The SaneCase extension automatic corrects case mistakes. For example if the page
Test exists, and someone goes to TEST, they will be automatically redirected
to Test with a 301.
This is really much more sane than the default case-sensitivity.
This implements the "Auto redirect option" from Case sensitivity of page names:
Automatically redirect to a page that has same spelling but different capitalization (have the computer do the disambiguation pages when a spelling doesn't match an existing page)
Negatives: Performance and possible search engine duplicate content penalties caused by MediaWiki's redirection mechanism.
My response to that:
- It's one very simple query, the performance hit should be almost unnoticeable for most sites.
- The user having to figure out the correct URL is often more of a performance hit, not to mention a huge usability hit. Plus these are the sort of responses that can be cached very well in Varnish or whatnot.
- A 301 "Moved Permanently" redirect should be fine for search engines.
Note This extension doesn't make MediaWiki titles case-insensitive! it only affects visitors following a link or manually typing the article title in the URL. Internal links are still case sensitive. See Issue #3 for reasoning.
Sometimes, titles have some special characters, like parentheses, exclamation or question marks, or other punctuation or special characters. When sharing such links on IRC or social media, sometimes the link gets cut off at the presence of that special character, pointing to nowhere.
With this new feature, the extension will try to find a title with the same prefix, followed by a special character, and if it finds it, you'll get redirected automatically to it.
Note the emphasis in followed by a special character. Just displaying any title with the same prefix may be undesirable, since there may be more than one. Matching only titles followed by a special character will drastically reduce the chance to get a naive redirect to a very common prefix.
This feature is disabled by default. To activate it,
set $wgSaneCaseAutofixSpecialCharBreak = true; in LocalSettings.php