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wiki:no_categories

A suggested requirement for a living knowledge commons wiki

Make categories to just be pages

Have no separate type of category pages. Categories are displayed by ensuring that all back-links with appropriate relationship are shown in the page.

Why is this desirable?

MediaWiki is confusing on this, in that you can add content to a category page. Wikipedia:Contents/Categories does a reasonable job, but the categories are vast. The P2P Foundation wiki has many categories, some of which are also used for content. Simpler = better. Other wikis have page tags. If there is a specifically different functionality associated with categories or tags, then it would be simpler to name these as different classes of page, but still have the same underlying mechanisms, including for export/import.

How it could work, and issues

Extremely easy: if there is a good backlinking system, then it is removing normal redundant functionality.

In practice, the distinction between content pages and category pages would simply be that category pages show backlinks by default, whereas content pages need not. On my own wiki here I have chosen to show backlinks by default on all pages, but I'm not sure if that is the best decision.

There is one other issue: that on Mediawiki there is, at least in principle, a category tree hierarchy. To duplicate that in a different way we would need to be able to mark pages as category pages, and one of the semantic links would be “is-subcategory-of” or similar. This would have the added advantage of allowing multiple “parentage” in a lattice rather than a strict tree.

Evaluation, or existing implementations

Not really an issue: it would be simply a matter of some wikis deprecating some functionality, perhaps to be replaced by page class vocabulary

wiki/no_categories.txt · Last modified: 2024-04-28 15:23 by simongrant