I tend to use these deeper pages to tack less-interesting stuff on to more interesting stuff, to avoid cluttering the interesting stuff.
I tend to feel that the advantage of the wiki is that it's editable, and I'm not so worried about the links being easy to write. I hate wikiwords and I use human-readable link names wherever possible. I'll try to limit it, but I don't think it's a big problem so far. On Wed, 2005-07-20 at 13:10 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: > Hi, > > Murray Cumming a écrit : > > On Wed, 2005-07-20 at 09:26 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: > >>However, going beyong 2 levels is ususally not a good idea, and going to > >>4 is definitely a bad idea. > > > > Why? > > Wow. I thought it was obvious, but you're forcing me to think about it. > OK... the first 3 are for readers, the 4th is for writers. > > 1) Pasting links > http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam/EventsOrganisation/GnomeEventBox/SuggestedCosts > is over 80 characters long. That means that it will wrap in typical mail > clients, doesn't fit nicely in IRC windows, causes warnings for all good > news clients, and goes way over the 72 characters that I set my text > editor to wrap on. > > For web links to be useful, they should be under 72 characters all the > time, and under 50 if possible. > > 2) Memorable links > > To find the above link (even though I knew what I was looking for), I > had to navigate the entire hierarchy. On the other hand, I know from > memory where http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam and > http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam/MarketingMaterial are. Beyond 2 > levels, the whole point of wikis (creating memorable link names by > chaining together words) doesn't work. The links are no longer memorable. > > 3) Navigation > > OK, so this isn't really a good point, but reducing the number of levels > makes us think a little bit more about how navigable the site is, and > that's never any harm. Too many levels implies a site whose navigability > is not good. Compare & contrast with best practices for Nautilus spatial. > > 4) Ease of wiki linking > > To link from the SuggestedCosts page to, say, the TalkingPoints page I > have to write ../../../TalkingPoints - to get to MarketingMaterial, I > use ../../../MarketingMaterial. Essentially, to link to another page, I > have to navigate to it and see where it is relative to my page - the > idea of WikiWords is (as I said above) to make things memorable, so that > I don't have to do that so much. Compare & contrast to linking to > TalkingPoints and MarketingMaterial (how many dots do I need? is it > MarketingTeam/TalkingPoints or > MarketingTeam/EventsOrganisation/TalkingPoints?) A case in point: on the > EventsOrganisation page, there is a link to /TalkingPoints, which should > be ../TalkingPoints. > > Reducing the number of levels just makes it easier not to make mistakes > which lead to dead links and/or duplicate pages. > > I'm sure there are other reasons (Jeff Waugh could probably point a few > out), but those should be enough to get started. > > Cheers, > Dave. > -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list