[pmwiki-users] yet another documentation suggestion ...

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Aug 03, 2005 at 11:22:23AM +1200, John Rankin wrote:
> On Wednesday, 3 August 2005 9:15 AM, Joachim Durchholz <jo at durchholz.org> wrote:
> 
> >Now that's a problem that you have with any large body of text. The 
> >problem really isn't that PmWiki has no FAQ (actually the entire PmWiki 
> >group is one, from a certain perspective); the problem is that searches 
> >don't turn up the "most interesting" results first.
> 
> Yes! It seems to me that people use many techniques for finding
> things in a large body of text, including a table of contents, an
> index and a search. One issue I see is that the page index (list of
> pages in alphabetical order) isn't very helpful in large page
> collections, because the sort is not necessarily in a useful order.

This is a very good point.  I wonder how hard it would be to add a
"relevance" measurement to the search, so that it could order pages
based on a predicted relevance instead of just alphabetically?

> What if we had an (:index text:) directive?
> ...

Interesting idea -- I'll have to brainstorm on it a bit.  My first
reaction is that we already have keywords, categories, and other
indexing mechanisms, so we ought to reuse or refine those as opposed 
to layering yet another one into the system.

An interesting approach would be to have

   (:pagelist group=PmWiki fmt=keyindex:)

which scans the pages in the PmWiki group, and then generates
an alphabetized index based on the (:keywords:) directive in 
each page.

Pm