on the cake? Have the link automatically capitalize itself when the page is saved, to ensure correct typography in article space.
—C.W.