Simon Kissane <sj_kissane(a)yahoo.com> writes:
I both agree and disagree. An organized collection of
links can be useful. But an alphabetical list of
articles in the category can still be quite useful.
[later:]
I don't envision the primary responsibility for
categorisation necessarily being with the writer of
the page.
[and, on the topic of "just edit one page":]
Well, it depends on how well you know the category,
and how it is organized. If you are thinking of just
assigning things to major categories, like "Physics",
or "Philosophy" and "History", and we are in the
process of assigning 20,000 articles to these major
categories, then just being able to click "Edit this
page", add "{{CATEGORY}}}" and save is a lot simpler.
I think my suggestion to add a "put this page in the following
categories" box (in addition to the normal "edit page text" box) can
achieve all that:
* Page authors not interested in elaborate categorisation have a quick
way to stuff a topic into the right categories.
* These categories end up with an unsorted (or alphabetically sorted)
list of topics.
* "Categorisers" can use this unsorted lists and gradually move topics
from there into a proper order.
* Topics which are afterwards put in a category the same way again end
up in an unsorted section, ready to be moved into the existing
order.
I know it might sound like a bit of an overkill, but
we could have both -- we could have organized and
unorganized category pages, the unorganized ones
automatically generated, the organized ones made by
hand. Since we'd only have to maintain one (the
organized one), its really no more work than we have
at the moment.
My scheme keeps both parts (manual and automatic) of a category on one
page so that they can be kept in sync more easily. Otherwise
"categorisers" always have to scan the automatic page for changes.
Well, my suggestion was that they would be
subcategories, or independent categories in their own
life... so an algorithm could go in the category
[[Computer Science/Algorithms]], or alternatively in
both the [[Computer Science]] category and the
[[Algorithms]] category. Using a modification of
Magnus' proposal you could display the contents of
multiple categories on the one page.
This would work, although it would blur the one-article-one-page
concept. What would you be editing if you select "edit" on such an
[[Computer Science]] page automatically built from a number of
subpages?
--
Robbe