Re: Results of user testing, and space handling in links

> I'm not either, seems in the last six months or so. I distinctly
> remember it *not* being a "feature" as I remember being surprised
> at the new behaviour. But we've gone over and over on the idea of
> permitting whitespace in WikiNames, my opinion has been expressed
> a few times on that one (i.e., the "%20" is *really* confusing to
> users, and they *do* grok WikiNames rather quickly, most thinking
> it's geeky cool, a "wiki thing", whereas "%20" is just something
> they stare at with a "WTF?" look on their face).

Spaces in page names have been allowed, according to the ChangeLog,  
since 31-Dec-2006.  They're soooo last year :)

The reason we are using %20 is that
a) it's the space
b) + is technically incorrect
c) _ was already in use.

If you hover on top of a "spaced" link, you will actually see the URL  
with the space.

We are also allowing all sorts of other characters, like brackets.   
This is to be in line with the more common wikiengines, such as  
MediaWiki.

Yes, the bad thing is that it means that you can no longer assume  
that the page name is byte-for-byte the same as the URL.  But we have  
some mechanisms in place which allow us to guess the correct name in  
many cases.

(If you're seeing %20 elsewhere than in the URL bar, then we have a bug)

> Thanks, I'll take a look for this, but anything like this, and there's
> a way of doing it from the search box too, but it creates islands.

Islands are not that bad, if you have good search tools.

> Iwhy things are the way they are. A large wiki with hundreds of
> unlinked pages is really a mess...

I think it's a mess anyway ;-)

> This is a wiki of course, not a word processor, it just takes time for
> people to get their heads around the differences...

On the other hand, people make the wiki.  And if people choose to use  
the wiki in a certain way, who's to say what is right and what is  
wrong?  Yes, we know they'll end up in a mess if they just keep  
creating pages, but...

Maybe if we had better tagging tools (autotagging?) it wouldn't be  
that bad.

/Janne