Forum:Case-sensitivity in page titles
(This topic is archived. Please do not edit this page!)
Is there a reason for the case-sensitivity when using the search function? I ask this question because of discovering that Wikipedia apparently does not have this restriction. I can type "WoRlD oF WaRcRaFt" in the search box, and not only will I be shown all the relevant pages (including "World of Warcraft" and all other pages starting with this string) in the drop-down list regardless of their different capitalisations, but also if I don't select one of those options and enter "WoRlD oF WaRcRaFt" I will still be taken to the "World of Warcraft" page. The same is true for "WORLD OF WARCRAFT", "world of warcraft" or any other variation.
Essentially, this just removes the tedious pedantry of capitalisation from the process of finding the page you want.
I can't tell you the amount of time I've spent re-finding the correct page after accidentally mis-capitalising a page title on Wowpedia. Some (such as talents) are fully capitalised (
[From Darkness, Comes Light], What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been) while others are mostly capitalised (
[Long Arm of the Law], 
[I Can't Hear You Over the Sound of How Awesome I Am]) in ways that are fairly hard to get 100% right 100% of the time. The rules for capitalisation, although learnable (different rules depending on the page type), are also not always consistent: 
[On The Rocks] vs 
[On the Blade's Edge]. Casual users are only going to have an even harder and more frustrating time of it.
If you make any errors in entering these names into the search field, not only will you not find the page you're looking for, but you will not be shown (in the drop-down menu) pages with an identical name to what you've typed that are simply differently capitalised. The search page itself will show these - such as [I Can't Hear You Over the Sound of How Awesome I Am] in response to you typing "I Can't Hear You Over The Sound of How Awesome I Am") showing that the system is capable of recognising this.
The only possible reason I can see for the above would be if there were technical constraints preventing us from handling capitalisation slightly differently, or if we have many, many pages whose titles are only distinguished by capitalisation. Technically, Wikipedia does it, and apparently so does our search page; while I don't know the details myself it therefore seems plausible that we could make it happen. With regard to multiple pages, at present we do have many, many pages whose titles are only distinguished by capitalisation... the uncountable horde of redirects we've created in order to try to cope with the fallibility of the current case-sensitive search function! Changing the system in this way would also remove the need for the creation of a huge amount of these redirects.
So, I ask again... is there a reason we can't change the search function's case-sensitivity to emulate this far superior functionality? -- Taohinton (talk) 14:49, 28 September 2012 (UTC)
- Unfortunately, there simply isn't an easy way to change that behavior. — foxlit (talk) 01:54, 6 October 2012 (UTC)