On Tue, 06 November 2001, lsanger@nupedia.com wrote in response to tbc:
The idea of a back-link feature has been tossed around. That was a feature of Ward's original WikiWiki. It's helpful.
Can you tell us more about that? I am imagining that this means you'd link, say, at the bottom of a page, all the pages that link to the given page? That could be cool.
I'm not Tim, but I've come across the backlinks concept on a number of other wikis. The ones I'm most familiar with are ZWiki http://zwiki.org/, which runs on Zope; and UseMod, which we all know and love so well. I'm not sure about the the technical implementations, but from the user's point of view, clicking on the page title presents a list of all wiki pages that link to that page.
I suspect that in UseMod and the original wiki, selecting the page title simply runs a search for all pages containing the text of the page title. This works in most wikis because page titles are created using bumpy case. This is *not* the situation in Wikipedia.
http://zwiki.org/BackLinks describes how this is done in ZWiki, but my python/zope isn't up to scratch so I can't follow the code.
If I'd discovered ZWiki a lot earlier I might have suggested it for wikipedia, because it has some very useful optional features such as hierarchical representations of the wiki structure which is calculated by checking backlinks. This can create the impression of subpages without actually implementing subpages per se.
Now we have Magnus's software, though, so it might be more constructive to concentrate on developments on that front.
Claudine