[pmwiki-users] A Wiktionary with PmWiki?

[Waylan Limberg]

On 11/9/05, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 06:04:38PM +0100, gc200 at gmx.de wrote:
> > >
> > > Out of curiosity, would it bother anyone if pagenames in urls were
> > > always lowercase, i.e., if the above always appeared as
> > > "contact_patrick" in a url?  (It would of course display with
> > > appropriate capitalization in page titles and the like.)
> > >
> >
> > Thanks Patrick,
> > I personally don't like automatic mangling of Urls and Names, when there's
> > no possibility to switch it off. I think, names should be preserved as much
> > as possible in the way they have been entered.

I feel the same way. If it can't be done, then all lowercase would be
an acceptable second option.

> Yes, but in this case what exactly do you mean by
> "the way they have been entered"?  For example, I will often
> want to write about [[basic text editing]], but have the
> page be titled "Basic Text Editing".  Which one of these is
> "the way the name was entered" -- is it "basic_text_editing"
> or "Basic_Text_Editing"?
>
IMO, that is what the page title is for. Or perhaps an option could be
included to change the case on display. But that could get ugly when
words like the, to, etc.. are part of the page name. They usually are
not uppercased in titles. Guess that's why I like setting the page
title. You get to explicitly set both the URL and the Title of the
page separately.

> What about for links appearing at the beginning of a sentence?
>
>    [[Basic text editing]] can be performed using any web browser.
>

Just do: [[basic text editing | Basic text editing]] can be performed
using any web browser. Not to hard, although I can see some users
getting confused as to why the simpler [[Basic text editing]] doesn't
work in this case.

> The problem with saying that names should be preserved in the way
> they have been entered is that there is more than one way to enter
> a name, so we have to pick one of them as being the canonical form.
>

I suggest having all page names default to lowercase with
case-*in*sensitive URLs, but give the option for an admin to set
either pagenames or urls or both to case-sensitive. When set to case
sensitive, then case is preserved. Those who do would have the issues
you described above, but could utilize the workarounds I suggested (or
something similar I didn't think of). While it may not be ideal for
everyone, I think it would work for more of us.

just my $0.02
--
----
Waylan Limberg
waylan at gmail.com