CamelCase

CamelCase is the practice of joining words by capitalising each one's first letter and removing spaces (CamelCase, WikiWord). Early wikis used it as an implicit link syntax before bracket-style {{wikilinks}} took over.

CamelCase — also called medial capitals — is a naming convention that joins multiple words into a single token by capitalising the first letter of each word and removing spaces, as in CamelCase, WorldWideWeb, or iPhone. When the leading letter is lower-case (camelCase) it is sometimes called "lower camel case" or "dromedary case"; the all-caps initial form (CamelCase) is then "upper camel case" or "Pascal case." The convention long predates computing but became ubiquitous through programming languages and identifier conventions in the late twentieth century. In wiki culture the style acquired a second life. Ward Cunningham's original WikiWikiWeb (1995) used CamelCase terms as implicit hyperlinks: writing a word like RecentChanges in page text automatically produced a link to a page of that name, creating it on first edit if it did not yet exist. The compound words came to be known as WikiWords. CamelCase auto-linking was carried over into many later wiki engines, but it forced page titles into awkward run-together forms; UseModWiki's free-link extension in January 2001 introduced the Page Title bracket syntax that allowed natural-language titles, and that form has since become the default in MediaWiki and most modern wikis.

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