I'm working (mentally) on a modification to wiki, that allows filtering of content, whether of content within articles and/or with certain articles themselves. It's a messy concept, and most would probably abandon the idea as unworkable, and indeed I just might. However, not without a fight.
To explain, let's use wikiPedia as a familiar example. Imagine that a user could select (and optionally save) a set of filter options from a predefined set, say "Prostate cancer", "European history", and "Opera". And let's say there were a way to tag articles to match the filtering options, and even content within articles. For example, the article on cancer and cancer treatments could have tags in the text to mark the beginning and ending of text that fit certain categories. Possibly even various levels of filters. Filter:Cancer|Prostrate,Colon,BladderVarious surgical methods are the usual first treatment.</Filter:Cancer|Prostrate,Colon,Bladder>
I've thought of the similarity to the methods used for multiple languages, but that's not the GUI that I'm after. And I've considered building on the Category system for the whole-article filtering, but haven't given it a thorough consideration yet.
An alternative to the embedded filter tags, would be to sidebar filterable material to the main article. That is, perhaps put a template tag in the main article, and then use extensions in the template article to decide which (if any) sub-articles to display, based on the filter settings.
Is this similar to anything anyone else has mulled over? Any alternate approaches come to mind? TIA,
James Birkholz admin, Posen-L mailing list and website http://www.Posen-L.com