Wiki Names

This is a sample of a page whose name obeys the wiki conventions. It, and its companion, WikiName, illustrate the WikiNamePluralProblem.

See, however: WikiNameAdvantages.

See also: ChoosingWikiNames

See, too: WikiNameDisadvantages

Discussion:

Would it be awful to make an all-cap-word a valid WikiName? If I want a page about PDAs, I don't want to have to do something silly like write it as PdA. -- BillSeitz

Except that doesn't work, since you need a lowercase letter after each capital letter. The real page for PDAs would have to be something more like PeeDeeAy?. But then you start running into pronunciation aliasing. The better name would probably be PersonalDigitalAssistant or PersonalDigitalAssistants. Wiki isn't very conducive to acronyms. -- GavinLambert

It depends on your implementation. VQWiki uses backticks around a string to recognize WikiNames that are ALL CAPS or lowercase. I see nothing wrong with that - just about every keyboard has 'em, but people rarely use 'em. Acronyms are core to English, and the people who write wikis are likely to offer them to get people to use their wikis whether you think they should or not. If a wiki writer's regexp library is sophisticated enough to handle it, why not offer the ability to use a different method of creating WikiNames?

Yes, it's possible. But is it desirable? One of the key points about WikiNames is that they actually make sense in isolation. So I can be reading a page, and see a reference to a PersonalDigitalAssistant and immediately understand what it is. If that was just "PDA" I might have to click on it to find out just what the heck that acronym stood for before it made sense in the context of the linking page. The same goes for other acronyms - which is easier to understand: OAOO or OnceAndOnlyOnce? DTSTTCPW or DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork? -- GavinLambert

I understand that the current way is very easy for writing comments, but it is still unreadable. Wiki's appear to be geared towards writers, and not so much towards readers. Wouldn't it be easy to display the WikiWords with spaces before capitals? They are always links, so it shouldn't be too hard. Convert Spaces To Tabs would be easier on the eyes. -- Rhesa Rozendaal

TwiciWiki makes all-caps words into WikiNames; this started off as a side-effect of allowing single capitals in WikiNames (WikiNamesWithASingleCapital), but it was decided that it was a feature. Mostly, this is useful for acronyms. The idea that forced expansion of acronyms is a good thing is a bit fishy; making acronyms into links doesn't stop people spelling things out when it's appropriate.

Other wikis (Open Wiki) use doubled-up square brackets around the wiki name / identifier... so you can create a wiki link to anything you want. Advanced wikis allow you to include edit text inside of the doubled-brackets, e.g. [[WikiKey?|Link text that I want to see]]. -- TGH

My questions is: how to make words in double-byte characters(such as Chinese) WikiName ? I don't understand your question. But you might be interested in ChineseWiki

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