[Pmwiki-users] Re: Categories instead of hierarchies?

John Rankin john.rankin
Wed Oct 20 18:17:15 CDT 2004


On Thursday, 21 October 2004 7:51 AM, chr at home.se wrote:
>> I wonder if the ability to assign pages to categories would be another
>> way of approaching the problem of how to organise pages in a flexible
>> way. It seems to me that recategorising is perhaps simpler than
>> restructuring.
>
>Unfortunately it doesn't fix a cluttered namespace. 

The solution lies, I think, in judiciously combining several indexing 
strategies. There is no one right answer. If I interpret your comment
correctly, the problem is not that there are lots of names in the same
space, but that the 'natural' name may already be taken. One solution
is wikipedia's disambiguation strategy.

So a page called Group.Mercury might list

    MercuryElement
    MercuryGod
    MercuryPlanet

and so on. Then when I am writing about Mercury, I say [[Mercury(Planet)]],
thereby resolving the ambiguity. This of course works 'straight out of the
box' -- no extra markup is needed.

But this approach doesn't really scale; it only works when the ambiguous 
names are a small fraction of the total name space.

But you may have had something else in mind...

-- 
JR
--
John Rankin





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