Free_Links
Free Links are used to make links that look like normal words, without weird capitalizations. Thus we can have Alabama instead of AlabamA, and South Dakota instead of SouthDakota.
You make free links using double brackets. Edit the text of this page to see how to do it.
- Other tricks
You can use pipes | to customize your links. For example, instead of saying George W. Bush over and over again in an article, you could say Bush, or even him, and point this link at the correct page.
You can link to ISBN's like this: ISBN: 0887308856
I am all for consistency. We should henceforth use free linking.
Why doesn't my Free Links work correctly. Is it because they contain non-ASCII characters? Look at Sweden for Göteborg and Malmö.
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
See WikiPediaBugs for more.