Hi,
The other day while trying to look for some information on the wiki, I
got very disappointed with the way the information was organized.
Specially the search doesn't seem to return very relevant results unless
you know *exactly* what you are looking for. Somehow the heavy use of
subpages in the fedora project wiki struck me as odd and inefficient.
After some searching and reading I came to some conclusions.
1. The concept of subpages evolved from the need to order articles
hierarchically.[1] However after the category system was introduced,
this became redundant as organisation of information is in itself a
non-linear idea and the use of categories is simply much more efficient
in that regard.
2. The search function in mediawiki looks through the page names in
specified namespaces. And through a combination of bugs and features a
particular search might/might not be effective.[2]
So could it be, that the search function could be made more effective if
we stop using subpages in the 'Main:' namespace? Maybe we could follow
some thing like wikipedia does, subpages are allowed only in the 'User:'
namespace. Moreover since a wiki is after all a free-form source of
information, wouldn't it be more logical to rely on the category system
to organise the information rather than force some hierarchy by the use
of subpages?
Just a thought, what do you think? Is this a worthwhile thought?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Subpages#History_of_subpages
[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching
--
Suvayu
Open source is the future. It sets us free.
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