Question

In my organisation we have two people with exactly the same name, lets call them both Fred Blogs.

When the second Fred came to Register with our TWiki he wanted to have his WikiName deal with this duplication in the same way all our other systems do, namely 'Fred2Blogs'. But when he tried this it gave a message about it being an incorrect WikiWord and was thus denied to him.

He's been a bit more inventive now so it's not causing problems but I just wondered why it's not allowed to have a number in a WikiName or for that matter in any other WikiWord?

Thanks,

Emma

Environment

-- EmmaForrester - 01 Aug 2007

Answer

If you answer a question - or someone answered one of your questions - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status selector is below the edit box.

This has been a topic of considerable debate in the developers' community, and in fact recent TWiki versions do allow numbers in WikiWords, treating them like lowercase letters. Eventually it turned out that many who wanted this feature (including me) have been surprised by unwanted WikiWord links more often than we had expected, so the feature turned out to be a mixed blessing

-- HaraldJoerg - 01 Aug 2007

Thanks very much for that extra information about this.

-- EmmaForrester - 02 Aug 2007

It has been a very mixed blessing in our case. We recently upgraded to the latest release. Many of our projects have letter and number names of the form LNNL like S21L. Suddenly we have question-marked wiki words all over the place.

I can understand that the feature was heavily debated!

-- AlanDayley - 05 Sep 2007

I voted no to the "numbers equal lower case" feature because I strongly believe a stable TWiki platform is key to a "TWiki everywhere" mission. It was a community decision, so I stand behind the decision.

On duplicate names, we have that frequently on twiki.org. We recommend this on the TWikiRegistration topic: "Use middle initial if your WikiName is already taken, such as FirstnameMLastname".

-- PeterThoeny - 05 Sep 2007

See feature request DisableWikiWordsWithNumbers.

-- PeterThoeny - 08 Sep 2007