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Allow full range of characters in page titles
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Description

Author: rememberthedot

Description:
Currently, we have a significant number of articles whose titles cannot be properly represented in MediaWiki because they use restricted characters. For example, the article [[Benzo(a)pyrene]] is actually supposed to be under "Benzo[a]pyrene", but MediaWiki doesn't permit brackets in titles.

I propose a proper escaping syntax for titles that would remove this limitation. Just as the title "C++" may be linked to by [[C%2B%2B]], "Benzo[a]pyrene" would be linkable by [[Benzo%5Ba%5Dpyrene]]. While editors would have to be educated about percent-encoding, this solution would make sure that the title shows up correctly in watchlists, logs, etc. Further, it would not lend itself to the rampant abuses offered by disabling $wgRestrictDisplayTitle.


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz19872

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Lowest.Nov 21 2014, 10:40 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz19872.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

catlow wrote:

I don't know why some of these restrictions exist anyway. I can see why [[ or ]] would cause problems in a page title, but a single bracket, or single brace, or < > (as long as there was no actual tag involved) seem quite harmless. Even # with nothing coming after it ought to be implementable. Anyway, in whatever way works best, I second the request to make as many page titles as possible possible.

This is to avoid bad interaction with markup; forcing humans to guesstimate how to use non-obvious escaping rules not very nice. Increasing our XSS attack surface also not cool.