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

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Thu Oct 21 13:53:35 CDT 2004


On Thu, Oct 21, 2004 at 02:40:43PM -0400, Bronwyn Boltwood wrote:
> 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.

More to the point: a category is just a convention whereby pages belonging
to the same category all have the same string or link on the page (i.e.,
"CategoryXXX") so the entire set of pages in the category can be found 
by a simple search or backlinks operation.

Indeed, it's almost the opposite of a WikiTrail -- a WikiTrail is an
index page that contains links to all of the pages on the trail.
A Category is a page that all pages in the category link to.  (Indeed,
this makes me wonder if we should relate the trail markups to categories
somehow...)

> I'm scared of PmWiki going hierarchical; I think it will add a lot of
> complexity for not much gain *unique to hierarchies*.  

In case it's not been made clear: I don't have any plans to make
PmWiki hierarchical by default anytime soon.  I may support hierarchies
as an option, or via a Cookbook recipe, but the default installation
is likely to remain with single-level WikiGroups.

> 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.  [...] ...but I honestly think that most of the 
> time, hierarchy is NOT the best solution, and that it's time we 
> developed something  better.

Indeed, Rob Pike (co-author of "The Unix Programming Environment" and
"The Practice of Programming") agrees with you.  In fact, yesterday 
Scott Duff pointed me to a recent slashdot article [1] in which Pike 
talks about hierarchies.  The last paragraph of his answer is 
particularly interesting...

    Question #5: Database filesystems - by defile
    The buzz around filesystems research nowadays is making the 
    UNIX filesystem more database-ish. The buzz around database 
    research nowadays is making the relational database more OOP-ish.
    [...] I think what we've got in the modern filesystem and RDBMS is 
    about as good as it gets and we should move on. What do you think?

    Pike responds:
    [...] What's really interesting is how you think about accessing 
    your data.  File systems and databases provide different ways of 
    organizing data to help find structure and meaning in what 
    you've stored, but they're not the only approaches possible. 
    Moreover, the structure they provide is really for one purpose: 
    to simplify accessing it.  Once you realize it's the access, 
    not the structure, that matters, the whole debate changes character.

    One of the big insights in the last few years, through work by the 
    internet search engines but also tools like Udi Manber's glimpse, is 
    that data with no meaningful structure can still be very powerful 
    if the tools to help you search the data are good. In fact, 
    structure can be bad if the structure you have doesn't fit the 
    problem you're trying to solve today, regardless of how well it 
    fit the problem you were solving yesterday. So I don't much care 
    any more how my data is stored; what matters is how to retrieve 
    the relevant pieces when I need them.

    [...] It's quite liberating if you can let go your old 
    file-and-folder-oriented mentality. Expect more liberation as 
    searching replaces structure as the way to handle data. 

Of course, Pike now works for Google so perhaps he has some other
motivations for saying this.  But it's hard to argue with Google's
success.  :-)

Pm

1.  http://interviews.slashdot.org/interviews/04/10/18/1153211.shtml



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