Upper CamelCase (or
CamelCaps as it's sometimes called) was the required way to create an internal
link in the original
wiki by
Ward Cunninghman and in many of its current
clones. This makes linking other nodes absolutely trivial:
any word starting with a capital letter and containing at least one other capital letter is considered to be a link and treated accordingly.
This very easy convention has been rethought in many wiki implementations because:
- it requires hacks of some sort to give nodes a single word name (i.e. you cannot simply name a node "Fish"; you'll have to name it "FisH" in order to be linked)
- many-word node names get to be rather unreadable (imagine FloridaStatuteRegardingPublicNudity) and so people tend to use shorter names - that's OK in a small system but would be a problem in a system with hundred of thousands of nodes
Many current
wiki implementations (most notably
Wikipedia and
OW2) are therefore moving away from
CamelCase and using a form of internal linking more similar to
everything2's square brackets (that's double
square brackets in the case of
Wikipedia); this gives far greater freedom in choosing node names of arbitrary length and with
white spaces and
punctuation marks in them.