[Mediawiki-l] Where can I read about the URL case-sensitivity debate?

Tue Sep 20 19:28:11 UTC 2005

On 20/09/05, Matt England <mengland at mengland.net> wrote:
> I'm sure this has been debated many times, so I simply ask:
> 
> Where's the best place to read about the current state of affairs with
> respect case sensitivity for MW URLs?

Well, first of all, the "current state of affairs", as such, is very
simple: page titles are entirely case sensitive, except for the first
letter (so [[Asteroid]] and [[asteroid]] are treated the same) unless
a variable is set to suppress even this (so that things like
dictionaries which want articles beginning with a lowercase letter can
do so).

There is no current plan to change this behaviour any time soon.

As for previous discussion, I dug through the archives a bit and found
this thread:
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2005-February/thread.html#3283
and this one:
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2005-March/thread.html#4188
which carries into the next month:
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2005-April/thread.html#4341

Basically, issues include (but are not limited to):
* what would the "normalised" article name be, for doing DB lookups
and binary comparisons
* how would you determine what the "correct" capitalisation was (i.e.
the one displayed as the top heading)
* are there situations where you want two articles differing only in
case; and situations where you don't want alternative capitalisations
to create valid links

Nothing insurmountable, but nothing that easy either, and nobody's yet
had enough conviction that it's the right thing to do to actually go
ahead and do it.

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]