Forum:Extremely well thought out rant about the CRISIS

Forums: Index > Village Dump > Extremely well thought out rant about the CRISIS

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Soooooo, how's it goin? Here's the crisis: Capital letters. I just spent 5 minutes trying to find one of my favorite unbooks, UnBooks:Gone With d' Wind. I spelled it many different ways: UnBooks:gone with d' wind, unbooks:Gone With d' Wind. Then I gave up, and just made a redirect: Gone With the Wind BUT LOOK OUT!! If you put in gone with the wind or Gone With The Wind you get jack-shit!

Please, what the hell is going on with the capital letters??? I always wondered why search is capslock sensitive, but I never had the balls to ask until now. It is THE most annoying thing on Uncyc, even more annoying than against votes, even more annoying than getting banned every time I look at that one user, and even more annoying than YTTE's never-ending usergroups! How do we fix it, or, conversely, how can we turn this forum into a discussion about the newly ressurected penisman?   Le Cejak • <21:23, 13 Aug 2008>

I agree. Fuck case sensitivity. -- T​K​F​​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​UU​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​CK 21:23, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Me too. The case sensitivity is retarded. -OptyC Sucks! CUN21:40, 13 Aug

Thank you, TKF! And another thing, I don't even understand the RULES of case sensitivity. Is it the first letter of every word, or what?   Le Cejak • <21:27, 13 Aug 2008>

I believe that, for mainspace, the rule is that the first letter of the title is capitalised and none thereafter (apart from names, places, etc). What we're meant to do with other namespaces, especially UnBooks, is anybody's guess. I just pretend that there's no extra bit at the start and proceed as before. -- 15Mickey20 (talk to Mickey)  22:20, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

What we should do is make that not-so-much a rule anymore, if only for the reason that satan does it...or is that a wikia-wide rule? Either way, REALLYREALLYREALLYREALLY fuckin' stupid. Chocolate Rain 00:09, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

My guess is that it's built into the wikia software itself. (I'm pissed that it capitalized my user name.) --monika 00:14, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Probably true, I think there was some argument about some band or artists name about 6 months back about their name being capitalized on their wikipedia article... Chocolate Rain 00:20, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, lots of things, like the band "the pillows", the poet "e e cummings", and the username "monika" are not supposed to be capitalized but end up as such as a result of the fucking parser. --monika 00:35, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Look, guys, if we got rid of case sensitivity, then User:Benson and User:BENSON would combine powers and merge into one super ultra evil Benson machine, and we'd all be doomed until the Power Rangers kill it. And I know no one wants that to happen. So case sensitivity stays. --Pleb SYNDROME _{CUN medicate (butt poop!!!!)} 02:13, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Okay, here are the rules as far as I can tell, in case anyone is confused:

1. New Page Rule: When you create a page, the first letter will be capitalized. You don't get a say in the matter. The rest of the letters remain as you left them.

2. Search Rule: When you enter a page name in the search box, it first tries it with your capitalization, and if that page doesn't exist, it capitalizes the first letter and tries again. If that still doesn't work, it lower-cases the rest and tries once more. If the page doesn't exist, it tells you the page doesn't exist with the capitalization scheme you gave it, and offers to create it under Rule 1. For example, searching for "Japan-France" or "japan-France" takes you to Japan-France but searching for "Japan-france", "japan-france", or "JAPAN-FRANCE" takes you to Japan-france, which redirects to Japan-France.

3. Link Rule: When you make a link, it automatically capitalizes the first letter and leaves the rest as they are. It will not try again as it would in the search box in rule 2. For example, megadeth and Megadeth will both go to the page that exists. mEGADETH and MEGADETH will both not work (and are seen as "MEGADETH" by the parser, as you can see if you scroll over). Any of those would go to the right page in the search box.

4. Gone with the Wind Rule: The parser does not recognize "d'" as a correct spelling of "the".

--monika 00:32, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Quality whoring there monika. Hats off to ya. MrN 00:42, Aug 14

If I wanted to whore out an article, I'd whore out a new one that needs pimping. Japan-France is my oldest and possibly worst article and I only used it because it was the first article I thought of that had a default capitalization redirect to another capitalization. --monika 00:44, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm sure you know it was a genuine complement. Anything else would be the Megadeth of me... ;-) MrN 00:57, Aug 14

Ah, see, I didn't know what you were talking about :) But Megadeth doesn't need pimping either! It's everywhere! Recent articles, VFH (thanks), Metallica... It's just the related betting pool that needs pimping. --monika 01:02, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

query

shouldn't spang be here by now to use a bullwhip on us and tell us that we'll get the current capitalization rules, and we'll like it? SirGerrycheeversGunTalk 03:01, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, mon whoring his article to me is greeeeat, but can I please have some official answers, here??   Le Cejak • <3:03, 14 Aug 2008>

I sat there and tested and solved the rules for you. What more do you want? I don't have time to hack Wikia for you tonight... --monika 03:06, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

The page you were looking for is first in the search results for the first two you supposedly tried, and 10th for the second two. Are you sure you tried actually reading the results of your search?

And the case of this wiki is called first-letter. The first letter is always capitalised, and the rest are however you made them. That's what redirects are for.

And the "go" function follows this pattern for matching. Also, if you enter an IP address, it goes straight to that IP's contributions page. Neato. • Spang • ☃ • talk • 04:00, 14 Aug 2008

Bah. I missed the fourth pass it makes. I am a failure as a scientist. I'm sorry Cajek. I didn't realize that "GONE WITH THE WIND" would be just as good an idea for the location of the redirect as "Gone with the wind". --monika 04:03, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

You did good, mon, thanks anyway. It doesn't really matter: I'm still pretty confused.   Le Cejak • <5:03, 14 Aug 2008>

What I've taken from this is that if you have an article with lots of words, make sure that you have a redirect from the title all in lowercase except the first letter. If you have that, all searches will work (and not over-strain the server) and while not all links will work, they'll be easy to fix. (But of course we could have avoided if Wikia'd been smarter about this years ago.) --monika 05:40, 14 August 2008 (UTC)