This proposition is not completely preposterous.
Perhaps starting with a hierarchical javascript tree nav (something like
this -
http://www.treemenu.com/) combined with XmlHttpRequests in javascript
so that the category contents are only retrieved (asynchronously) from the
server if the category is expanded?
The Plone community has struggled long and hard with what they call "Keyword
Management" (for these purposes, keywords assigned to pieces of content are
equivalent to placing wiki articles in a category).
This is one of the best examples of a screenshot of the widget that is used
to manage the keywords on an a piece of content:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/download.php?group_id=75272&atid=543433&…
It allows for the browsing of existing keywords, the assignment of multiple
keywords to an item, the creation of new keywords, as well as the deletion
of keywords from item. The code powering this widget is readily available
here:
http://svn.plone.org/archetypes/Archetypes/trunk/skins/archetypes/widgets/k…
and here:
http://svn.plone.org/archetypes/Archetypes/trunk/skins/archetypes/widgets/j…
For a site with a relatively small number of categories, and a flat category
hierarchy, this kind of a widget may do the trick.
Categories are a wonderful addition to the mediawiki, and really open up the
possibility for using these wikis as long term knowledge repositories.
However, the usefulness of categories is severely limited if people can't
put articles in the "right" category, because they can't easily choose from
among the existing ones.
In the coming weeks we will be working hard to integrate this kind of
category selection widget, if anyone is interested in collaborating.
btw - The Moin wiki, which supports categories, uses a simple pulldown to
assist the editor in assigning a category, but their sites seem to have far
fewer categories defined than either the typical mediawiki or plone site.
/Jonah
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rowan Collins" <rowan.collins(a)gmail.com>
Newsgroups: gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical
Sent: Thursday, December 16, 2004 3:32 PM
Subject: Re: categorization support
On Thu, 16 Dec 2004 17:40:10 +0100, Kai Kumpf
<kumpfk(a)web.de> wrote:
try considering a new feature: a dropdown menu
for inserting/deleting
categories into/from articles is definitely what the wikipedia world
needs!
i am not suggesting offering *all* categories under the sun but only
universally agree on top-level categories in immutable form
I think you may have inadvertently explained the key flaw in your own
proposal: in order to be useful, the categorisation needs to be to the
same level it would be if entered manually - otherwise, you've still
got manual categorisation work to do, just like if it had no cat at
all. Maybe I'm wrong, but if the drop-down list is limited to a subset
defined as the "top level", the majority of work would be still to do.
In other words, do we gain by having lots of entries added to
categories like "maths", "history", etc?
If we had a "category tree" (itself problematic), you could have some
odd JavaScript concoction that allowed you to narrow in on the
appropriate category, which could be kind of funky, but I can't
imagine being easy. Presumably, for instance, it would need some
on-going dialogue with the database - as downloading the entire
category tree every time could be a little bandwidth-consuming, but
loading a whole page each time you "expanded" a sub-category would be
rather irritating too...
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]