Steve Bennett wrote:
On 5/31/06, Brion Vibber <brion(a)pobox.com>
wrote:
Going through redlinks is how you create pages on
a wiki.
It's not the only way... It's just that the interface
apparently does some primitive case resolving when there *aren't* too
separate articles - type NOSTRADAMUS in the search box and it will
take you (silently) to "Nostradamus". Make a link to [[NOSTRADAMUS]]
in an article, and it will be a redlink (and clicking it will
definitely not redirect silently).
Although there is another way to get there -- just type
NOSTRADAMUS into the browser's address bar.
Personally, I'd like it if the interface did a little *more*
of that "primitive case resolving", because creating all those
redirects seems like a waste of time, a task which could better
be handled in software. Some work has been done on this over at
en.wiktionary, although in a somewhat ad-hoc way.
[[Lyon Métro]] is a good example, because a hypothetical
more-than-primitive search resolution process ought to handle
presence/absence of diacritics, too. On the one hand this
can quickly get nontrivial, but on the other hand the Unicode
consortium has published some pretty concise normalization
and collation algorithms which directly address this problem.
(See e.g. UAX 15 "Unicode Normalization Forms" at
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr15/, and UTS10 "Unicode
Collation Algorithm" at
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/.)