PS: I put an implementation question into the developer's FAQ at HackingOutWikiAnnoyance (with the code mods I did) due to the fact that I already hacked our Twiki.pm to do this and wanted some advice on how to do it right. I'm putting this here due to the fact that it really should be a standard feature of all Wiki-type systems.

-- JamesBowery - 08 Feb 2005

Well, for one, history, and for two, because it is deceptively a complex problem.

"This is a phrase about WikiWords and Non-WikiWords which should be auto-linked."

On a hypothetical wiki site in which the previous sentence appears there are the pages [about WikiWords], [WikiWords], [WikiWords and Non-WikiWords], [Non-WikWords], [Non-WikiWords should be auto-linked], and [auto-linked].

Now which of those 6 pages should the sentence link to? How does a program decide which ones are most relevant and which are not (and thereby shouldn't be linked to)?

Last summer there was somebody working on this. I don't know far he got but it did sound like he made some progress. Search the TWikiIRC logs.

-- MattWilkie - 08 Feb 2005

TravisBarker and I are interested in this, but i'm not activly persuing it - we need to reverse the way we do topic linking * right now we look though a topic to find linkable words, and then look to see if they exist

• while to do arbitary phrase linking, you have to get a list of all existant topics, and then search the topic repeatedly for each topic

-- SvenDowideit - 09 Feb 2005

MattWilkie, if you take the code mods I did, you'll see they are just a few lines and they pretty much embody the behavior desired. The problem is resolved by:

• Using WikiWordSyntax (no dashes, spaces or underlines) as canonical for topic names, and then letting people use the non-canonical variants in the body text
• Sorting canonical topic names by length into a single regex so that longest are matched first.

Now, whether this is the best way to implement it or not is my developer's FAQ question at HackingOutWikiAnnoyance. Certainly I left at least one minor bug -- see below.

-- JamesBowery - 09 Feb 2005

SvenDowideit, do check out the code mods I provide at HackingOutWikiAnnoyance. They do the job more or less. The main problem is some of the topics are linked to the wrong webs but everything else pretty much works.

-- JamesBowery - 09 Feb 2005

I'm currently working on the rename topic code, and this might be one of the few places where your code causes trouble ... otherwise, its an interesting approach!

-- SvenDowideit - 10 Feb 2005

I wouldn't worry about renaming. I just had to do a topic renaming in my web and it did indeed break one of the normal text auto-links but if people care about it that much they can always go to the trouble of using the normal forced link syntax.

-- JamesBowery - 10 Feb 2005

trouble is, you might not worry, but if we take this feature to its final conclusion, and users never use WikiWords in text, then rename must work (somehow) - possibly with some kind of edit section mechanism so that they can re-write the sentences in a logical way. also, when we use multiple links spanning a phrase, and rename one of the links, the phrase will need some heavy magic to still work like before (which again is alot of manual work for the user.

-- SvenDowideit - 11 Feb 2005