--- Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote: [snip]
My experience from various wiki shorthand notations is that they should be easy-to-write. The major difference between an old style website and a wiki is that the wiki is written by all, and that this broadening of the authorship must be met by a simplification in format. For example, the choice between plural and singular in article headings is guided by which is easier to use as a link from another text, and that most often turns out to be a singular, thus [[Car]] rather than [[Cars]].
The indicated sort of overengineering should be avoided, not because I say so, but because it will not be used. You can try to introduce it, and then collect statistics on its use, and draw conclusions from the numbers. Keep it simple, make it successful. Even the use of special {{}} braces seems overly complicated to me. This is not a programming language designed for programmers,
but a text format intended for someone who is specializing in entomology or woodcarving.
I don't think its that big a problem if the category syntax is a tad bit complicated. Its not content-creation, its metadata. The entomologist or woodcarver who can't understand the category system can just write their article anyway, and let other people worry about the category system.
And, how is "{{{CATEGORY ...}}}" any more complicated than "#REDIRECT"? Not much. Maybe, if we want to make the syntax more coherent, we could use syntax "#CATEGORY" instead?
So instead of writing (Bill Clinton article): {{{CATEGORY Biography, US_Presidents}} We could write, on a line by itself anywhere in the article: #CATEGORY [[Biography]], [[US Presidents]] In fact, this syntax is probably easier to write than Magnus', so maybe we could use this one instead?
For a real simple category system, see http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?CategoryCategory
When I read this, I had what seemed like a good idea at first. Why not just adopt Categories as in the original WikiWiki?
I would suggest though that rather than use CamelCase to mark categories, lets use a namespace "category:" or "cat:". Then, a page containing a link to a category page is in that category.
There is one problem here: what if I want to link to category X page from page Y, without thereby adding page Y to category X? We'd need to introduce two different syntaxes -- one for adding the page to the category, and one for referring to it. For example, we could have "[[cat:Dog Breeds]]" to put the current page in the category "Dog Breeds", and "[[catref:Dog Breeds]]" to link to the "Dog Breeds" category without putting the page in it. But how is that any simpler than Magnus' proposed syntax? If anything it seems harder, and unless you know the difference between cat: and catref: one might get them confused, and accidentally add an article to a category, or just link to the category when you meant to add to it.
If you look at http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?DiscussionOfCategories, you'll find that this problem has been discussed already on WikiWiki. They suggest three solutions: a link prefix, a separate linking syntax, and do nothing. A link prefix is what I suggested above, cat: and catref:. A different linking syntax is basically the {{{CATEGORY}} syntax Magnus proposed, or the #CATEGORY syntax I propose above. Doing nothing is not making a distinction, and including pages which link to a category in the category. The last is what WikiWiki does at present. While that might be acceptable for WikiWiki, I don't think it is acceptable for Wikipedia.
[snip] Simon J Kissane
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