Findings: Like many interesting problems I do not have a completely clear 
picture what I need but it is becoming clearer.

At the moment I have two new buttons on my side bar - there will be one 
when I have added some kind of control to rank in increasing or decreasing 
- until then I am happy to prototype with two buttons.

Already I am finding some good ideas in tiddlers that are over one year old 
and yet had zero back links and so were only really 'discoverable' through 
tags - I thought for instance I had discovered something new recently but 
it turns out that the seed of the idea was over a year old - my earlier 
tiddler had some good ideas that I had become disconnected with. Of course 
older tiddlers often lack some tags and links precisely because they are 
old and written at a time when those additional tags and similar tiddlers 
did not yet exist. Many of my tiddlers although single topic contain 500 to 
1000 words. 

Backlinks are a very good indicator but they do not tell the whole story - 
they are asymmetric to my ranking code  because I only detect the backlinks 
and not links in the regular text entry of the tiddler so sometimes there 
is a really useful tiddler that has a lot of backlinks and clustered around 
that useful tiddlers perhaps even more useful ones that have no backlinks 
because I originally linked in one direction.

I have played around also with star ratings plugin $:/plugins/tobibeer/rate 
<#%24%3A%2Fplugins%2Ftobibeer%2Frate> - where the field to contain the 
integer star rating is held by an integer ( 1 to 5 ) as a dynamically added 
field in the tiddler - by this I mean that the field is added to the 
tiddler when you first assign a star rating - it also disappears if you 
later change your mind and give that tiddler a zero rating.

Also the upvoting tool from Kooma $:/plugins/kookma/vote - if I understand 
this one correctly it does not actually add a field to the tiddler but 
instead maintains it's own table of votes for all tiddlers which is held in 
a special tiddler? I stand to be corrected on this one :-) If my 
understanding is correct then I did find this one less useful - I would 
have preferred a field added to the tiddler being voted on so that code 
written by me could then be independent on Kooma's code and then simply 
display tiddlers in the main story river according to how my own filters 
interact with the vote number stored in the tiddler.

Finally I have my own tags called simply "1" and "2" - these I assign to 
tiddlers I find particularly useful a bit like "silver" and "gold" medals - 
currently I do not have "bronze" - there is no "3".

Are these lots of different ways of solving the same problem? Yes certainly 
but that does not mean that they are redundant, each has it's strengths and 
weaknesses.

For instance the strength and weakness of both the stars plugin and the 
upvoting plugin are that you do not have to go into edit mode just click on 
the widget - this does also mean that accidental voting may occur - this 
would be easy to do on my mobile phone for instance - consequence could be 
that one of my most useful tiddlers disappears to the bottom of the pond 
again. 

There is psychology here as well - for instance I have resisted adding "3" 
and then "4" and "5" to my own tagging system because I know that once a 
tiddler has been assigned "5" ( lowest score in my case ) then I will 
probably never look at it again and so it loses the opportunity to be 
reconsidered in the light of changes to my understanding of the area my 
knowledge base concerns, this is infact why I also have a button on my 
sidebar called "random 10" - it simply shows a random ten tiddlers on my 
story river so that every so often I shake the dice and give myself the 
opportunity to reconsider tiddlers that would otherwise receive no 
attention.

Possibilities also include ranking on the lines of "importance by 
association" - tiddlers that are ( for instance ) linked to high ranking 
tiddlers are themselves considered of high rank but not necessarily 
assigned a high ranking score directly - so a dynamic decision at the time 
the story river is populated.

For the time being then I advocate quite a number of different approaches - 
the whole issue of assigning importance to tiddlers is complex and at least 
as complex as the way the knowledge base has evolved and been interlinked.

What I do feel is that it would be very nice if the standard wiki - out of 
the box so to speak facilitated ranking by having user available fields - 
probably just integers provided for the purpose or if official support was 
provided for the kind of dynamic fields that tobibeer provided - it would 
be great to have functionality capable of visiting every tiddler according 
to a filter and updating the various rankings by means of user registered 
functionality or simply published frameworks for this.

The goal for a support framework, a tool kit if you like would be to 

1. Simplify plugins written with the purpose of assigning integer rank to 
tiddlers and have a common way of storing the rank. I do not favour rank 
being stored in special tiddlers because I think it is less accessible to 
developers having a rudimentary knowledge of Tiddlywiki - for instance in 
my case I can write filters and add pill buttons to my side bar to filter 
on criteria I consider of interest but I do not have the technical 
expertise to write the above plugins mentioned above - I can usually tweak 
them after study of the code but that is all.

2. Provide methods for updating ranking not just on a single tiddler when 
someone has voted on it but on all tiddlers - for instance the ranking 
based on the number of backlinks may require periodic refresh although I do 
not believe it would necessary require automatic update - I would happily 
press a button once a day to update.

The justification for wanting common ground - a best practices toolkit is 
to try and ensure that the methods for assigning, updating and reading rank 
are similar and suited to as many ways of working as possible - for 
instance I found it much easier to create buttons for the tobibeer ranking 
system ( to display on the story river ) because I just had to react to a 
field stored in the tiddler containing a simple integer - I found this less 
easy with Kooma's voting system because as far as I understand it the 
rankings for all tiddlers are stored in a special tiddler rather than the 
actual tiddler being ranked. I think if the storage method and the methods 
of access, update and so on have a common feel then we might see more and 
more interesting ideas develop which can be adapted to suit the individual 
user. Ideally I would like to focus on the algorithm that calculates rank ( 
if rank is not a simple user assignment as it is in the case of upvoting 
and stars ) and probably develop several different models in the attempt to 
better understand the connections and priorities in my own knowledge base. 
It is very unlikely that one view of the world will satisfy every user and 
every wiki - we all think and organise differently but I do feel a vanilla 
toolkit to facilitate the housekeeping activities would enable non-expert 
coders in Tiddlywiki to focus on the meat of the problem rather than the 
housekeeping.

Sorry it's so long but I think ranking is an absolutely critical part of 
any large knowledge base wiki particularly if the knowledge base is not 
focused on a hard science where there may be fewer alternative views or 
perspectives on a particular area of study where the individual may find 
their viewpoint is in constant development and the knowledge base is 
constantly in revision, review and mining for new connections and 
explanations. 







































On Tuesday, 4 January 2022 at 11:04:01 UTC Jon Light wrote:

> Many thanks Mohammad - I will try that out.
>
> On Tuesday, 4 January 2022 at 07:46:13 UTC Mohammad wrote:
>
>> Jon,
>>
>>  My filter looks like this
>> <$list 
>> filter='[!is[system]!tag[Journal]sortsub:integer<sub>limit<limit>]'>
>>
>> you can use :sort as a simpler solution
>>
>> https://tiddlywiki.com/#Sort%20Filter%20Run%20Prefix
>> On Tuesday, January 4, 2022 at 12:15:59 AM UTC+3:30 jonligh...@gmail.com 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I found a useful lead from Eric Shulman using subsort
>>> https://groups.google.com/g/tiddlywiki/c/hZBWTSo8eCw
>>>
>>> Using this I can order in the filter directly.
>>>
>>> My filter looks like this
>>> <$list 
>>> filter='[!is[system]!tag[Journal]sortsub:integer<sub>limit<limit>]'>
>>>
>>> And the macro sub looks like this
>>> \define sub() [backlinks[]count[]]
>>>
>>> Thought I would leave this for the next person.
>>> Jon
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Friday, 31 December 2021 at 12:08:21 UTC Jon Light wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> I am interested in being able to get an overview of my wiki to identify 
>>>> tiddlers which seems to function as important "hubs" in my knowledge base 
>>>> - 
>>>> for instance if a tiddler has ten backlinks then it might be more 
>>>> important 
>>>> than one with say 2 backlinks - or perhaps I have neglected a tiddler 
>>>> because I have missed places which should ideally link to it. 
>>>>
>>>> I use the "giffmex" bi-directional back link plugin so the required 
>>>> data is already in place.  
>>>>
>>>> It's all speculative, I am just interested in seeing if tools can show 
>>>> relationships in my knowledge base which is 20MB which perhaps I cannot 
>>>> always appreciate.  
>>>>
>>>> I do not regularly code in Tiddlywiki so I started off with existing 
>>>> code to hack..
>>>>
>>>> https://groups.google.com/g/tiddlywiki/c/j5oVXLCErE8/m/okRgDg9GCgAJ
>>>>
>>>> My experimental tiddler code now looks like this....
>>>>
>>>> <$list filter="[all[]]" variable="tiddler">
>>>> <$list filter="[<tiddler>backlinks[]count[]]" variable="count">
>>>> <$reveal type="lteq" state="$:/temp/Testing!!minimum" text=<<count>> > 
>>>> <$reveal type="gteq" state="$:/temp/Testing!!maximum" text=<<count>> > 
>>>> <<count>> <$link to=<<tiddler>> /><br />
>>>> </$reveal>
>>>> </$reveal>
>>>> </$list>
>>>> </$list>
>>>>
>>>> It's a good start -  it displays a list of all my tiddlers with the 
>>>> number of backlinks for each tiddler displayed - the next step would be to 
>>>> order the list so that tiddlers with the most backlinks appear higher in 
>>>> the list.
>>>>
>>>> I looked at the idea of adding a new field to each tiddler to hold the 
>>>> number of backlinks - if so then so far have not found out how to add a 
>>>> new 
>>>> field (if it does not already exist) and write the value 'count'. 
>>>>
>>>> So far performance is not an issue. 
>>>>
>>>> I am interested in any existing plugins or attempts to extract this 
>>>> kind of information from large wikis - no point re-inventing the wheel!
>>>>
>>>> Thanks 
>>>> Jon
>>>>
>>>>

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