[cl-wiki-devel] Thoughts about page storage

[Ian Clelland]

On 9/8/05, Emre Sevinc <emres at bilgi.edu.tr> wrote:
>  - Do we really need categories? Refer to Wikipedia. Does it
>  have any? I mean, what if I create a page called "Categories" then
>  make some alphabetic links (or categories) and place the links
>  under them accordingly? Wikipedia doesn't do that automagically (you'll
>  have to do a lot of editing), why should cl-wiki do?

Well, Mediawiki (Wikipedia) definitely has categories, although I have
no idea how they're managed , or whether they're a lot of work to
maintain. They look like they're generated automatically.

ZWiki, for Zope, doesn't do categories, but instead maintains a
document "tree", in which nodes have "parents", and that parent-child
relationship can be changed by an editor. It uses this to create
hierarchical lists of nodes, while still keeping the nodes all in a
flat namespace.

I'm fairly certain that Ward's Wiki (c2.com) only does categories
manually; you have to create a category page, and link your other
pages to it by hand. It doesn't seem to suffer for that despite its
huge size.


Honestly, I don't think that cl-wiki needs categories in order to be a
"real wiki"; if there is a simple and elegant way of incorporating
that sort of metadata, I'd be all for it, but I suspect that it would
just take away from the simplicity of the thing right now.


-- 
Regards,
Ian Clelland
<clelland at gmail.com>