[pmwiki-users] Polish vs polis (was: A Wiktionary with PmWiki?)

[chr at home.se]

On Wed, 9 Nov 2005, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> (and it goes against what others have been asking, which is
> that page names become case *in*sensitive).

Just to chime in from the other end, I do want page names case sensitive
in some case. By some weird coincide a co-worker actually told me today
about a word in English where the meaning changes with the case of the
first letter. Here are two example sentences
* To 'polish' a car.
* A Polish car.

So maybe someone out there would really like to refer to the page 
[[polish]] in the first form, as well as to [[Polish]] in the second form.

I also think the URI .../Polish and .../polish should be different here.

Here is another example that works in Swedish
* [[Sara]] is a page about someone name Sara
* [[SARA]] is a page about 'Ställning, Anding, Riktning och Avfyrning', 
  which happens to be an acronym or mnemonic which is used in e.g. riflery
  (For those wondering, it's: position, breathing, aiming, firing

> Let me see if I can frame the issue succinctly -- suppose
> we have markups like the following:
> 
>     [[Contact Patrick]] for more details on PmWiki.
> 
>     Interested parties should [[contact Patrick]] for more details.
> 
> It's pretty clear that the links in both brackets should link to
> the same place, so *something* has to be case-folded somewhere to get
> that to happen.  Doing that case-folding smartly, consistently, and
> efficiently is the issue.

Yes, and in all honesty, being able to automatically differentiate between

	[[Polish]] cars are ...

	[[Polish]] can be used on your car to ...

seems hopeless...

> 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.)

I wouldn't like this. I'd definitely prefer case sensitive URIs for the
wikis I'm working with.

Anyway, the thing about [[polish]] vs [[Polish]] makes me wonder if this
is something we need to handle differently. Maybe the system could work as
follows (inspired by google): When you click on [[polish]], but [[Polish]]
also exist, you can get the text "Did you mean: [[Polish]]". 
Or maybe we could have an action/link for listing pages with a similar 
name (including minor mispellings)

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr