[Mediawiki-l] Should I be doing this??

[Morten Blaabjerg]

Yusuf, it sounds to me like you're trying to squeeze a hierarchical system 
into MW. A scheme like the one you describe may work, but it is with the 
risk of restraining yourself and your users too much, and not really taking 
advantage of the freedom a wiki can give you. There basically is no 
"correct" way of organizing information in a wiki - it is up to you and your 
users to organize the content, as you see fit.

If you want a more hierarchical organization of content, you may be better 
off with another CMS or wiki engine which is better set up for this kind of 
thing. If you want your site to be a wiki, I'd suggest you simpy throw 
everything together in the main namespace, and use categories like Java, C, 
C+ etc to tie related pages together. This will be the least restrained 
option, leaving you and your users with the greatest freedom to organize 
things as you go.

You may use custom namespaces as you suggest, but namespaces are not an 
ideal way of organizing content, they are primarily meant to differentiate 
between different types of content and functionality, i.e. between content 
and userpages, discussionpages, system pages etc.

Best wishes,
Morten :-)

--
Crews Cut Production
Morten Blaabjerg
Danmarksgade 97 - DK-5000 Odense C
Tlf. 65 90 60 88 / 51 80 91 55
http://morten.crewscut.com
morten at crewscut.com


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Yusuf Mohsinally" <yusufm at hotmail.com>
To: <mediawiki-l at Wikimedia.org>
Sent: Friday, August 25, 2006 11:44 PM
Subject: [Mediawiki-l] Should I be doing this??


> Hi,
>
> I have a site that will have information about programming languages. My
> questions concern the organization of that information, and I wanted to 
> know
> if the way I am planning on doing it is correct, or if theres a better 
> way.
>
> - I have a namespace for each programming language. I think this is
> necessary, because:
> ---- It allows users to search within articles for only particular
> languages.
> ---- It allows articles of the same name to live under each language (e.g.
> LangJava:Arrays, LangC:Arrays, etc.)
>
> - As far as I have found out. Categories are common for the whole site. 
> So,
> the cateogory Arrays, can be a subcategory of other cateogies (e.g.
> LangJava, LangC) but it will just be one category. For example, the
> categories Category:LangJava:Arrays and Category:LangC:Arrays both point 
> to
> the same category (Arrays), not to two different sub categories.
>
> So heres my question. Do categories that are similar between all 
> programming
> languages, (e.g. Arrays) have to be labeled differently (e.g. JavaArrays,
> CArrays) for them to be disctint, or am I missing something... Because, if 
> a
> user wants to check Arrays articles for Java, they should be able to look
> through a category for only Java Arrays.
>
> - Another question is, it seems that namespaces and categories are not
> really mutually exclusive, so, I need namespaces like (LangJava, LangC) 
> AND
> articles found within these namespaces must belong to categories like
> (Category:LangJava, Category:LangC) as well?
>
> Do the above methods seem reasonable or have I totally missed the correct
> way of organizing information?
>
> Thanks!
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Get real-time traffic reports with Windows Live Local Search
> http://local.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=42.336065~-109.392273&style=r&lvl=4&scene=3712634&trfc=1
>
> _______________________________________________
> MediaWiki-l mailing list
> MediaWiki-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
>