Versions 2.0 and 2.1 of ikiwiki, and I think earlier versions as well, allowed wiki links to have spaces in the link text. For example, [[!ikiwiki logo page|logo]] should create an anchor tag referencing the logo page, and [[!ikiwiki logo|logo/ikiwiki.png]] should create an image tag referencing the logo.

As of version 2.2, this no longer works. I think the pattern [[...|...]] should allow spaces before the pipe. I suspect this is the same problem as reported in discussion.

The above examples are ambiguous, only worked due to a bug, and were never documented to work. So I'm not inclined to re-add support for them.

If you look at WikiLink, it is clear that spaces cannot be used in WikiLinks. It also shows how to use underscores in the link text if you want multiple words.

This was a decision I made a long time ago due to the ambiguity between a WikiLink and a Directive. Is "[[foo bar|baz]]" a wikilink to baz with a link text of "foo bar", or an instance of preprocessor directive "foo" with a parameter of "bar|baz"? If it's interpreted as a wikilink today, that could change tomorrow if a new preprocessor directive is added.

Before version 2.2, ikiwiki actually first treated it as a preprocessor directive. If that failed, it output the preprocessor directive back onto the page, and next the wikilink code tried treating it as a wikilink. In 2.2, I fixed several problems with the way an unhandled preprocessor directive was re-output onto the page, by prefixing it with a '\' ... which makes it not be treated as a WikiLink.

If WikiLinks had ever been documented to work with spaces in them, then I'd feel I needed to support the pre 2.2 behavior, but I don't feel that I have to support old behavior that was never documented and happened due to a bug, so I current have no plans to bring the old behavior back. --Joey

I agree that the grammar should be unambiguous. It seems to me that the problem with spaces-in-wikilinks is caused by overloading the wikilink and preprocessor syntax to use the same symbols. If they didn't (and is there much advantage in them using the same symbols? I know in some cases you have something which is a wikilink and a preprocessor directive, but how often?) there'd be no problem with spaces.

If there was ever a future, syntax-breaking major release of ikiwiki (similar to python3000) I'd like to see this fixed as part of that. --Jon

You can enable prefix_directives and get the disambiguated behavior and spaces in wikilinks today. It will become the default in 3.0. --Joey

done