Jimmy Wales

And it turned out to not be a problem, but

To make a link in Wikipedia, in the early days, you would make a link to a page that may or may not exist by just using camel case, meaning it's like uppercase, lowercase, and you smash the words together.

So maybe New York City, you might type N-E-W, no space, capital Y, York City.

Mm-hmm.

And that would make a link.

But that was ugly.

That was clearly not right.

And so I was like, okay, well, that's just not going to look nice.

Let's just use square brackets.

Two square brackets makes a link.

That may have been an option in the software.

I'm not sure I thought up square brackets.

But anyway, we just did that, which worked really well.

It makes nice links.

And you can see in its red links or blue links, depending on if the page exists or not.

But the thing that...

didn't occur to me even think about is that for example on the german language standard keyboard there is no square bracket so for german wikipedia to succeed people had to learn to do some alt codes to get the square bracket or they a lot of users cut and paste a square bracket where they could find one they would just cut and paste one in and yet german wikipedia has been a massive success so somehow that didn't slow people down um how is that that the german keyboards don't have a square bracket how do you do programming how do you

How do you live life to its fullest with a screwdriver?

It's a very good question.

I'm not really sure.