Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 129.2.40.144 (talk) at 01:40, 25 March 2005. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

So, capitalization counts in the second word in a Proper name, but not in the f/First. Brilliant. When are you going to wake up and change the software and convention? It's inevitable. Give up please. You're wasting our time.

Give me the user interface source, and database source, and I'll fix this myself.

• Misplaced Pages:PHP script source
• http://www.wikipedia.com/tarballs/ database dump
• Wikitech-L developer mailing list

Enjoy!

Err, thanks. Damn I hate that.  ;-p Now, do I have to deal with LDC's claim that "this has been settled, shut up and love it", or can I really just do this?

Well, what exactly do you want? For page titles to be completely case-sensitive and case-preserving (ie, you could have separate Foo, foo, FOO, fOO articles)? The annoying thing about that is that you'll break a zillion links -- non-proper nouns are usually linked to in lowercase... except at the beginning of a sentence, of course. And who wants to write something like "] are known in this area."?

Or, you might want page titles to be case-insensitive, but case-preserving. ie, the actual article might be "foo" or "asteroids", but a link ] or ] will also match the lowercase title. Doable, but again problematic; if the page is first created from an uppercase link, you're stuck with the uppercase title (time to make more redirects!). And if you want to have distinct Foo vs foo pages, how do you distinguish them in links without making the more frequent case of non-proper noun at the beginning of a sentence problematic?

I'm not aware of any prior discussion of this subject on wikipedia (though it probably exists somewhere), but if someone else does I'd be curious to see just how it was settled previously... Personally, I like the status quo just fine with first-letter capitalization, but if something else can be made to work cleanly and keep everyone happy, I'm open to suggestions. --Brion VIBBER

The discussion took place under "Wiki Canonization", or something like that. and what we actually agreed to do is to be even less case-senstive than we are now, by uppercasing the first letter of every word in titles, and matching them with links in either case. That's actually the way I'd like to see it, but before that software change came into effect we switched to the new software.

Please realize that the single most important thing that makes Wikis work is easy linking; that is, one can merrily type along and suddenly decide to put brackets around chess because you think it would be nice to link, and behold, it magically links to an article about chess. Now, since the English language requires using the same word with different capitalization in different contexts (like the beginning of a sentence, inside a title, etc.), the sanity of the system demands some basic case-insentive matching. That also makes searching reasonable. That makes it a little trickier to distinguish between one-word generic terms and proper nouns, but that's a minority case and has reasonable workarounds, and anyway that's already the way real encyclopedia's work (Britannica, for instance, has titles in ALL CAPS). Now it could still be case-preserving, but then titles would look really ugly. Better to have titles be in standard English case, so that they are what educated people expect--or at least people who have read our naming conventions.

Being totally case-sensitive is simply not an option. It would make 90% of the pages redirects, make links point to the wrong place, make searches a major pain in the ass, and many other things. Being totally case-insensitive actually is a good option, and I'd be all for it, and put all the titles in ALL CAPS; that would work well, but it would be ugly. Of course we could also have total separation of page title and link address, but that defeats the whole purpose of a Wiki. So we compromised on the system as it is--it's not as easy to use as all caps, it's not as pretty or as flexible as total sensitivity. But it's a good compromise, and you're the only one whining about it. -- Lee Daniel Crocker

Thanks for the link, Lee. For what it's worth, Capitaliztion Of The First Letter Of Every Word In The Title is what the old software that's still running on most of the Non-English Wikipedias does. It's hideously ugly; I much prefer the first-letter capitalization we have here, and would generally prefer to keep it that way and convert the others to the first-letter scheme. However I see no pressing need for lowercase first letters in titles, which is also ugly. Brion VIBBER

Except, of course, for articles like pH -- but things like that are a rare exceptions to the general rule. Perhaps we should have initial uppercasing as the default when creating article, but allow articles to be moved to lowercase-initial titles, by simply not forcing the issue in the move code.

Language

"7-Eleven is the world's largest chain of small convenience stores". Now isn't that a nice statement. WHAT IS "SMALL"? 10 square inch? 10 acres? - Jerryseinfeld 03:07, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Fixt. Adraeus 03:44, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Which states have gasoline-selling 7-11s? Which do not?