Re: Proposal: making [[article]] and [[Article]] equivalent on the wiki

[Sietse Brouwer <sbbrouwer@gmail.com>]

Hi Mojca,

Sorry, somehow I missed everything but your first line when I wrote my
reply. Here's a better answer.

Mojca wrote:
> Even if you change that setting, you still have no idea whether a page
> is "Font Tools" or "Font tools" or "font tools". You can make a link
> to [[font tools]] or [[headers and footers]] inside your sentence, but
> that still won't help you to get to
>     http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Font_Tools
>     http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Headers_and_Footers

It'll help you get to [[Multiline equations]], though. Multi-word
titles are still inconsistent, and I think that [[Headers and
footers]] and [[Font tools]] would be better titles: both more
predictable and more linkable. Wikipedia uses the same policy, and I
think it works well:

* titles are displayed with an initial capital, unless otherwise
specified with {{DISPLAYTITLE:...}}
* the rest of the title is in lowercase, except for proper nouns etc.
(e.g. TeX); just like you'd write the phrase in a sentence.
* links can be both with and without an initial capital, depending on
need at the linking end.

What we have to deal with that Wikipedia doesn't, is filenames (and a
few commands): -- we'd like those to display and behave as lowercase.
So we want lowercase on occasion, but we don't want it to get
confusing, either --- we don't want people to wonder whether to write
[[Article]] or [[article]], and we especially don't want there to be a
wrong answer. Now, neither of these requirements compel us to enable
or disable wgCapitalLinks.

File and command names can be solved like so:
1.a keep wgCapitalLinks disabled, and simply title the articles like
the filenames
1.b enable wgCapitalLinks, and simply use {{DISPLAYTITLE:filename}} on
filename articles.

No "[[Article]] vs. [[article]]" doubts can be achieved like so:
2.a keep wgCapitalLinks disabled, consistent article naming policy
plus consistently writing [[Article|article]] to get lowercased links
2.b keep wgCapitalLinks disabled, consistent article naming policy
plus a lowercase-to-titlecase (or v.v.) redirect for every article
2.c enable wgCapitalLinks. (Still need an article naming policy for
multi-word titles, of course.)

So, which is the bigger burden: lowercasing filenames manually, or
manually adjusting mid-sentence links? I think making article titles
look like filenames is more of an edge case than linking to articles
is. You write that "the ConTeXt wiki hardly covers any substantial
amount of common words or phrases", but have a look at this page:
http://wiki.contextgarden.net/index.php?title=Special:AllPages&from=Symbols&to=write18
There are only about 20 or so filename/commandname articles on the
entire wiki (excluding those under Command/), of which about 12
describe various no-longer-used zip files. There are a lot of articles
with names one could easily work into a sentence, even if we don't
have as many 'simple noun' articles as Wikipedia.

Kind regards,
Sietse
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