Valerie, In my experience in wikis, *none* of the categories are ever officially "administered", and all of them are user inspired. Members are free to create whatever categories that please them, usually guided by a set of guidelines and watched over by a group of experts and helpers. The purpose of using categorisation in a hierarchy-like format (MW is not just top-down, it's also side to side) is not typically to place content on "shelves" but to allow members to browse, which is an essential tool. And just like tag categorisation, it creates relationships between content. As I see it, MediaWiki categorisation is really just a cloud of links, as Mr. Shirky described.
I would love to have a tool that displays a category cloud on a page, however, I have found no extension that does it today. There are functions that do similar things, but not exactly. This concept also cannot be separated from another existing MW categorisation concept because they are in fact the same thing, only displayed differently. Jesse On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 9:20 AM, valerie <[email protected]> wrote: > > I love the little 4 green squares icon for status. Very helpful. > > I just read Shirky's piece > http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html > > Having a few formal categories for metadata and user tags might be a > good way to go. > > I have been helping out on the > http://www.wikieducator.org/Workgroup:Categories > > Some of what are listed as Categories should be formal Categories and > "administered". The OER Metadata entries are a good start. > http://www.wikieducator.org/Template:OER_Metadata > Everything else should be user tags - any one can use what makes sense > to them. These two things are mixed in together now. They need to be > two separate things. Can that be handled in WE? > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
