Wiki: Camel Case

"Camel-Case" is the word used in the online wiki communities to describe two capitalized words smashed together.

These words are all camel cased:

It's called "camel case" because when you smoosh the words together, they look like a camel with humps.

When the wiki sees a word in CamelCase, it turns it into a link to a page with the same title as the word.

WHY IT WORKS LIKE THIS

Often people balk at the use of camel case. "It looks so ugly."

The focus of this wiki, though, is not on presentation. Rather, the focus is on the development of ideas, and that purpose is served by linking ideas together, like legos. Two words smooshed together are easy to remember, and easy to refer back to. No special formatting is required except for the omission of a space, and it flows effortlessly at the typewriter.

We did a lot of experiments back on CommunityWiki? with alternative formats, and we found that nothing worked quite so well as camelcase. When you try and get fancy with the presentation, it turns out that it makes it a LOT harder to link to previously established ideas. What's far more powerful is to shave a little bit off the beauty of the presentation, but greatly strengthen the capacity to build a language that links.