Eep

Task comments don't show the task. I wanted to see which task TheBeast commented on regarding people getting 2k-60k (!) points. You see, I was wiki-banned for accidentally editing the wrong page and I want to make sure TheBeast isn't being a hypocrite about wiki banning... I am appealing my ban.
 
Update: OK, I found the task (tree), and the point thing was just the total points the user had at the time of the edit.

" I didn't forget Wiktionary. "It depends on the application and one's preferences." For what Wiktionary is trying to do, $wgCapitalLinks=false makes sense. But it's not relevant here. We're not building a dictionary. "

" There's no rule against it as far as I know, but I don't include link sections. Deciding what should go there would require rules in order to avoid spam and abuse. I don't want to have to get into any arguments over what should be allowed to go there and what shouldn't, so I leave it out entirely. "

" @mracoon:   Yeah, I agree.  It seems Eep really wants GB to be Wikipedia.  If you look at his pages, he's even putting a header for "External Links" at the bottom of the pages with a link to the corresponding Wikipedia page, which I feel is unnecessary.  "

That's just {{DISPLAYTITLE}} though; it only affects the way the title looks when viewing that page. Pages are still stored with in initial uppercase letter, as I'm sure you know.
Cases like iPod and the like are exceptions. The Wikipedia community decided to allow those exceptions, and the MediaWiki developers decided to add the technical capability to make those exceptions. We make exceptions for them too [1] [2] [3]. But we don't do it for all pages, and neither does Wikipedia. I'm familiar with enwiki's article title policies and guidelines, and I get the feeling you do too. But they don't apply here. Giant Bomb has its own style guidelines, just as your site does.
 
It depends on the application and one's preferences. For linking to pages as part of prose, as most MediaWiki sites do, that works great. If you expect to be linking words at the beginning of sentences, you may want to keep $wgCapitalLinks set to true to avoid the hassle of redirects.
 
And if you want to create wiki software with no wiki markup, where page titles have little relevance, and where linking requires the conscious use of a search every time, you're welcome to do that too. That's what's what the wikid developers have done here. And because they've chosen to do that, page titles matter a lot less. You don't type "Doom uses a [[first-person perspective]]", or "Doom uses a [[First-Person Perspective|first-person perspective]]" or "Doom uses a FirstPersonPerspective" and magically get links. You type it as "Doom uses a first-person perspective" or whatever you want, click the link button, and search for the relevant concept; which may or may not be in the initial search results. It's completely different from MediaWiki and other popular wiki software, and as a result it's not important that page titles use proper sentence case. wikid gives a site's staff or community the ability to make up their own naming conventions without having to worry about redirects and how text appears in sentences. Unfortunately what it lacks is an easy way to fix naming mistakes. "

" @Eep said:

"Wikipedia only capitalizes the first letter of most (but not all) pages because it does so by default. "

While WikiMedia software does automatically capitalize the first letter - that is not the reason why the first letter is capitalized on Wikipedia pages. The Wikipedia: Manual of Style (capital letters) page you linked to earlier refers to capitalization in articles and does not apply to titles. Wikipedia:Naming Conventions (capitalization) addresses the capitalization in titles, and clearly states that the first letter of a title should be capitalized except in extreme cases (e.g. something where the second letter is capitalized - eBay, iPod). I could understand you arguing that only the first word be capitalized, since that looks fine, but page titles without any capitalization looks horrible.  Either way, all the talk about wikipedia is completely irrelevant since we're not wikipedia. And I don't see what the big deal is with this. We go by standard AP guidelines with our page titles, Wikipedia does something different. Both are acceptable, and it isn't really a big deal. It definitely wouldn't be worth our time and effort changing all the pages currently in the database to a different naming convention. The benefits would be minimal, if there are any benefits at all, and it would take a lot of time of moderators and/or staff which could be spent doing far more constructive things. "

" @Eep: Yep, I'm familiar with the MediaWiki software and the $wgCapitalLinks setting. But like I said, lower case titles are not used on the Wikipedia projects, which is what your argument is based on. The lightning article on the English Wikipedia isn't titled "lightning", it's titled " Lightning".
 
In the same way that other wikis have rules about the naming of articles, so too does Giant Bomb. Of course, you may have your own preferences and you certainly don't have to agree with Giant Bomb's naming conventions. But the least you can do is try to abide by them. Especially since unlike with MediaWiki, renaming is not so easy with this software. Changing the page naming conventions from title case to lowercase would require a staff member to rename almost every object, concept and location on the site. If we're going to do that, I recommend switching to CamelCase titles instead. Good old CamelCase. ;-) "

What looks dumber is the search results when looking up common terms and a bajillion character/company/game/location results with the same or similar name show up BEFORE the common term. Try searching for " lightning" and you'll see what I mean: 2 objects and 3 characters all named "Lightning". It would make more sense to have the "Lightning" character names and the " Lightning" vehicle stay capitalized but lowercase the weather object (which should probably be a concept, but the distinction between "concept" and "object" is vague and subjective--hence why more categories are needed!). Obviously, characters like Jimmy Lightning and Lightning McQueen should remain capitalized but " lightning bolt", " lightning manipulation", and other actions/effects should usually be lowercased too (unless specific/unique to a certain game or franchise--but even that is suspect).
 
Again, it's all about making things easier to find...

I didn't say EVERYTHING should be lowercase, nate. Read more carefully please...

"Titles" are not necessarily always capitalized. This is an American concept (most likely influenced by the German language which has a habit of overcapitalizing MANY non-proper nouns). Specifically in the context of Giant Bomb, lowercase titles for NON-PROPER NOUN names (as I described above) would, again, make it easier to distinguish between the MANY kinds of things that get thrown into concepts (animals/beings/creatures/entities/insects/species, gameplay elements, effects, etc) and objects (refer to my " Categories" blog post for the many kinds of items!). If the autocompleter search results displayed more than 10 results this wouldn't be as big of a deal, but even then lowercase (or "Sentence case") would still help distinguish proper nouns from regular nouns.
 
Perhaps a poll is warranted, though I don't see an option to attach a poll to an existing thread. :/