Wikipedia:Phase II feature requests/Naming conventions

This page is obsolete! It is an archive of old feature requests that were still active on 2002 July 20, when we moved from Phase II to Phase III of the software. Many requests were implemented then, while others became obsolete due to being rejected by the community. See Wikipedia:Feature requests for current requests.

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Naming conventions (this is all done, but not yet implemented on Wikipedia)

• The wiki software could be written so that, for example, if I write andy jewell[?], Andy jewell[?], andy Jewell, or Andy Jewell, the page linked to will always be Andy_Jewell. In that case, one would be able to capitalize or not in the text of wiki articles at one's pleasure, and only the titles of articles would look strange (in some cases, e.g., Ich_Bin_Ein_Berliner). But that situation would be preferable to the current situation, in which some people are capitalizing second and third words of article titles, when, in referring to the subject of the article, one doesn't ordinarily capitalize those words. (For discussion, see naming conventions.) -- Larry Sanger
  • This has been done in version 0.92. The canonical form of a page will have all words capitalized, and links can have arbitrary words capitalized. This will be a little strange sometimes, but it seems to be the best solution for now.
  • Ooh, that sounds awful. I hope that's not what'd going to happen, since it violates the naming conventions. --The Cunctator

• Now that we have Free Links, can we have the canonization software allow parentheses, so we can use titles with short glosses rather than awkward compounds, e.g., Nirvana (musical group)[?] rather than NirvanaBand[?]? The downside of this is a little more typing to make a link; the upside is that we get to have titles in plain English. --Lee Daniel Crocker and Larry Sanger (see Wikipedia:Disambiguation)
  • This is in version 0.92. I was surprised to see that parentheses are allowed in URIs/URLs according to RFC 2396, so it shouldn't be hard to add them. --CliffordAdams

• There's a good reason why we can't use single quotes in titles, right? It sure would be handy to have the use of them, though.
  • After more thought, I've given in on this request also. Single quotes are allowed in 0.92. Please don't ask for any more punctuation, however, or I may scream. :-) --CliffordAdams
    • How about backticks and semicolons? (joke!)

• Can we please turn off automatic subpages? I'm not suggesting we disallow subpages, only that the software not assume that anything following a slash, even if it's not in brackets, should be a subpage: currently aspirin/Tylenol; Marat/Sade; and Face/Off all want to make a subpage of Feature requests. CSCE/OSCE did want to make one on one of the Hungary pages, but for some reason doesn't do it here. I know the < [[Feature_requests/nowiki|/nowiki]] > trick; I just think links should be links when in brackets and not otherwise. --KQ