Steve Bennett wrote:
On 6/1/06, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote:
Although there is another way to get there --
just type
NOSTRADAMUS into the browser's address bar.
No good for accents, punctuation etc.
No? It tends to work for me -- must be a browser thing.
(But I think I agree, the "Go" box ought to work just like the
address bar.)
Personally,
I'd like it if the interface did a little *more*
of that "primitive case resolving"...
Yep, but there is a fundamental issue which is that in *some* cases
case is significant, and in others it isn't.
Yup.
Without looking, do you know whether "Bell
Tower" is the same thing as
"Bell tower"? (no, I don't either).
Well, the simplistic answer (but I would think the answer to go
with) is that if they both exist they're different, but if not
they're probably the same.
On the other hand, there are definitely cases where
case should be
more significant: I noticed today that someone had linked to
[[foreland]], whereas [[Foreland]] came up.
But of course there, if nothing else, you're butting up against
Wikipedia's special-casing (er, special uncasing) of the first
character.
There is currently no way to force [[foreland]] to
give a redlink.
Hmm.
You either have to unlink it entirely, link it and
hope that someone
will realise that they're not at the right article, or go to [[Foreland]]
and add a red dablink (a very weird concept). All bad solutions.
I see what you mean, although I have to wonder if perhaps this is
a problem that's not worth solving (law of diminishing returns,
and all that).
The best solution would:
a) be consistent between typing in the search box, and following a [[link]]
b) propose choices when the exact choice wasn't found, involving
diacritic and case allowances
Strictly speaking there are at least four cases: the search
box when hitting "Go", the search box when hitting "Search",
wikilinks, and incoming external links (or, equivalently, users
typing directly into the address bar). At some point I want to
sit down and map out exactly how these are the same and
different, and exactly which sorts of fuzziness ought to apply
where. (It's tempting to suggest that three out of the four
ought to be identical in every respect, but there are enough
weirdnesses lurking nearby that I'm not ready to make that
assertion yet.)
There are also nuances depending on how likely it is that the
user is searching for something that ought to exist, versus
preparing to create something that doesn't exist. (This
distinction is mostly aligned with wither the user is hitting the
Noarticletext or Newarticletext page.) For example, if you map
case too aggressively in the case where only one variant exists,
you can make it impossible for anyone to ever create the other ones.
I'm sure we've all gone "name
fishing" before - you don't know what a
thing is called, but hope to use the most canonical name by adding
(film) or (food) or something afterwards. In such cases you do
definitely want some name resolving. If a thing by that name existst
and it' sthe wrong thing...you'd like to turn it off somehow...
Well, when I go fishing in that way and get a false positive,
it's always from the Go/Search box, and I just go back and hit
Search instead of Go.