Wiki Synonym

A WikiSynonym is what you get when you have two different wiki terms for the same concept. It happens a lot, and people spend a lot of time trying to tie discussions back together that emerged around two different names for the same thing.

One possibility is to put cross-references in both term's definitions.

Often the best thing to do when a WikiSynonym is discovered is to use the fullsearch= capability to find the pages using one term and convert them to the other. If done early enough in the existence of the newer one, this can be fairly efficient even without the rumored WikiRefactoringBrowser software.

KyleBrown et al.

Decide which one is better. Merge the two together under the appropriate name (RefactorByMerging). Reduce the "bad" one to being just a link to the "good" one by using a SeeInsteadPage?.

At that point, doing the FullSearch and correction is a nice thing to do, but it is no longer absolutely necessary, and its attendant risk of missing recently added links is gone.

What if a Wiki had a WikiSynonym capability?

It might work something like this:

When an undefined link was followed, the page would include an 'Add As Synonym' utility along with EditText, etc.
If an author chose to Add a synonym, a form would be offered allowing the author to enter the name of an existing page considered synonymous.
The assignment would be such that if A were synonymous with B, and B were synonymous with C, then A and C would be synonymous.
Once a synonym had been assigned, the page lookups and link assignments would be essentially transparent, maybe even showing the page with the title by which it had been accessed.
It might be nice to show a list of synonyms on pages which had them.

CategoryWiki