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Build understanding of page categories into the WikiEngine.
(partially implemented on MoinMoin – see below)
Presently, to categorize pages (on most wiki), we put a “Category” tag at the bottom of the page. For example, this page should have “CategoryFeature” beneath it.
To see all the pages in the category (in most wiki), we first:
This has some problems:
Building understanding of page categories into the WikiEngine means that the WikiEngine can intelligently tell us what pages belong to what categories.
MoinMoin has some features that help it understand page categories better than earlier wiki.
To see all the pages in a category, you simply go to the category page. The list of all the pages in the category is generated on-the-fly by a MoinMoin macro. (With earlier wiki, you had to click on the category page title).
There’s also a Make this page belong to category drop-down list while editing. This makes it much easier for editors to add *all* the appropriate category tags to the page, and get them spelled correctly.
However, the category tag isn’t treated as special meta-data – MoinMoin treats it as simply text on the page, no different than any other wiki word.
You could have something that lets you see the RecentChanges limited to pages of a particular category.
So, for example, you could say, “Show me the last 20 edits to pages in CategoryFeature,” and get a list of the most recent edits to pages that belonged to CategoryFeature.
That way, you can get a sense of what’s going on in a particular category of wiki work.
Well, that doesn’t really required builtin categories, but with builtin categories, it might work better. See CommunityWiki:SubscribedRecentChanges for an implementation of filtered recent changes that works without having builtin categories. – anon
Right- you can still filter for pages containing a word. But that just means that every page that refers to the category will be included as well. That’s terribly distracting. – LionKimbro
You can do more intelligent things as well- you can establish multiple hierarchies of categories. Then you could address categories by their super-categories.
For example, suppose you had a wiki of your thoughts. You thought the following quote was clever, and wrote a page on it:
“I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.” – Mark Twain
At the end of the page, you may want to categorize the page with:
People/MarkTwain/Quotation Quotations/School Quotations/Education Quotations/PersonalCode
If you ever wanted to see all of your pages about People, the page would show up.
If you wanted to see all pages about MarkTwain, the page would show up.
If you wanted all pages involving quotations, you could do so, and if you wanted to find all pages about quotations on Education, you could do so.
You can do this now, but you have to make sure that your categories are all spelled right, and the wiki system can’t help you- all it sees is text. With an intelligent BuiltInCategories system, the system can help you out intelligently.
SocialText (their “Workspace” product) has builtin categories (a screenshot.
Zwiki has ParentPages. When a page is created by following a BrokenLink, the page that the BrokenLink was in is stored as MetaData, and zwiki creates a tree of pages (starting with the front-page). Pages can be “reparented” if necessary.
What about twiki?
| status | wiki engines |
|---|---|
| Implemented | SocialText, MediaWiki |
| Developing | - |
| Intend to Develop | - |
| Considering | - |
| Rejected | - |
A similar, but different approach would be to use RdfForWikis (IdeasToPlace #7 - read MeatBall:RdfForWiki to see an example about categorization as well.)
This page does not describe in any way what are built-in categories and how they are different from standard categories. – NirSoffer 2005-02-10
I described a bit of how MoinMoin categories differ from C2 categories … but more info on other implementations of categories would be helpful. – DavidCary
LionKimbro, BrianTempleton, CommunityWiki:AlexSchroeder