Wagn Wise+discussion

One way to phrase this question is: "when is one card name a variant of another?". 

The technical answer is that names are variants when they have the same "key".  To generate a card's key, we split it into a list of words, strip out the non-alphanumeric charactes, singularize and lowercase each word, and then re-join the word with an underscore (_).  So the key for #1 above would be "wagn_wise".  The same goes for 2,3,5,6,7,8,9,11, and 12.  There can only be one card for any given key, and that card will have one "canonical" name, which in this case is "Wagn Wise".  If you visit any card name that resolves to a given key, it will show the canonical name for that key.

I wish there were a simple non-technical way to say this, but the best I have at present is "when Wagn knows the two names are comprised of identical words".

So why not 4 and 10?  Wagn can't tell that these are two words; it has no idea where to split them.  Even though camelcase variants like 2, 3, and 5 are smushed together, the capitalization makes it easy to split into multiple words.

Sure, we could try to make wagn smarter about this, but it's not a simple task.  how would it know that wagnwise should be split into "wagn" and "wise" but beauty should not be split into "beau" and "ty"?

Alternatively, we could rejoin the words without the underscore, which would make "wagnwise" the key where it was "wagn_wise" before.  That would mean that #4 would now be a variant, but it wouldn't catch #10.  I'm actually partial to this solution.  It's annoying to me that McCutchen and mccutchen aren't name variants!

Changing the key algorithm is not something to do lightly, but we will be looking into this more extensively soon because wagn is growing increasingly international, which means it makes less and less sense to have English singularization hard-coded so deeply into the software.