Wiki Name Wrangling

Wiki Names are a central concept in wiki. They are just words which, by virtue of their capitalisation, are recognised as names of pages, and turned into links, and that's how the magic happens.

But what if you want to use a single word as a name? How do you turn it into a Wiki Name?

There are no hard and fast rules about this; it's really a question of aesthetics. Since Twic I treats all-capitals words as Wiki Names, there's always the option of spelling it out in capitals, but that's visually noisy and somewhat misleading (it suggests it's an acronym); unless there's a good reason (eg ASH, whose title can honestly be construed as an acronym for A Secret History), this should be a weapon of last resort. One option is to try and tack an extra word on; little grammar words (eg articles like 'a' and 'the', eg, Excession -> The Excession; the object to which the name refers is described as 'the excession' throughout the book) are good, but bigger words can be okay too (maybe Eon Book instead of EON?). Another option is to insert internal capitals (perhaps Te Hanu instead of Tehanu, or Twic I instead of twici).

Is a technical solution possible? Probably not, not without breaking some deep user assumptions about Wiki Names. The best idea yet for a technical solution is to have some symbol which is essentially an invisible capital; if this was, say, the tilde, we could write things like ~Dog, which would be recognised as a Wiki Name, just as A Dog would be. It is tempting to use the backslash for this, when backslash escapes roll along, as there will be no other meaning attatched to backslash-word, whereas backslash-Wiki Name will work to make Wiki Names act like ordinary words. This all still feels icky, though.

If you have a word you want to Wiki Nameify, and are having trouble, feel free to ask for suggestions here.

• 'Fantasy', as in the genre of Speculative Fiction
• Fantasy Fiction (as opposed to Science Fiction)
• Bah! To prevent more than one page springing up on the same topic, the convention should be as simple (and, ideally, intuitive) as possible. In the absence of an invisible capital, I therefore propose that we should adopt the above suggestion and make 'The' the extra word whenever such is required. Thus: The Fantasy.
• On the downside, 'The Fantasy' is stupid
• Agreed. Now that Backlinks are alive again, the doppelgangerpage phenomenon should be a little more easily avoidable. Given that Wiki Is A Website, the more sensible/accurate page name ought to be gone for where ever possible. Since it's a category of Fiction, Fantasy Fiction is the best option here. Putting 'the' in front of abstracts and concepts just looks... Bad And Wrong. -- WJR

Category Wiki