Last modified: 2007-02-02 18:39:23 UTC
Wikilinks like [[Glassfish_Application_Server]] are currently parsed into <a href="/wiki/Glassfish_Application_Server" title="">Glassfish_Application_Server</a>. This is ugly and awkward. People will continue to include underscores in wikilinks since it's easiest to copy them that way. There are multiple ways to solve this, but the easiest would just be to globally replace underscores with space when generating anchors and titles of links.
I disagree. First of all, you can copy easily from the page's actual title rather than the URL. Second of all, there are some page names that should actually contain underscores, and we don't need to introduce even *more* places where this is difficult or impossible. And finally, that leaves the underscores in the wikitext, where it's still ugly and counterintuitive.
The title was meant to be "Underscores in wikilinks should be changed to spaces for anchor". Sorry for the confusion.
First, what pages contain underscores, and how do you create them? Second, if this is the case, the software can detect this distinction. As for the underscores being ugly, that's true (and I usually avoid them), but it's not as big a deal.
(In reply to comment #3) > First, what pages contain underscores, and how do you create them? None do, but some *should*. The first one that comes to mind is the redirect [[mod_rewrite]]. > Second, if this is the case, the software can detect this distinction. Not easily, if at all.
Then your reasoning doesn't make sense to me. Underscore titles aren't supported, and I don't see how they could be. Why should we let that stop us from improving parsing this way?
Underscore titles are not *currently* supported in the page titles themselves. Eventually, one hopes, we'll get around to allowing underscores along with initial lowercase letters and so on (while treating them as more or less canonically equivalent for the purposes of user input, just not for display). Underscore titles *are* currently supported in some places, such as wikilinks, and this should not change.
First, initial lowercases are allowed, and even used on wiktionary. However, they are disabled on Wikipedia. If underscore titles were allowed, thousands of current wikilinks would have to be changed. One way to avoid that is to rewrite (on save) underscores into wikilinks into spaces, *until* the ability to have titles with underscores was created. That would resolve my concerns while still allowing the possibility of future underscore titles. However, this begs the question of what we would use as a URL delimiter in place of underscores. Do you have any ideas? We would either have to come up with an escape scheme (awkward when manually typing URLs), or sacrifice a different character.
The link text is the text as written, period.
