[Pmwiki-users] Re: Why heirarchy?

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 09:58:22AM -0400, Stefan Candea wrote:
> > Why? I've been reading these threads but I'm having a hard time coming
> > up with a real problem that needs solving. Do you just want syntactic
> > relief from ReallyLongGroupNames or what?
> 
> To me is simple, I would like to be able to use wiki for internal project
> documentation.  And, yes, it could be a different wiki for each and then a
> different wiki for each department and then a different wiki for each team
> and then a diff ...

One item of note is that I've only come up with two reasons for 
needing a hierarchy over PmWiki's current group structure:

1.  ...when a group name (e.g, "Hardware") needs to be reused by multiple 
    groups; i.e., the same group name has different meanings and content 
    depending on its context.  To illustrate, if a group name such as 
    "Hardware" appears only once in the hierarchy, there's really no 
    difference between saying "Linux.Hardware.SoundCards" and just 
    "Hardware.SoundCards".

2.  ...to make an organizational framework more apparent to authors
    and readers.  This is likely a valid consideration.  However, as 
    John Rankin points out, Wikipedia manages to implement a fairly
    extensive hierarchical structure on top of a flat namespace, and
    using WikiTrails and wiki trail menus may be a superior mechanism 
    for hierarchical organization of content rather than trying to 
    wedge it into the group name structure.  This is especially true
    since restructuring the hierarchy then becomes a simple matter of 
    editing trail pages.

Pm