Topic on Project:Support desk

Help:Linksearch says "Linksearch is case-sensitive". On Wikipedia I used Linksearch to do an export of the links to *.dailymail.co.uk to a text file. While writing up a post summarizing the results I saw that the file contained five references to www.DailyMail.co.uk and so included that in my summary. However https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LinkSearch&target=http://www.DailyMail.co.uk includes dailymail.co.uk in the results.

Is the Special:Linksearch help on both Wikipedia and here on Mediawiki outdated? Marc Kupper (talk) 19:58, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

On Internet, domain names are case insensitive. However, paths and filenames are (usually) not. Maybe what's case sensitive is any path, file or fragment of the URL, but not the domain itself.

Thank you Ciencia Al Poder. I realized I could do some testing to confirm that.

• http://org.toolserver./~acc 2 records found
• http://org.TOOLSERVER./~acc 2 records found
• http://ORG.TOOLSERVER./~acc 2 records found
• HTTP://ORG.TOOLSERVER./~acc 2 records found
• http://org.toolserver./~Acc There are no results for this report.
• http://org.toolserver./~ACC There are no results for this report.
• http://127.0.0.1:8080/wiki/Main_Page 2 records found
• http://127.0.0.1:8080/wiki/Main_page There are no results for this report.

I tried to update Help:Linksearch but it's complaining about the translation marks though they appeared to be syntactically correct to me.

Existing text:

• Even if multiple URLs lead to the same target, with regard to capitalisation, multiple underscores, and using "index.php" or not, Linksearch is case-sensitive after the first slash (/) and also does not find alternatively written URLs.

Therefore, when creating an external link, for optimal use of Linksearch, use a canonical form for the URL. In particular, if after following a link the address bar shows a modified URL, change the URL in the link to that.

Proposed text:

• Even if multiple URLs lead to the same target, with regard to capitalisation, multiple underscores, and using "index.php" or not, Linksearch is case-sensitive after the slash (/) that separates the host or domain part of a domain name from the [/path][?query][#fragment] parts. The domain name part is not case sensitive meaning a search for http://www.mediawiki.org/ returns the same results as a search for http://www.MediaWiki.org/
• Linksearch does not find alternatively written URLs. Therefore, when creating an external link, for optimal use of Linksearch, use a canonical form for the URL. In particular, if after following a link the address bar shows a modified URL, change the URL in the link to that.

Along with the rewording I tried to separate out the part about link normalisation into its own bullet.

Ok, done