Wikipedia:Canonization

Wiki Canonization is the algorithm by which the text of links (in [single] or [[double]] pair of square brackets) is converted to a URI.

• Precede URIs with "http:", "ftp:", "gopher:", "mailto:", or "news:", with no pair of brakers, to create links automatically (this is not canonization). This includes links to .gif, .jpg, .jpeg or .png URIs, not to the image (does not display the image inline).
• A single pair of square brackets is for an in-line link to another site. For example, [http://www.wiktionary.com/] produces this: [1] (http://www.wiktionary.com/), while [http://www.wiktionary.com/ Wiktionary] produces this: Wiktionary (http://www.wiktionary.com/).
• A double pair of square brackets creates an intra-wiki link, i.e. a link to a Wikipedia article. The special syntax [[wiktionary:verb]] allows you to link to an article on another Wiki (in this case, Wiktionary's entry for verb); see InterWiki. Use Interlanguage links to create the links at the top and bottom of articles that link to the same article in another language.
  1. Whitespace is converted to underscores (i.e. the page "Star Trek" is actually located at "Star_Trek"). Multiple consecutive underscores and spaces are contracted to just one underscore.
  2. Leading or trailing whitespace/underscores are removed.
  3. Character references are replaced with their raw character (i.e. if you write "département" it will link to département).
  4. For Interwiki and Interlanguage links, processing stops here. For other links:
     1. Illegal characters are stripped (e.g. ^)
     2. The first character is capitalised.
     3. If there is a namespace prefix (Talk:, Wikipedia:, User:, etc.), the first character of the article name (what comes after the colon) is also capitalised.

Example: [[ death in   Vegas  ]] creates a link to the page Death_in_Vegas[?].

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The following is old discussion relating to an old version of the software

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A better strategy might be

1. remove all accents, umlauts and other diacriticals
2. convert all non-alphanumerics to underscores
3. delete all leading and trailing underscores, and replace any consecutive underscores with a single underscore
4. uppercase the first letter, and any letter that follows an underscore
5. lowercase all characters that were not explicitly uppercased in #4

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What happened finally with the wiki canonization discussed here?? The new scheme was implemented on the non-english wikis, but the new version (magnus' one) used the ols scheme. what will happen? (specially since the links and article names in the non-english wikipedias are made using the all uppercase scheme... AN

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Basically, we never switched to the newest version of UseModWiki, because we never solved the problem of the namespace crunch, where "Foo Bar" and "foo bar" were distinct articles in Wikipedia but one of which would be lost in converting to the newest version of UseModWiki.

After working on the Nupedia Chalkboard, which does use the latest version of UseModWiki, as for myself, I've more or less come to the conclusion that it's rather better to have the old format, which does distinguish between upper and lower case in titles. I'm not directly responsible for the fact that Magnus' software does distinguish between upper and lower case in titles, but neither did I speak up when I noticed that it still does. Frankly, I was a bit relieved that it did, because the titles do look nicer according to the older standard. I think we'd have even more of a problem (a wetware problem) with people making links All Upper Case, since they think that'd be necessary for the link to work. --LMS

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See also

• Wiki Text formatting rules
• Usemod text formating rules
• HTML tags