Last modified: 2007-03-06 02:07:38 UTC
In the Go/Search bar on the side of the Wikipedia (And hence, Wikimedia) pages, you can put in almost any combination of capitalizations to get the to the proper article. Example: Prestige Oil Spill yields http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_oil_spill . However, using internal wikilinks (The double square brackets) on Prestige Oil Spill (IE: [[en:Prestige Oil Spill]]) yields a broken link, because it attempts to go the improperly capitalized URL. There are, in my best estimate, more than 5000 redirects on the English Wikipedia simply to attempt to avoid this error. This is very conservative, as there are 1.4 million decent sized articles on the English Wikipedia. I thought this would go in site requests, but apparently not, so it's in general. Low priority, and Minor severity, since it's not important to have it fixed immediately. There is already a working work-around, but this would resolve some things. OS and Platform shouldn't matter, since it's something to do with the Wikimedia software.
And if there's some unrelated page that's legitimately a proper noun and gets put at [[Prestige Oil Spill]] sometime, the wrong case will take you to the wrong page. It's not too surprising if someone miscapitalizing things when typing them into the search bar starts getting the wrong page one day (and how many people would type it more than once to notice?), but it's unexpected and confusing if wikilinks go to the wrong place. People expect searches to possibly not turn up what they want, but expect links to go to a relevant place. So wikilinks are much more conservative in guessing what you want. Regardless, this should be solved if/when we forbid names that are case-insensitively identical, which is the sensible thing to do at some point anyway. So I'll dupe to bug 453, which appears to be about this. Incidentally, the software is MediaWiki, the Foundation is Wikimedia. No, the people who thought up these names were not experts at brand-name recognizability. :P *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 453 ***
