On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 17:45:38 +0200, Enrico Weigelt weigelt@metux.de wrote:
I'm going to do some quite huge changes in mediawiki and so going to start a forkoff into phase4.
awaiting you comments :)
I just started playing with gmail account (google's web-based e-mail system, for those that don't know).
They have a very nice implementation of what they call "Labels". If you have gmail account, it's best to just play with it. "Labels" are just a categorization implementation. I can create labels and tag a given e-mail message with multiple labels.
The idea is not new by any means - it has been done before, it's just adding very simple metadata to pieces of information.
In context of e-mail "Labels" can be used as equivalent of "virtual folders" e.g. I tag all e-mails from this list with "wikipedia" label.
In context of WikiPedia, Labels are equivalent of Categories.
They can also be used to implement other things that are done manually e.g. lists of any kinds (e.g. list of articles nominated for great writing, list of "most wanted to be written articles). We could use label "stub" instead of {{stub}} tag etc.
So I think it would be good to have a good implementation of labels and implement other functionality (e.g. categories) in terms of labels.
Why bother? I'm a strong believer that good user interface is important. Label, if implemented well like in gmail, are much better interface than e.g. [[Category::foo]].
They are more discoverable (assumption is that labels were accessible from main page).
Just a thought.
Krzysztof Kowalczyk / http://blog.kowalczyk.info