The case for case
Standardizing case in AboutUs:
The Options
Title Case
- Pros
- Makes the most sense as links are page titles
- Searches well
- Cons
- Doesn't work as is, i.e. you might need to say title case when using it inline.
- Easy to read & remember
CamelCase
- Pros
- Harkens to the original wiki
- Helps with LinkLanguage - i.e. easy to "link while you think".
- Recognizable as an internal link
- Laser points to you in search engines
- Cons
- Search Engines may have a harder time with it
- Too tech/geeky to appeal to the average internet user
- Requires high English proficency to be able to parse [1]
- Doesn't work as is, i.e. you might need to say camel case when using it inline.
- Laser point search results won't scale, if everything is CamelCase
Capital Case
- Pros
- Easy to read & remember
- Searches well
- Cons
- Doesn't work as is, i.e. you might need to say sentence case when using it inline.
- There is the potential for ambiguity with small words, such as "of" and "the", etc.
Sentence case
- Pros
- Easy to read & remember
- Searches well
- It makes sense to the largest amount of people
- Is the only natural way of typing on the list
- Cons
- I thought it did, but Sentence case does not work as sentence case. But did it before? And might it again after we address capitalization (see related development card).related development card).
- not easy to remember
lower case
- Pros
- Inline capability.
- Cons'
- Looks sloppy
- Doesn't work with names or titles
Discussion
I think that there are several uses for case in the wiki:
- Interal links that only the people working on the wiki use. (CamelCase)
- Links created in order have content added and to be searched. (combination of Capital Case and Sentence case)
I find these two links, for example to be faily useless: public domain & fair use - MarkDilley
- Yeah, I just did that because someone spammed the fair use page. I agree we should build something there that is more relevant to AboutUs. - RayStandardizing case in AboutUs:
- I don't see how changing the pages to FairUse and PublicDomain would make them any more useful. It would just make the pages less likely to show up on Google. Scott
- It would simplifiy the naming standard here. With small case fair use and public domain we need to create a plethra of redirects: Fair use, Fair Use, and the less obvious fair Use. Similarly, Public Domain, Public domain and public Domain. 6 redirects for two pages. And to make it more clear, I don't think CamelCase words are targets for search engines. So that critique doesn't work for me. MarkDilley
Ref - the current proposal (Image above)
In my view it is Search that is broken, not the database model for pagenames. There are at least two methods of improving search that we should explore first:
- Making search case insensitive and take full advantage of MySQL's 5.x full text search engine (the MW search function has not been significantly updated since MySQL 4.x)
- Changing the search engine (Lucerne)
Only after taking one these steps should we consider changing the basic pagename architecture. This is a very risky proposition because the pagename code is pervasive over the mediawiki code base and chances of catching every instance of it on the first try are slim.
The current proposal would force pagenames to lowercase and remove spaces and the majority of other characters (except numbers)
- The following pagenames would all resolve to theaceinthehole in the database
- The Ace in the Hole - a restaurant
- The ACE in the hole - an organization
- The ace in the hole - a definition
- The ace in the hole! - an expression
- Only one page could be created for theaceinthehole and other entities with the same name but different casing or punctuation would be forced to modify their pagename even if they held a copyright or trademark
- Only one page could be created for a specific acronym and other organizations with the same acronym would not appear in a search for that acronym
- May not be predictable what would happen when foreign language pagenames are entered and we may not have the resources to fix it
- Would have to develop an algorithm to accomplish the lowercasing and removal of special characters for every language.
John Stanton 21:02, 11 April 2007 (PDT)
A case to consider
Is this the right place to make this comment? SteveHabibRose is a redlink, but when I click to edit it to create a redirect to Steve Habib Rose, it tells me that I cannot do so, because a similar page already exists, namely Steve Habib Rose. This might be a feature, but it strikes me as a bug. TedErnst
