[pmwiki-users] Polish vs polis
jo at durchholz.org
Thu Nov 10 14:07:14 CST 2005
chr at home.se schrieb:
> On Wed, 9 Nov 2005, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
>>(and it goes against what others have been asking, which is
>>that page names become case *in*sensitive).
> Just to chime in from the other end, I do want page names case sensitive
> in some case. By some weird coincide a co-worker actually told me today
> about a word in English where the meaning changes with the case of the
> first letter. Here are two example sentences
> * To 'polish' a car.
> * A Polish car.
> So maybe someone out there would really like to refer to the page
> [[polish]] in the first form, as well as to [[Polish]] in the second form.
> I also think the URI .../Polish and .../polish should be different here.
There are situations where different words have the same letters, down
to letter case. (Say, "print" may mean "write to a screen" or "produce a
piece of paper". In German, the words for "lock" and "castle" are the
The strategy for such homonyms is to create a "disambiguation page".
E.g. the page for "Schloss" would say
See "Schloss (building)"
or "Schloss (locking device)"
so people can follow the link. (It's done all the time in Wikipedia.)
Now that disambiguation is an established practice, we don't need to
differentiate between "polish" and "Polish". It could be reasonable to
do that, but it's not necessary, and certainly a per-Wiki (or even
I also see a reason not to differentiate letter case. People constantly
get letter case wrong; and reading out a page name to a buddy (across
the room, our through a telephone line) gets quite awkward if you have
to communicate the letter case as well.
So I personally would configure my wikis in a case-insensitive manner.
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