CamelCase

CamelCase is the term identifying the ability to link to another page on early wikis by removing the space between two (or more) words beginning 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 WardCunningham. 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.

The MediaWiki wiki engine was developed from UseModWiki, and because it was developed for an encyclopedia, where proper spelling, 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—[[]]. This became known as a 'wikilink', and has now been accepted by all subsequent wiki engines as the de-facto standard of creating internal links.

Likewise, WikiIndex (which also runs on MediaWiki) does not use CamelCase to create links. There is, however, 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.

Note that for wikis which have CamelCase links, the feature will create inadvertent links with phrases that have internal capital letters, such as Paul McCartney (turning his surname into a link).

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