Wikipedia talk:Free links

I wanted to Free Links page to be nice and clear for everyone to use as a reference, so I moved some clutter here.

Excellent! Now, is there a way to automate the conversion of old-style links (and pages) to new-style links? I seem to remember Cliff saying something about doing this. For example, I would like to convert links that look like LarrysText to Larry's Text; then it would be cool also to convert the pages themselves, in this case to Larry's Text (since apostrophes are not allowed in page names). What are the chances of this happening anytime soon? -- Larry Sanger

Why doesn't my Free Links work correctly. Is it because they contain non-ASCII characters? Look at Sweden for Göteborg and Malmö. LinusTolke

Fixing the non-ASCII character problem should be relatively easy. A similar problem has already been solved in the world of IMAP in the i18n of mailbox names, and the solution was to use modified UTF-7 encoding. For a complete explanation, please see RFC 2060, section 5.1.3. The short version is that M-UTF-7 uses US-ASCII representation for US-ASCII characters, and "shifts" into modified BASE 64 for all other charsets (UNICODE 16-bit octets).

Although I don't have a library routine I can whip out for you, I'm sure you can find one somewhere to hack up for Wikipedia. - Flavor

We might have to use something like UTF-7 to encode URLs for the Japanese pages or for other languages. But for the more common ones that fit within the normal ISO-8859-1 range (Spanish, French, German, et al.) it might be better to anglicise for the purpose of searching. I can imagine, for example, English-speaking people who might want to read a French page about Paris, or a German page about Kurt Gödel. I can imagine people (perhaps even Germans used to English web sites) searching for "Godel" or "Goedel", but I can't imagine them ever searching for "G+APY-del" (the UTF-7 rendering). Of course, the software could do that in the background, but I think taking advantage of 8-bit ISOwould generate more links and hits.

"Free Links" should be moved to "free links"
"Free links" is not capitalized. --2004-12-29T22:45Z 05:15, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

Arguments for and against
Free links are useful for the legibility of links within the wiki; they're titled like how they're linked. However, those who advocate for CamelCases say that too much spaces tend to clutter up the URL or lead to all-space links. . Personally, I favor free links because my first and currently-primary wiki experience was with Wikipedia's wikitext. But I have seen the other linking options offered in the usemodwiki article, and some of those seem like they could be useful in certain situations. --Toussaint 14:35, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Merge with Wiki markup
Despite the fact that this page has been around since 2001, there is very little useful information, and certainly not enough information to warrant a page of its own. A brief description in Wiki markup with this page redirecting there would be better.  Giftiger Wunsch    [TALK]  14:40, 14 May 2010 (UTC)