Make mediawiki page names case insensitive, including semantic queries

At Prophecy, We use MediaWiki for our internal documentation. Our use has become more sophisticated over time, and we’ve recently made a small change which I hope will make the wiki even more usable in future.

Table of Contents

• The default behaviour
• The new behaviour
• How to make MediaWiki case-insensitive
• High-Level Summary
• Identify duplicate pages
• Update database collation
• Prevent capitalization
• Update SMW

The default behaviour

By default, MediaWiki page titles are case-sensitive. This means that “Funky Penguin” and “funky penguin” are two unique pages. This makes sense for Wikipedia, which maintains a massive and list of page names, which need to be accessible in multiple languages.

For a small internal wiki though, it’s less than idea, because:

1. Case-sensitivity makes it harder to find pages, and easier to accidentally create duplicates. You might create a page titled “Customer ABC Inc”, but a colleague would enter it as “Customer ABC inc”, and complain that the page is not found. Worse still, your colleague might re-create the page as “Customer ABC inc”, and now you have two differing pages each containing a version of your customer documentation
2. Mediawiki’s default behaviour is to capitalize the first link of the page, no matter what. This can be a nuisance when recording device details on the wiki (say, ‘router1.isp.co.nz’), since the resulting page will be called ‘Router1.isp.co.nz’, and when staff copy/paste to/from the wiki, all sorts of inconsistencies will result

The new behaviour

We now treat each wiki page as case-insensitive. That means “Funky Penguin”, “funky penguin”, and “FuNKy PEnguIn” now all point to the same page.

We also treat all Semantic Mediawiki data as case-insensitive, so that a search for pages with property “customer” set to “ibm” will also match pages with property “Customer” set to “IBM”.

This page at ITW3 was the basis for the following changes.

How to make MediaWiki case-insensitive

High-Level Summary

I did the following to effect the desired behavior:

1. Identify and resolve any duplicates page names which would prevent us from making the page titles case-insensitive
2. Update the collation on the page_title field in the database, to a case-insensitive collation
3. Prevent MediaWiki from capitalizing the first letter of the page title
4. Update the SMW database tables to make searches case-insensitive

Identify duplicate pages

I wrote this script to help identify duplicate page names. Fortunately we didn’t have many (about 30 over 10 years)

In each case, I had to specify the namespace (0 is the default namespace), and then I simply clicked on the first URL returned (I knew this to be the oldest page) and deleted the page.

Once the script returns no results, it’s safe to proceed with changing the database collation

Update database collation

Bearing in mind that my database is named “wikidb”, with prefix set to “mediawiki”, I ran the following:

{% highlight php %} mysql wikidb -s -N -e “alter table mediawiki_page modify page_title varchar(255) character set latin1 collate latin1_general_ci;” {% endhighlight %}

Prevent capitalization

Provided MediaWiki is > version 1.2.4, the following will disable capitalization of the first letter of wiki page titles:

{% highlight php %} $wgCapitalLinks = false; {% endhighlight %}

Update SMW

Updating the Semantic Mediawiki database tables was a bit more complicated. The following database update was necessary

{% highlight mysql %} ALTER TABLE wikidb.mediawiki_smw_object_ids CHANGE smw_title smw_title_bak varbinary(255); ALTER TABLE wikidb.mediawiki_smw_object_ids ADD smw_title VARCHAR(255) AFTER smw_namespace; UPDATE wikidb.mediawiki_smw_object_ids SET smw_title = CAST(smw_title_bak AS CHAR) ;

– smw_sort_key ALTER TABLE wikidb.mediawiki_smw_object_ids CHANGE smw_sortkey smw_sortkey_bak varbinary(255); ALTER TABLE wikidb.mediawiki_smw_object_ids ADD smw_sortkey VARCHAR(255) AFTER smw_subobject; UPDATE wikidb.mediawiki_smw_object_ids SET smw_sortkey = CAST(smw_sortkey_bak AS CHAR) ;

– smw_di_blob ALTER TABLE wikidb.mediawiki_smw_di_blob CHANGE o_hash o_hash_bak varbinary(255); ALTER TABLE wikidb.mediawiki_smw_di_blob ADD o_hash VARCHAR(255) AFTER o_blob; UPDATE wikidb.mediawiki_smw_di_blob SET o_hash = CAST(o_hash_bak AS CHAR) ; {% endhighlight %}

After making this update, I launched a refresh of all semantic data by running extensions/SemanticMediaWiki/maintenance/SMW_refreshData.php and maintenance/runJobs.php from the command line.