CamelCase Wednesday: ClearAndConcise

When Ward Cunningham first thought about wiki design prinicples, one of his goals was to make it easier for people to link ideas easily and create links to things that didn’t exist yet. The best solution ended up being the LinkLanguage known for years beforehand as CamelCase.

The original wiki and its descendants use CamelCase to automagically create links. Later, wiki software such as Mediawiki abandoned CamelCase in favor of the more encyclopedic page names. Here are a few of the more clear-cut advantages for using CamelCase in wikis:

• The words smashed together form both a visual and a conceptual token.
• CamelCase links are faster to type.
• They shrink the namespace down small enough to encourage AccidentalLinking.
• The plain text version of the page reads smoother in edit mode.
• CamelCase discourages really long link names like “I feel that arctic cod tastes really good” by making them super ugly.
• When a concept is used over and over within a community, that concept deserves its own evocative word. The CamelCase links become compound words that each represent a single concept.
• Because links are visual tokens already, they no longer need to be underlined. This makes for more readable text and frees up underlining to serve as a visual signifier of heavy emphasis.

At AboutUs we use the shared language of CamelCase to name our pages about websites. This makes them easier to read and all the reasons listed above. Next CamelCase Wednesday (it’s hump day, get it?), we’ll talk more about what SharedLanguage does for a wiki and the community that uses a wiki.

Tagged as: CamelCase