Capital by Default
The Graduate School of Education and Information Studies has given us server space to host a MediaWiki version of the Informatics Wiki that has been on PBwiki. Wow, that sentence sounds funny with all the wikis.
I’d like to get upset at MediaWiki naming conventions a bit. This forced capitalization of article titles and usernames drives me crazy. I really hate seeing my username as Tkeswick instead of tkeswick. It’s just ugly. I typed it all lowercase on purpose, because I wanted it that way. Whoever came up with the idea that people would like their usernames to be automatically capitalized didn’t think it through.
I first noticed this sort of thing when using Google Docs & Spreadsheets a while back. Still, I notice that on the documents I have shared with other users, the first letter of their email address account name is capitalized which just looks bad and inconsistent to me, especially when people use the convention like me of first initial, last name. The last name does not get capitalized. Why capitalize the first initial if the last name will not be capitalized as well. It ought to just remain in the same format that the user types it in without introducing all this mixed-case ugliness.
