Mark Koudritsky

Email: <kamrik AT SPAMFREE gmail DOT com>

MathML

MathMlSupport

Notes on links to related pages

Call the feature NavigationLinksList (nll for short)

Description

Add to pages some construction that would list links to closely related wiki pages, like this:

#nll PageOne,PageTwo,PageThree

The list of links would appear somewhere near the title like this

PageTitle

PageOne : PageTwo: PageThree

with approprite changes to the fonts and spacings

Motivation

• It can give a good overview of the logical structure of the "neighbourhood" of a page
• It enables to answer the question "Where am I?" after landing on some page from search (both internal or google)
• It enables to implement tree structure so wanted by many
• It doesn't force all the pages to be in some tree structure (a problem so feared of by many others)
• It's very flexible, the pages in the list need not have any special relations one with the other.

Automatic nll

Pages are usually created from other pages, so we can make this list inherited, like this:

1. Say there is an existing PageThree that has PageOne and PageTwo in its nll.

2. On PageThree one creates a link to a non existent PageFour, clicks this link and creates PageFour.

3. Automatically (optionally!) PageFour will start with an nll made of nll of PageThree plus PageThree itself.

4. Later this nll can be manually edited or even deleted completely

It would be also very nice to have a checkbox on the "create new page dialog" that asks if I want this automatic nll on the new page.

Related things

• FeatureRequests/BreadCrumbs

• PagesHierarchy

• FacetedNavigation As far as I understood facets, it's not really applicable in many wiki usage scenarios, (but the idea is nice)

• DiamondWiki

Examples

HelpOnEditing/SubPages see the two links just below the page title.

Discussion

So this is just inherited navigation links. Where is the "back-" thingie here?

The "back" is in the fact that usually they point back to the "upper" level page, or back to a page that, in most cases points to this page. Though, I don't insist on the name I invented, and actually I even like "Inherited navigaition links" more, it's more descriptive and less restricting. Is it a well known concept that was discussed before?

• No. But they do not even point to the page back. Or do you would like to see them enhanced by the name of the page where the link was used initially?

To get the pages there, simply add them like that:

See also: PageOne, PageTwo, PageThree

We may want to use that data as meta data - so you can also search for pages the related to some page. In that case the related pages can be part of the page meta data:

#related-pages: PageOne, PageTwo, PageThree

Currently pages ignore #related-pages, and accept only known words. Adding this feature to 1.3 wiki can be done with a meta section using SectionParser (when its released).

• Apart from the the search there are several other reasons to make it metadata instead of just writing See also:   PageOne, PageTwo, PageThree

  • The automatic method mentioned above for creating this list of links (inheritance)
  • Special appearance, that can be controlled by themes.

  I'm somewhat surprised I managed to generate any discussion on my homepage, this probably means people are reading RecentChanges Do you, people, think it's worth moving the above to FeatureRequests?

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