CamelCase

CamelCase is the term identifying the ability to link to another page on a wiki by removing the space between two (or more) words begining with capital letters. It was a revolutionary way of thinking of technology — "What is the simplest thing we can do to make this work?" — to paraphrase WardCunningham. The MediaWiki wiki engine was developed from UseModWiki, and because it was developed for an encyclopedia, where proper spelling and spacing are of high importance, the use of CamelCase to create internal links was phased out and is deprecated.

Likewise, WikiIndex (which also runs on MediaWiki) does not use CamelCase to create links. Instead, one must enclose the wanted link in double square brackets — [[]]. However, there is some sentiment (and practice) that CamelCase should be used on WikiIndex when creating categories or templates which contain two or more words, such as Category:LoginToEdit or Template:MultilingualMain. Unfortunately, in some cases, neither convention is consistently followed, even among subcategories of the same category.

CamelCase is very important for 'LinkLanguage' — that is writing and adding links easily to your writing. Ward has commented that instead of adding 10 characters to make a link, he took away one. JohnAbbe pointed out that you have to shift for each word capitalized.

External links

• CamelCase on WikiMatrix
• CamelCase at English Wikipedia
• CamelCase at Everything2 – a personal commentary by StrawberryFrog and others on the history and implementation of CamelCase