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# LinusTolke

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Contributor of things to Wikipedia.

Swedish citizen.

Linus,

I think that there are only some relatively minor problems with using native names instead of English names. The problems have to do with what happens to web browsers if you go outside the standard English 26 character alphabet.

1. Fancy characters are simply not legal in URLs. This means that we can't have page names in fancy characters. This isn't a wikipedia thing, it is just the way the Internet works.
2. If people use local letters, it becomes difficult to do searches. This could be overcome by squashing fancy letters down to latin in the search engine.

Actually, the software could automatically squish fancy letters into Latin automatically for the generation of URLs, for searching, etc. This would be a good solution. However... I am not sure how hard it will be.

Please see Free Links for an update on this issue, Linus.

I simply cannot accept the item 1. Yes, the characters are illegal in url, Yes, the browsers might have problems with reading some of the characters (Netscape for Mac had problems until 1998 or so) but this is just an issue of coding the letters correctly like using %E4 in the URL and possibly using ä in the text if you are not delivering the pages in Latin1 (ISO-8859-1) that is the HTTP-default. Item 2 on the other hand I understand. This is more or less just how the spelling should be done. It shouldn't be harder than to decide if we should use U.K., American or South African spelling in the wikipedia. This must be agreed upon and stated as soon as possible. I hope this will be clearly stated (in Naming conventions or somewhere else.

Hi Linus, good to see you here again!

I wouldn't point "Capital" to "capital". When anyone wants to link to "capital", he will write it like this: capital. But that links to Capital, not capital. Unless we want to start a convention where all lowercase-titled articles are always reached via redirection, which I don't recommend, I think we should just accept the fact that the first letter of all titles will have to be capitalized. -- Larry Sanger

Again I am bit by the pecularities of this wiki software. :-)

I don't agree and I don't understand why the wiki software has all these "problem". They are getting in the way when it comes to creating the contents.

I think that the all main articles should reside in the word with the correct capitalisation (sic!). Then most of the words will be capitalised because they are names of places, persons, months or days in the week. Other words, where the wikipedia actually has the role of a dictionary instead of that of an encyclopedia, it is correct to spell with a lowercase-title.

I made the redirect from Capital to capital because somebody had already used Capital because it was in the beginning of a sentence and I didn't wan't to destroy that. The correct way for the person wanting to link to capital but in the beginning of a sentence would be to link to Capital. I think this is the correct way of doing it. I still don't think that the wiki software shall be allowed to dictate how we organise the contents. It is better if it is the other way around i.e. how we organise the contents dictates how the software will have to work.

I agree with you for the most part, but we have already discussed this on...jeez, I forget where. Maybe someone else can answer you adequately. There are good reasons for this, anyway. Perhaps there's a way around the problem and everyone can be satisfied, though. --LS

My understanding is that it is better if Capital and capital resolve to the same page, because for almost all concepts, case is irrelevant. There is the very common case of a word appearing at the beginning of a sentence. Here are some examples:

  Computers? are used on the Internet.
  The Internet uses computers?.

Those should resolve to the same page.

In other words, we don't want two pages, "Capital" and "capital", on the same subject; when we link to capital and Capital, ideally, the page should be the same. The question is just then whether we want to make the first letter capitalized or not.

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Last edited March 5, 2001 3:12 pm (diff)
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