CamelCase: Difference between revisions

'''CamelCase''', originally known as '''WikiWords''', and grammatically known as 'medial capitals', is the archaic but historically important term identifying the ability to link to another page on early [[wiki]]s – by removing the space between two (or more) words which began with capital letters.  At the time, it was a revolutionary way of thinking of technology — ''"What is the simplest thing we can do to make this work?"'' — to paraphrase [[Ward Cunningham]].  CamelCase is very important for 'LinkLanguage' — that is: writing and adding links easily to your writing.  Ward has commented that instead of adding ten characters to make a link, he took away one.  [[JohnAbbe]] pointed out that you have to shift (on the keyboard) for each word capitalized.

Moving forward into todays' '[[Wikisphere|wiki world]]', the [[:Category:MediaWiki|MediaWiki]] wiki engine was developed from [[:Category:UseMod Wiki|UseMod Wiki]]; and, because it was developed for an [[:Category:Encyclopedia|encyclopedia]], where proper spelling, word spacing and grammar are of high importance; the use of CamelCase to create internal links was phased out, and is deprecated in MediaWiki.  In order to create an internal link, one must enclose the wanted link in double square brackets — <code><nowiki>[[]]</nowiki></code>.  This became colloquially known as a '[[wikilink]]', and has now been accepted by all subsequent [[:Category:Wiki Engine|wiki engines]] as the de-facto standard of creating internal links.

Likewise, [[WikiIndex]] (which also runs on MediaWiki) does <u>not</u> (and can not) use CamelCase to <u>create links</u>.  There is, however, some sentiment (and practice) that CamelCase should be used on WikiIndex when creating [[Special:Categories|categories]] and / or [[:Category:Templates|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!  It may be observed here on WikiIndex that our founding fathers still have an unrelenting favour for the use of CamelCase; whilst to some of the newer, younger WikiIndex folk, CamelCase might seem like a foreign language!