[Pmwiki-users] Re: Categories instead of hierarchies? (was: can pmwiki handle hierarchical content?)

[Bronwyn Boltwood]

On Wed, 20 Oct 2004 20:51:48 +0200, chr at home.se <chr at home.se> wrote:
> On 20 Oct 2004, John Rankin wrote:
> 
> > I seem to remember someone a while ago (Bronwyn perhaps?) asking about
> > the ability to assign pages to categories. If I understand Christian
> > correctly, this is akin to his 'a page can belong to multiple groups'
> > concept.

A category is just a descriptive tag that can help users find pages on
the same topic, by grouping them into their own list. It doesn't have
to change where the page lives.

I'm scared of PmWiki going hierarchical; I think it will add a lot of
complexity for not much gain *unique to hierarchies*.  AFAIK, in every
environment where a great many pieces of information have to be
managed (email, bookmarks, filesystems), the trend is *away* from
hierarchy and *towards* schemes involving tags and searching, letting
people label things (usually with multiple labels) in terms that are
meaningful to them.  This is the way our brains work. Filesystems are
a geekery that most folks don't understand.  Perhaps PmWiki should
have a hierarchy recipe for those special cases where it truly is the
best solution...but I honestly think that most of the time, hierarchy
is NOT the best solution, and that it's time we developed something
better.

I used to do tech support, and I easily spent an hour a day sorting
and copying email into the rigid hierarchy I had to use because of
Outlook, and trying to remember where the hell I put things when
customers wanted answers *now*.. I desperately wanted a flexible
system with multiple user-defined categories and a good search
function, and I couldn't have one. It wasn't just me, either -- my
coworkers and callers had similar information management problem. 
Most content crosses subject boundaries and has multiple important
attributes. (You can read some more about the email management problem
at http://arndis.godsong.org/Portfolio/Vertex)

I agree that sometimes we need to structure content and take people on
a guided tour of it, but the combination of wikitrails, the Trail2Menu
recipe, and HTML's headings address that very well already.  We should
be able to find wikipages not only by their names, but by the
attributes important to us at the time. When was it written? Updated?
What is it about? Isn't it time that our systems started working for
us instead of us working for them?

Here are my thoughts on how categories should work, from
http://arndis.godsong.org/Aerie/IWantABliki

     I expect to link to the category archive for cooking with
Cooking.HomePage, Cooking.Cooking, or Category.Cooking.
Category.HomePage and Category.Category are going to bring up my list
of category archives.

     The writer should be able to add a directive to the page to tell
PmWiki what categories this post belongs to, e.g. [:category photos,
family, my puppydog:]. It would be nifty for this information to be
added to the page's [:keywords:] automatically. The page should
automatically be added to each category's archive page. John Rankin
has a nice script that works very similarly, using groups and
wikitrails. (See
http://wiki.lianza.org.nz/index.php/Research/DigitisationSurvey2001.)

     Creating and deleting categories shouldn't be any more difficult
than creating and deleting pages. (Ideally it should be possible for
an admin to resurrect deleted categories, much as they can resurrect
deleted pages.) The ability to rename categories is desirable, but
will probably fall prey to the same sorts of problems as renaming
pages.

Bronwyn