[Pmwiki-users] Why heirarchy?

[John Rankin]

On Tuesday, 19 October 2004 10:51 AM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at mindspring.com> wrote:
>On Mon, 18 Oct 2004, Jonathan Scott Duff wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Oct 18, 2004 at 09:08:53PM +0200, chr at home.se wrote:
>> > And I should also say that I'm very much in favor of hierarchical
>> > content.
>>
>> Why? I've been reading these threads but I'm having a hard time coming
>> up with a real problem that needs solving. Do you just want syntactic
>> relief from ReallyLongGroupNames or what?
>
>i want to start a wiki for linux-related stuff, containing things
>like:
>
>Multimedia
>  Sound
>    OSS
>    ALSA
>Filesystems
>  Disk filesystems
>    EXT2
>    EXT3
>    Reiser
>  Pseudo filesystems
>    /proc
>    tmpfs
>
>
>and so on.  oh, yeah, i'd put 4 or 5 levels of wiki to pretty good
>use in a hurry.
>
>rday
>
Why does this require hierarchical naming to implement?

Given that wikipedia's scope is all of human knowledge and doesn't
require a hierarchy, I too am not convinced there is a real need.

In the above example, a trail page plus ^|TrailPage|^ on all content
pages (via a GroupHeader page) will show you where you are. For example, 
  'Filesystems > Disk filesystems > EXT3'
would show on the EXT3 page. And reorganising the structure is
just an edit of the trail page, no moving or renaming required.

Wikipedia has a lot of thoughtful discussion on page organisation, 
which are well worth a read. Here is one place to start
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disambiguation
-- 
JR
--
John Rankin