[Design] Wiki suggestion

[Erik Moeller]

Mitch et al.,

I don't care which wiki you will use (although Wikipedia's wiki engine
-- wikipedia.sf.net -- is quite sophisticated and has a very large user
base), but I strongly suggest to disable CamelCase and use Free Links
instead. Explanation: In most wikis, it is necessary to
"SmashWordsTogether" to create a link. This style of linking is, IMHO,
what has kept mass adoption of wikis back. It may be convenient for the
writer, but it is very inconvenient for the reader just looking for
information. Most readers and potential participants are scared by
CamelCase and quickly move away.

Furthermore, these links cannot be reliably converted to something else.
For example, if I wanted to link to a page called "Evolution", I would
have to create a link called "EvoLution" or something similarly awful.

Free links, on the other hands, are typically created by [[simply
putting square brackets]] around a few words. The are convertible and
are displayed as normal links to the reader. Their only (minor)
disadvantage is that they take slightly longer to write.

Wikipedia, the largest wiki in existence, uses free links for a good
reason.

In my experience, CamelCase is especially ugly for readers who speak
highly case-sensitive languages, such as German. I for one cannot really
participate in a CamelCase-based wiki for precisely this reason. 

MoinMoin has a feature that allows you to display CamelCase links with a
space between them. This sometimes works, but "EvoLution" would become
"Evo Lution", which isn't very helpful either. Some MoinMoin wikis solve
this by suggesting to use CamelCase where the link reads well with a
space between it, and free links otherwise. In my experience, this
creates total chaos, because you have the wiki-fanatics who will always
use CamelCase when they can. 

The only way to enforce a readable wiki is to enforce free links.

This may seem slightly off-topic, but I'd love Chandler to have some
kind of distributed wiki functionality, and allow the user to interlink
his own information store, so the question of link patterns will
probably pop up again.

Regards,

Erik Moeller (not ErikMoeller)