Last modified: 2008-03-18 23:20:48 UTC
If I attempt to go to a nonexistant wiki page, and then click the "Search for this term in other pages" button, spaces in the page's name will be converted to underscores, making the search unsuccessful. For example, "classical relativity" is a phrase sometimes used in physics to describe Galilean relativity. There is one article containing the phrase "classical relativity" (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aen.wikipedia.org+%22classical+relativity). If I click on a red link for "classical relativity", I will go to "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Classical_relativity&action=edit", which has a link labelled "Search for Classical relativity in Wikipedia". This link takes me to "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/Classical_relativity", which searches for the term "Classical_relativity". Note that the space has been incorrectly converted into an underscore. The Google search boxes on this page offer to search Google for "classical_relativity", which is not what the user wanted. This problem also occurs if I go directly to "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/classical relativity" -- the "Search" option converts all spaces to underscores. This bug has made it difficult for me to convert the Dictionary_Search Firefox plug-in to use Wikipedia -- if there is no article for a multi-word term, the user has to remove the underscores manually.
The current UI templates on en.wikipedia.org don't appear to suffer from this problem, or link properly through internal channels which handle it correctly. It should be equally possible currently to add the external links with correct formatting, should they be used. Resolving this as WORKSFORME since current links appear to be fine.
