[Mediawiki-l] To Change Separator Character (underscore to Dot)

Sun May 14 00:12:28 UTC 2006

I have to say it'd be cool if you'd integrate this, but I'd suggest  
dashes (-) instead of periods (.) - it'd make more sense to the end- 
user, and be more user-friendly. Perhaps, just make it an option as  
you suggested - a configuration variable. Check with brion about  
getting into the SVN team to comit you're changes.

On May 13, 2006, at 2:22 PM, Seun Osewa wrote:
> 100?  Ouch!
>
> Google recognizes keywords in urls that are separated by dots or
> hyphens, but words separared by underscores are viewed as one unit.
>
> A Google rep even recommended hyphens over underscores:
>   http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/23564.htm
>   http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/4572.htm
>
> The difference is really small, and if a project gets a lot of link
> love (like wikipedia) it probably wouldn't matter, I guess.
>
> On 5/13/06, Elliott F. Cable <ecable at avxw.com> wrote:
>> ... How will this affect you're search engine rankings? And you'd
>> have to modify them ALL, every single one - if you missed one, it
>> would break major things, would it not? The whole linking scheme,
>> really.
>>
>> I'd say 100+. I could be wrong, but in my experience hacking
>> mediawiki, everything is so tightly interwoven that changing even a
>> small tiny thing that you think would only appear once, actually
>> appears in 10 different places. Making this a variable in some ways
>> wouldn't be a bad idea, but in others, it wouldn't work - what about
>> interwiki linking? Templates? using dots in titles that are NOT  
>> spaces?
>>
>> But again, how would this help with google?
>>
>> On May 13, 2006, at 1:19 PM, Seun Osewa wrote:
>>
>>> Well,
>>>
>>> I'm launching a new site that I'll be developing for years or more,
>>> and I feel that if this project that'll take maybe a few hours in a
>>> weekend will affect my search engine rankings by even just 5%, it's
>>> worth getting it over with right now.
>>>
>>> If the community will help me, then instead of just changing the
>>> underscores to dots i might even be able to create a patch which  
>>> makes
>>> it possible for people to use any character as the separator
>>> character.
>>>
>>> How many places do you think I'll need to modify?  5? 10? 20? 50?
>>>
>>> Seun.
>>> http://www.nairaland.com/
>>>
>>> On 5/13/06, Elliott F. Cable <ecable at avxw.com> wrote:
>>>> You'd have to look through most of the source code for mediawiki,
>>>> methinks. Big project. WHy, if I may ask?
>>>>
>>>> On May 13, 2006, at 1:09 PM, Seun Osewa wrote:
>>>>> Hello,
>>>>>
>>>>> I would like to change the separator character on my mediawiki
>>>>> installation from the current underscore format to dot format.
>>>>>
>>>>> I have read a previous exchange in which it was noted that the
>>>>> underscore is hard-coded into mediawiki in many places, but i
>>>>> feel it
>>>>> would be worth the effort.
>>>>>
>>>>> What are the places/files/directories where I should start
>>>>> looking?  Thanks!
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> Seun Osewa
>>>>> http://www.nairaland.com
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> MediaWiki-l mailing list
>>>>> MediaWiki-l at Wikimedia.org
>>>>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
>>>>
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>>>
>>> --
>>> Seun Osewa
>>> http://www.nairaland.com [vast Nigerian forum]
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> MediaWiki-l mailing list
>>> MediaWiki-l at Wikimedia.org
>>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
>>
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>
>
> -- 
> Seun Osewa
> http://www.nairaland.com [vast Nigerian forum]
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