[Wikipedia-l] HTML entities in article titles?

Mon Feb 4 23:37:35 UTC 2002

I'm inclined to think #1 is best.

On 1 Feb 2002, Brion Vibber wrote:

> In the 'Wikipedia:Bug reports' page, it came up that someone's trying to
> make an article titled "&beta;-cyclodextrine", ie using the HTML
> character entity for the greek letter beta (&beta;).
>
> Currently the code makes a mess of attempts to do this; it can be sorted
> out, but the question is how *should* it behave?
>
> Possibility one: Ampersands in general and HTML entities in specific
> should not work in article titles; links to such pages will be
> considered invalid. (I believe this is how it worked on the old
> software.) The user should probably instead title that page
> "Beta-cyclodextrine".
>
> Possibility two: Ampersands will be escaped; HTML entities will not work
> as such in article titles, but the name typed as "&beta;-cyclodextrine"
> would appear as typed, with an ampersand, the word "beta" and a
> semicolon. The user should probably instead title that page
> "Beta-cyclodextrine", but might well call a page "HTML entity &beta;".
>
> Possibility three: HTML entities should work in article titles. Thus the
> name typed as "&beta;-cyclodextrine" will appear in body text and the
> page title with a beta character. For "HTML entity &beta;" to display as
> intended the wikipedian must type "HTML entity &amp;beta;".
>
> Possibility four...?
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
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