Forum:Page names with colons - traps

Space after colon
Not a good idea. I've just moved two "Agoraphobia:" pages, explaining thus: "Deleting space after colon so that page lists properly". They were listed AFTER the proper ones in Special:Allpages (possibly because that listing finds the URLs, which have an underline instead of a space) but listed BEFORE the proper ones in the category (in the normal "nothing before something" manner that some of us have become accustomed to with word-processed list sorting). With long lists, there's a risk one could be hiding at the end and then be duplicated because someone thought it hadn't been written.

It MAY be OK to put a space in a link when the page hasn't one, and vice versa, because the software strips the space before and/or after searching; but I'd advise caution. Better to get them all right first time!

Robin Patterson 14:40, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Prefix
As Joe knows, if your page prefix is the same as the magic shortcut to another Wikia, you'll go there when you try to link to it. "India:" was the first I know he noticed. I noticed an Austria - ... this evening: presumably a solution to the India problem. A good alternative if you want that sort of page name structure is the subpage using a slash (/). That has the added advantage of creating an automatic link back to its parent page. If the Agoraphobia pages had had slashes instead of colons, they would have linked to Agoraphobia like that. Most of them didn't link directly to it and had no category, being therefore quite divorced from their parent page.

There are possibly many other similar groups of colonned pages around the wiki. If you want to convert to slashes, go ahead! But if (as I suspect) most are also uncategorised, it might be better to leave the colons (which have certain time-saving advantages, as I explain at Cities:) and categorise them all in one hit, using Special:Allpages. You just set up the link, copy it to your clipboard, then run right through them pasting that into both the page and the edit summary, then using your Back menu to jump straight back to where you were on the Allpages (or use separate windows if you prefer).

Robin Patterson 14:40, 26 April 2007 (UTC) in New Zealand