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.