Re: Categories work for messages as well
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Nov 01, 2010
- 2110 views
For instance, I see you have "categorized" this page into the Wiki category, but what would you maybe categorize it to reflect it's contents so that it could, as you indicate, be more easily found than the search facility?
Hm. I would categorize it as CategoryWiki because it deals with the maintaining the wiki. I'm not sure I would put it in another category. The CategoryWiki has pages such as CreoleHelp, Sandbox (place for people to test editing/formatting) and WikiCategories (describes how to use wiki categories).
Well, no, this message is really informing people that they can use the "Category" system to "index" FORUM messages, right? Not actually about MAINTAINING the WIKI, I think, but rather about USING the Wiki to find forum messages?
I feel the message fulfills both categories. That is,
1) It explains how to find forum messages using the Categories feature of the wiki.
2) It explains how to maintain the Categories entries on the wiki by tagging forum messages appropriately, and provides an example of doing so.
That is, by tagging forum messages, you add to the wiki.
And where might we find a LIST of possibly relevant categories, so if people DO categorize some posts, we won't end up with a million different terms of categorization for fundamentally similar categories?
Well, at this point it's like most other wikis that implement categories... at the humans mercy. Now, what saves the day is a few people who monitor the wiki and keep things in check. Our wiki is not huge. I'd imagine that after a few weeks we'll have 20 categories or so. Not too many. As the wiki grows we can look into adding functionality to list or suggest categories, doing fuzzy matching when saving and giving prompts like "Did you mean CategoryWin32Lib instead of CategoryWin32?"
but.. for now it's the human. I know of quite a few wiki's that are maintained in this fashion that have > 40,000 pages and hundreds of contributors. We have some room and time to grow.
Jeremy
Ok, that sounds reasonable, but since this post is about how the categorizing system works also with FORUM POSTS, I still suggest that if there were a specific LIST of all FORUM categories to reference to, then people could see existing categories to USE for FORUM posts, instead of creating many many unnecessarily different but fundamentally similar categories.
Why can't we use the same categories for wiki and forum posts? The wiki already has a filter option, so if you only want the wiki entries in a category or vice versa, you can do this.
