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On Thursday, February 17, 2011, a replacement for the much maligned ptitles system was put into place on This Wiki. This article will detail the changes in both layman's terms and in detail, to use as a reference to explain the transition. The primary reference is this forum thread.
In a nutshellOld System Any page title that could not be created as a Wiki Word or bracketed with {{ }} had to be created using the ptitle markup: \[\=\~ \~\=\]. This created an ugly URL looking like "ptitleXXXXX". Referring to these names in Pot Holes required either copying the ptitle or using a Wiki Word redirect. Example: "Everything's Worse With Snowclones" is stored as "ptitlemvm5d9py". You refer to it with a redirect: EverythingsWorseWithSnowclones, by Pot Holing it to the ptitle: \[\[\{\{ptitlemvm5d9py\}\} Everything's Worse With Snowclones\]\], or by using the special markup \[\=\~Everything's Worse With Snowclones\~\=\]. New System All page names (that is, the URL you follow) will be Wiki Words or alphanumerics. Each page will store, as a separate attribute, a display title that is automatically substituted when you see that name on any page. Users may request changes to the display title with the Custom Title Request form but they must be approved by a moderator. The forced ptitle markup \[\=\~ will no longer work.
Example: "Everything's Worse With Snowclones" is stored as EverythingsWorseWithSnowclones. You refer to it by that name, but when you view a page containing that wick it will display as "Everything's Worse With Snowclones". If you want it to display as something else, you can still use a Pot Hole: \[\[EverythingsWorseWithSnowclones Yep, snowclones are awful\]\].
Further, instead of renaming articles by creating a new URL and pasting all the text into it, making new redirects, and changing all of the wicks, renaming an article will now be as simple as changing its displayed title. For ease of linking, a redirect from the new plaintext title can easily be made.
FAQ on the new systemQ: So, what exactly happens to existing ptitled pages?A: They will all get swapped in the database with their redirect. So if you previously referred to Airplane! as \{\{ptitlesuqqsfypos4b\}\}", it will now be just \{\{Airplane\}\}, but will automagically appear as Airplane!. Q: How do we create new articles with punctuation under this system? A: Create the article with a plaintext URL. You can then submit a request to have its display title changed to the desired text. The plaintext URL doesn't matter but should be analogous to the real title so it can index properly. Q: How do we change the displayed title? A: Use the Custom Title Request form. Please note that you will be submitting a request which must be approved or denied by a moderator. Moderators will be notified automatically when there are pending requests.
Q: How can we avoid flooding the system with frivolous display title requests? A: Any title which has already been denied by a moderator will be rejected and a notice will be displayed to that effect. Note that moderators may always override the display title for any page. Q: Does this meant that foreign language titles will work? A: As long as it can be expressed in the character set employed by the wiki (which means no Unicode yet, sorry), it can be used in the display title. Not only that, but it'll always display that way so you don't have to remember how to type it, except in the case of a Pot Hole. Q: Does this mean that slashes will work in titles now? A: Yep. But only for display — the underlying URL can't contain extraneous slashes. Q: So Pot Holes aren't affected by this? A: If the article URL referred to by a Pot Hole changes, the Pot Hole will be changed to the new URL, but the displayed text won't, so the appearance of existing Pot Holes won't change at all. Q: What happens to the {{ }} markup? A: You can still use that markup to link to pages that are not Wiki Words. If the page has a display title, then it will appear in place of the text of your link. For example, to get Spider-Man to display properly in all cases, set its display title. Q: Wait, this means no more tricks with using the {{ }} markup to pluralize wicks or hide parts of the name? A: If the article has a display title it will override those tricks. To change the displayed name of such an article, you need to use a Pot Hole. Q: Does the replacement title apply to a specific namespace, or all of them? A: The substitution is per namespace. Each namespace can have its own display title. Custom requests may be made to have an article display the same title across all namespaces. Q: What happens if the new URL for a ptitled page collides with an existing one that is not a redirect? A: The ptitle URL will remain, but will get a new display title. Q: How do indexes work with the new system? A: The index needs the URL of the page, or a redirect to it. You should alphabetize the index according to the URL, not the displayed title. Q: What happens to Discussion pages for ptitled articles? A: They move along with the URL change. Brief history of the issueFor most of the history of the wiki, only alphanumeric characters were allowed in Wiki Words. This means no punctuation (except for hyphens), no accented characters, and no customized capitalization unless you use the {{ }} markup to force it. To get around this, a kludge (techspeak for "clumsy workaround") was used to convert punctuated titles (hence "ptitle") into a functional URL, but this left the page title unreadable to people and required either a Pot Hole or special markup to be properly displayed. The confusion caused by this system resulted in a number of issues, including: the requirement for a Wiki Word redirect for all ptitled pages, cluttering the wiki; the inability to perform a Related To search on many ptitles; confusion as to how to insert a ptitled page on an index; and creation of unnecessary ptitles by people unfamiliar with the system. The problem has been on the wiki To-Do list for some time, but Fast Eddie buckled down and polished it off in February 2011.Transition notes, copied from the forum thread.Step 1: In the evening of Thursday 17 Feb (GMT-8), article editing will no longer process the \[\=\~ markup. In other words, no new ptitles will be accepted from then on. Step 2: A script will be run that replaces 'ptitlexxxxxxx' with the title of its un-punctuated redirect. For example, if ThisLinksOnDrugs redirects to ptitle1234567 which is "This Link's on Drugs", ptitle123456 will be replaced with ThisLinksOnDrugs. Step 3: The new page-viewing code will be installed. Step 4: There will be joy across all lands. Additional notes: Ptitles that don't have a redirect will still be serviced. The new system doesn't really care about the replaced item. It's arbitrary. If we tell it to say 'Morton's Left Foot' when it sees 'ptitle098765', that's what it does. Same deal if we tell it to say 'Morton's Left Foot' when it sees 'MortonsLeftFoot.' Starting a new page: New pages will need an un-punctuated title to translate into a punctuated form. What the un-punctuated title is makes no difference to the system at all, as long as all the letters in it can be used in a URL. Making a link to a "punctuated" page: Yes, the "link name" (the name used in the URL) can be different from the displayed title of the page. The link name has to be used, when you want to link the page from another page. To make it easy, it makes sense to make the link name the un-punctuated version. However, if you type {{ptitle1234567}} for those existent pages with a ptitle, the substitution will work. Slashes in custom titles? Yup. F/X and //sign at will. Search-n-destroy questions: When we decide to change the name of a page, we just change the title that displays. The URL will stay the same. A new redirect will be useful for those people who want to use the new name as the "link name", but existent links using the old name will display the new one automagically. No text moving or cutting required. The substitution is per namespace. So, yes is your answer. A custom request will have to be made for pages that have the same title in multiple namespaces.
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