User:William M. Connolley/Case sensitivity of page names

I've realised [2004/02/27] that m:Case_insensitivity exists.

The text below copied from Wikipedia:Village pump/January 2004 archive 5. The issue was never resolved, so I thought I'd like to keep it here for reference.

I'd currently go with Jgm:

A trivial example is Meat loaf vs. Meat Loaf. Despite this example, I heartily agree that things in general would be easier if entry titles were case-insensitive, with the odd exceptions like this handled through disambiguation.

Is there any justification for case sensitive page names?

Is there any reason to want "climate change", "Climate change", "climate Change" or indeed "ClImAte ChangE" to be different pages? In this case, obviously no, but are there in others?

If not, could wiki perhaps internalise names based on capitalising the first letter and little-ing the others (ie "Climate Change" is canonical), and (if desired) undo this in the displayed page. Ie, if you search for "ClimATE CHange" wiki would search for "Climate Change" but could (if this is desirable; it would be, say, if you had searched on IPCC or ASEAN) reconvert to whatever you had searched on, and display a page headed "ClimATE CHange". This would I think be very little extra load. (William M. Connolley 17:39, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC))

The only time it could possibly make a difference (that I've noticed) is when it comes to acronyms →Raul654 17:42, Jan 21, 2004 (UTC)

True. But acronyms are all uppercase, so UC'ing the first letter wouldn't affect them [WMC].

Not all acronyms are uppercase. Think of Dfs or Basic, for instance. Bmills 10:42, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)

(nb - this last is spurious: since I write But acronyms are all uppercase, so UC'ing the first letter wouldn't affect them. And anyway, Basic (as an acronym) should be BASIC [WMC, added after move here]).

I'm sure this came up before and an example was swiftly located where a two-word entry had different meaning depending upon whether the second word was capitalised or not. The answer will probably waken me sometime later tonight at which point I will have no clue as to why I thought it :-) Phil 18:18, Jan 21, 2004 (UTC)

A trivial example is Meat loaf vs. Meat Loaf. Despite this example, I heartily agree that things in general would be easier if entry titles were case-insensitive, with the odd exceptions like this handled through disambiguation. Jgm 18:53, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Of course, those rare cases could be treated like any other disambiguation. Anthony DiPierro 18:37, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

OK, so, can anyone either point to the earlier discussion, or, give an example where the different meanings occur? (William M. Connolley 22:36, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC))

This did come up in the Pump recently, and I'd be interested in continuing the discussion. But I don't know offhand where or even whether it was archived.

Mind you, I have found Wikipedians to generally be very conservative about such changes even if trivial. And this is not a trivial change. Andrewa 00:18, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)

There are many good reasons to keep titles case-sensitive. For example, GNU and gnu are quite different things, as is OVA and ova. With a little time, it is not difficult to compile a long list of words where case matters. Furthermore, an addition good reason to keep page titles case-sensitive is the fact that it helps to standardize the way users write pages, so we don't have people writing pages like "comMUNity" just to be funny. --Lowellian 00:46, Jan 22, 2004 (UTC)

A long list perhaps, but are they all acronyms-vs-words? OVA and ova are different, but Ova and ova are the same thing. And indeed (I wasn't ware of this - is it new?) "ova" is actually "Ova" so my suggestion is half-done already, but only for the initial letter of the first word. GNU and Gnu/gnu are different so perhaps I have to modify my idea to just uppercase-ing the initial letter of each word, which is only a minor extension of what seems to be done already.

As to your second point, at the moment you CAN write a page called comMUNity, and it does something. (William M. Connolley 10:21, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)).

There are certainly reasons for not completely removing case-sensitivity. But there are schemes that would do this far better than we do at present. At present a link to Oyster bay is broken even if Oyster Bay exists, while a link to oyster Bay would find the article. All this has been discussed before, I wonder where it went? Andrewa 18:44, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)

It looks like gnu and ova should be treated as disambiguisations. Why not gnu (acronym)? ilya 23:50, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)