On Mar 23, 2004, at 5:56 AM, Lars Aronsson wrote:
Before you code this in PHP: How do I write the wiki link to one of these sub-articles?
There would be some delimiter, (perhaps a ':' or '/' ). You would then write something like [[New York City:History]]
And how do I write the URL if I want to link to a sub-article from an external web page?
Something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City:History
And if I arrive at such a sub-article URL, and then press "edit this page", will I also edit the common introduction to the bigger article?
That's the idea; it would be similar to editing a section, but the intro (i.e. everything before the TOC) would be shared between the parent article and the child, so any changes there would appear on both. Also, a child article would feature a link under the title saying something like "Parent article: New York City"
Note that since I'm not very familiar with the code yet, I have no idea what would be an easy or proper method (or syntactical/semantic structure) for implementing this; that's why I'm putting the idea out for discussion. A simpler idea that occurred to me after my initial message is to maintain the sub-articles as separate articles in the DB, and link them into the parent article via a {{msg: }} type mechanism which would pull in the intro from the sub at the appropriate heading level. For example, you would put in the main New York City article:
==={{sub:New York City:History}}===
...and that would insert the intro paragraphs for New York City:History at a second level heading in the parent. (Does that make sense?)
That solves the problem of very deep headings and makes it possible for a sub to be included in more than one parent, even at different levels.
The traditional reaction to the word "hierarchical" has been "think again". Neither wiki nor hypertext in general is hierarchical, but networked, with many small pieces of information each reachable by a unique URL.
True, but I don't see any reason why it can't be both. I think this feature would be most useful for maintaining large complexes of related articles (such as the ones I've been working on relating to New York City.) Specifically, it would be a great tool for working towards creating detailed topics and sub-topics (and sub-sub-topics) without making master articles too big or polluting the main namespace with billions of stubs that are difficult to keep track of.
Wikipedia does cover a lot of material that would benefit from a formalized hierarchical structure, but I am NOT advocating forcing hierarchy anywhere where it doesn't belong.