Short description
The following lines are not a concrete feature request but rather ideas I want to share and discuss with you. Concerning wikipage organization and structuring, I would say, three different levels could/should be distinguished: a syntactic, a semantic and a pragmatic level.
1.) Syntactic level: On a syntatic level page organization and grouping is achived by the concept of pages and the ability to add and create sub-pages, sub-sub-pages and so on. By doing this, a hierachy of pages could be created expressing a certain orderliness. E.g. you have a wikipage called "Workshops", some subpage like "ThisYearsActivities" and some supbpages "WorkshopOne", "WorkshopTwo".
2.) Semantic level: Besides the syntactic level, pages could be at the same time organized according to their semantic content, i.e. some metadata about the page, which describes its content, helps to group pages together. At the moment, this is done by the concept of giving a page a certain category name (see for more on that WikiCategory), e.g. the page "WorkshopOne" belongs to the category "CategoryPublicEvent". Other categories might be "CategoryPrivateEvent", "Category Meeting". To build denser semantic networks and thus enable Moin to be also usabel for large documentation projects, the concept of subpages (=subcategories) could be also used here thus introducing "MainCategories", "MainCategories/Sub1", "MainCategories/Sub2", "MainCategories/Sub1/Sub1_1" and so on ( I don't know, whether this works already in Moin). In the far future, MetaData integration might be also done by using FacetMaps and at the same time also improving browsing and searching in the wiki. See for that FacetedClassificationInMoin.
3.) Pragmatic level: There might be also situations, where you want to loosly group pages on a third way besides the two ways you grouped pages as described above. Maybe you want to associate to a main-page also a discussion page and a sources pages, which contains all the images and attachments of the main page. These pages together form a certain group of pages although the pages may belong to different syntactic and semantic realms in the sense of the words mentioned above. Of course, information about page associations would be also integrated by some MetaData like on the semantic level, but this metadata is of another kind than mere semantic metadata, it lies on a different categorial level: Pragmatic page assocations are based on the aims and intentions of the wiki user and not on the page content itself (that's the reason why I call this level pragmatic level)! Also pragmatic page grouping will have another effect than semantic grouping. Instead of being one more menu item in a facet-browsing-tree, pragmatic page grouping would be often used to built different tab controls and thus offering the user some help on a different level (for more on pragmatic page organization see FeatureRequests/AssociatedPageFeature)
These are just ideas I want to offer. Maybe the distinction of these three levels of page organization might be helpful for further developement of Moin and may help to make some things clearer.
Thanks and all the best to you! -- OliverSiemoneit 2006-08-15 20:24:23
Annotation: Maybe some interesting pragmatic metainformation of a page that could ease wikinavigation in some sense would be, if a page would know from which page it was created from (i.e. by inserting a link to an unknown page on a known page and afterwards clicking on that link). I don't know how to implement that. Maybe the html-links in a page must have some unique IDs "...?id=ffff", so that Moin can find out from which page a yet unknown page was called and therefore caused the creation of a new page. Coding the links with IDs also enables Moin to distinguish whether the page was created by clicking on a link or entering it directly in the url line of the browser.
But why is this pragmatic metainformation? Because the user normally has some special intentions when he creates some pages in a certain order and keeping this information might be very interesting and helpful to group pages and link between these pages. Concerning semantics the pages may have something in common, but need not to. Keeping the creation trail would be a way to generate automatically some so called wiki walks and trails (see for that MoinMoinIdeas/EduardoMercovich and http://pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/WikiTrails). And of course: other wiki walks and trails are also some kind of pragmatic metainformation since a wiki walk always has a certain purpose - and it is the purpose which makes it pragmatic and not semantic (for similar thoughts see also FeatureRequests/AssociatedPageFeature). Pragmatic navigation with wiki and/or creation-order-trails might also put not so much information overflow on the user than semantic navigation by FacetedNavigation and thus might be much quicker and more specific, precise, purposeful. To be able to easily go to the creator page (like show parent page) might be often better than browsing all semantically realted pages! -- OliverSiemoneit 2006-10-22 19:28:22