Please reply at http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,513.0.html
Note, I know that you need leadership from me on the license issue. I hope to get to that soon as well! --Larry =========== Here is a definite proposal about how to replace categories. "Finally," you say? :-) Background: I confess to a perhaps overextreme animus against Mediawiki's Category feature. Yes, the feature is useful when it comes to categorizing articles for, say, workgroup assignments, or for categorizing images. But when it comes to categorizing articles, well, the information contained on category pages is the same sort of information that one looks for in an encyclopedia article. That is, a list of subtopics is perfectly valid as a sort of end matter as are lists of Further Reading and External Links. This suggests, then, the following proposal. PROPOSAL (1) Delete all category information from CZ article pages except those links that assist workgroup management. There might be some other exceptions; we will list them. (2) If there was (or, if you would like there to be) a category titled C, then find the article titled C, and create an end-matter section titled "Subtopics". You may also create "Related Topics" but only after "Subtopics." This is because we want to encourage people by the structure of the end-matter to realize that they should not put subtopics under "Related Topics." (3) (Totally optional.) Coders are then strongly encouraged to build easily-navigable topic maps based on the links contained in the "Subtopics" and "Related Topics" sections. Eventually, users might be able to opt to put useful strings of topic-subtopic relations somewhere on articles. Suppose '>' refers to the topic-subtopic relation. Then we say X > Y iff Y is in X's "Subtopics" section. If articles in this way define a string of relations, such as A > B > C > D > E, then it's (theoretically) easy for coders to display those relations somewhere on the article E page--i.e., it's theoretically easy to display the "breadcrumbs." And, of course, since there can be multiple parents for a single topic, there might be multiple "breadcrumbs." ADVANTAGES * (1) and (2) are dead simple to implement, while (3) is optional and can be deferred. No new technical apparatus needed. * We move information crucial to understanding a topic (namely, what other topic are related to it) to the page where the article page. * We remove the redundancy that now exists between various lists and templates. What do you all think? What are the disadvantages? I don't propose to make a final decision on this for at least a week, and I'd like to bring the community to as close to a consensus as possible. Let's have a debate in the meantime. Counter-proposals, one of which would be just to replicate the WP system, are welcome. --Larry Please reply at http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,513.0.html _______________________________________________ Citizendium-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/citizendium-l
