[Pmwiki-users] Re: Categories instead of hierarchies?

chr@home.se chr
Thu Oct 21 00:50:57 CDT 2004


On 21 Oct 2004, John Rankin wrote:

> On Thursday, 21 October 2004 7:51 AM, chr at home.se wrote:
> >> I wonder if the ability to assign pages to categories would be another
> >> way of approaching the problem of how to organise pages in a flexible
> >> way. It seems to me that recategorising is perhaps simpler than
> >> restructuring.
> >
> >Unfortunately it doesn't fix a cluttered namespace. 
> 
> The solution lies, I think, in judiciously combining several indexing 
> strategies.

If you mean that we'll want to combine the use of categories, wiki trails 
and hierarchies I agree :-)

> There is no one right answer. If I interpret your comment correctly, the
> problem is not that there are lots of names in the same space, but that
> the 'natural' name may already be taken.

Yes, if we had categories I don't think I'd mind having lots of pages in a
namespace. Nor that the pages might be about vastly different topics.  

> One solution is wikipedia's disambiguation strategy.
> 
> So a page called Group.Mercury might list
> 
>     MercuryElement
>     MercuryGod
>     MercuryPlanet

> But this approach doesn't really scale; it only works when the ambiguous 
> names are a small fraction of the total name space.

Yes, I think this is annoying in practice because:
* You have to use longer page names
* You don't select the correct name initially, so it has to be renamed

> But you may have had something else in mind...

I didn't have this explicitly in my mind, but ideally I'd like to think of
*all* the wiki pages in the wiki as a big set of pages (where duplicate
names *are* allowed). To be honest, I often find that a page really
belongs in several places in a hierarchy, just like it often can belong to
several categories.

If the wiki can contain pages with pages duplicate names, it's of course
no longer enough to merely specify the name in the URI. But maybe we could
use several URI components to specify which page we want. For instance,
assumming that we have these pages:

	Mercury		Category:Physics,Elements
	Mercury		Category:Religion,Gods
	Mercury		Category:Astronomy,Planets

Then Mercury(Planet) could be accessed through for instance this URI
	http://www.pmwiki.org/Astronomy/Mercury
but also through
	http://www.pmwiki.org/Planets/Mercury
or
	http://www.pmwiki.org/Planets/Astronomy/Mercury

Maybe you could think of the URI as a "search"?

Oh well, guess I've gone off the chart here. A more realistic suggestion 
might be to have URIs like this:

	http://www.pmwiki.org/Mercury?category=Planets,Astronomy

that corresponds to a markup like this:

	[[Category=Planets,Astronomy Mercury]]

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr




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