UESPWiki:Archive/CP Problem with Commas

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Problem with Commas

I added to the infobox on Oblivion:Henantier that he is essential until Oblivion:Through A Nightmare, Darkly is completed. The raw text I entered was:

• Until [[Through A Nightmare, Darkly]] is completed

I also tried:

• Until [[Oblivion:Through A Nightmare, Darkly|]] is completed

As you can see on this version of the page, when I save the changes, it changes the raw text to:

• Until [[Oblivion:Through A Nightmare, Darkly|Through A Nightmare]] is completed

Just wondering what's going on with that. --GuildKnight (Talk) ^contribs 13:45, 3 October 2007 (EDT)

I've noticed this before. Whenever there's a comma (or a colon) in the title of a page, you have to specify the whole link, with the pipe to make it display correctly. Thus, in this case, you'd need to say [[Through A Nightmare, Darkly|Through a Nightmare, Darkly]] to get the proper link. I think it's a feature designed to ignore stuff after a comma or colon, as if it's a sub-page. It IS rather annoying. I'll talk to Daveh about fixing it. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 15:06, 3 October 2007 (EDT)

Notice that this also happens with hashes '#' and parenthesis '(', and maybe any non-alphanumeric character. While it is desired to fix this behaviour for commas, colons and hashes, you still want to keep it for parenthesis, which is being used widely for disambiguation. --DrPhoton 03:48, 4 October 2007 (EDT)

This is actually a problem in the underlying MediaWiki code and not the new code that Nephele added to help make auto-linking easier. For example, try making the following link on Wikipedia or another wiki:

  [[Some Page, Title|]]

You'll end up with the same Some Page link title. I'll continue poking around and see if there's an easy solution. -- Daveh 12:42, 6 October 2007 (EDT)

Ah, I guess the auto-linking thing made linking so much easier I didn't notice the problem was there before. I agree that it's okay with '(', (It's invaluable for the number of times I've had to link Vivec), but for pretty much any other character it just becomes an annoyance. One other optimization that might be useful is if there's a '#' in the link, it should automatically title the link to be whatever is AFTER the '#', not before it. Thus: [[Oblivion:Artifacts#Azura's Star|]] should look like Azura's Star, but instead, this formatting doesn't even result in a link at all, and instead you're forced to type out "Azura's Star" twice in order to create this link. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 14:38, 6 October 2007 (EDT)

Just to clarify: the behaviour with the commas is a wiki feature not a bug. The wiki software has explicitly added code in order to enable this feature. The intention is similar to the parentheses: in standard wiki, text after a comma in a title is assumed to be extra information that isn't really part of the title.

As for other punctuation there are a few different things going on. Hashes (#) are not supposed to be part of wiki titles, because they have a special meaning within URLs: the part of the text after a # is an anchor within the page that you want to link to. This is a standard part of URLs, and I don't think we should be tweaking the code in order to allow # symbols to be part of titles. Other symbols that are never supposed to be part of wiki titles include []{}.

Colons (:) are only treated differently the first time they appear in a link, because they are assumed to separate the namespace from the rest of the title. Any colons after the first one are treated as standard text, and will be duplicated in the label for any link.

So I really don't think we want to be messing with the punctuation other than perhaps the commas, and even for commas it seems like we should have a bit more discussion as to whether or not everybody agrees it's a wiki feature we will never want to use on the site. The special treatment for commas can be taken out pretty easily, just by removing/commenting out two lines of code. I just don't think we should be rushing to the conclusion that the treatment of commas is a bug that has to be fixed without a bit more consideration of why the wiki software included this feature in the first place. --Nephele^Talk 20:21, 6 October 2007 (EDT)

I was guessing it might be on purpose from the way the code was written but I couldn't find any explicit documentation/notes to that effect on Wikipedia or MediaWiki. There are definitely some articles on Wikipedia where the comma is actually part of the page title, like 0,1-simple lattice. -- Daveh 20:30, 6 October 2007 (EDT)

See Piped link on wikipedia. One example provided is that a link to "Boston, Massachusetts" will be labeled simply "Boston", because the text after the comma is deleted in the label. --Nephele^Talk 20:51, 6 October 2007 (EDT)

Well, I wasn't doubting that it was a feature. It's just a feature that in our case turns out to be more annoying than useful. I don't think there's a single case on our site where a comma in a title is something we'd want to truncate in a link. I can see how it's useful on Wikipedia, but we don't have links like "Boston, Massachusetts" here, so there's really no need for this. In fact, in almost every case where we do have a comma in the title, it's the text AFTER the title that we're more likely to want displayed, rather than the text before it. (E.g.: Morrowind:Bal Molagmer, Books for Vala.) But more often than that, we really don't want to truncate it at all. I'd be all for removing that feature that's burned me on multiple occasions. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 22:06, 6 October 2007 (EDT)