--- Lars Aronsson <lars(a)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?
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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