[Mediawiki-l] Knowledge Management and MediaWiki

[Morten Blaabjerg]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "James Mohr" <mediawiki at jimmo.com>
To: <mediawiki-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, June 11, 2006 9:38 AM
Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] Knowledge Management and MediaWiki

> (...)
> The idea of a site map is not a bad idea. There is obviously a lot of 
> manual
> work to do (or not?), but that offers one more method of finding the
> information. I have run into the argument that the information **has to** 
> be
> stored hierarchically. That there is some absolute requirement somewhere.
> Granted humans natually put things into categories, but I see that most of
> the belief that things must be in hierarchies is because that is the way 
> we
> are used to storing files on hard disks. Thus we store files for our web
> servers like that. Also, up to now, most web sites have had some kind of
> hierarchy due to limited search mechanisms.
>
> I am not exactly sure what you mean by "top-level categories doesn't link 
> to
> the new sitemap, since they do not belong in any category." What would be 
> a
> top-level category on your site where you do not yet have wiki categories. 
> I
> am asking because we are working on a start page with various blocks for 
> "top
> level" categories. For example, administration, technical, customer, etc. 
> To
> some extent, these are too vague to put into wiki categories, so I am not
> sure if it really makes sense to create wiki categories.
> (...)

At first I tried to develop a useredited sitemap/index, which clearly has 
the advantage of providing additional information on the pages linked to. In 
effect though, this is clearly often not updated effectively enough, 
especially on a smaller wiki.

So, I decided to have a go at using categories more efficiently. I edited 
the text at "Special:Categories" to contain our top-level categories - as 
well as all categories in the wiki (which are included automatically on this 
special-page).

Our top-level categories are "Cultural Networks" (which covers everything 
from rockbands and periodicals to global media institutions and broadcast 
networks), "Persons" (all pages on individual artists, theorists, directors 
etc.), "Cultural Productions" (which covers every single publication, song 
or film in the wiki)... etc. My idea is that all pages belonging to a 
subcategory will also belong to one of these top-level categories, so 
effectively all pages in the wiki is in a category. We also employ more 
subject-oriented indexing categories, which are much more diverse, spreading 
over several namespaces and across other categories. These are completely 
non-hierarchical. It is of course also possible for pages to coexist, say in 
both a "network" category and a "cultural works" category - in the case of a 
periodical for instance, which is a publication, yet also an editorial 
institution. The top-level categories are very vague, yet deliberately cut 
out to describe the different kinds of content we have and want in the wiki. 
They also have the purpose to simply display the mass of, as well as what 
kind of information is in the wiki, for users and visitors(which can 
otherwise be difficult to get an overview of).

The only (minor) problem with using "Special:Categories" as a sitemap is, 
that since our top-level categories aren't themselves in any category, they 
won't automatically give a link back to the Special:Categories (our sitemap) 
page (as all pages or categories in a category do). This is a minor issue, 
really, one which I expect could be solved comparatively easy (if by no 
other way, then just by inserting this link manually).

What would be vastly more interesting, is to have more customizable category 
pages - for instance, entries in a category being able to display data on 
the pages in the category at a glance (say the first two lines of wikitext 
on a page, latest author, page views), as well as sorting the pages in the 
category for display after userchosen criteria. "Show me the latest edited 
pages in this category" - "Show me the most popular pages in this 
category" - "Show me only pages from this namespace, this date interval" 
etc... What I guess I am talking about is combining the very efficient 
cross-non-hierarchical category system with the MySQL requests of what is 
now hidden in very "blocky" and "not-so-flexible" Specialpages (which only 
is used for the wiki as a whole, and for the primary namespace in 
particular). Ideally I want all the functionality of the specialpages to be 
enabled for each category, each namespace and for all files in the wiki. 
This could be implemented with an expanded dropdown menu system, which is 
already in place for several Specialpages.

This kind of expanded functionality would make MediaWiki ultimately the most 
powerful indexing tool you could find ever.

I know this kind of functionality will probably not find its way into 
Wikipedia at present, because it will constitute too great server loads etc. 
But in the long run, I am not so worried about server load issues. On 
smaller wikis the load times will probably be less of a problem, and you 
could make this kind of indexing functionality optional, to be dis/enabled 
in the localsettings.

Best wishes,
Morten :-)

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