FYI (I sent this to the users' list)
/Christian
--
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44 http://www.md.kth.se/~chr
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2006 20:34:40 +0200
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Newsgroups: gmane.editors.lyx.general
Subject: Help categorizing the wiki pages
I would like to ask my fellow LyXers with help categorizing the wiki pages.
In all likelyhood most of you are now scratching your heads, wondering if heat
stroke finally got me. Fear not, I live in Sweden so it's unlikely. I'll try to
explain...
Several users have noticed that finding stuff on the wiki is ... tricky.
Categorizing pages should make this easier. The goal is to be able to associate
pages that deal with related topics/subjects so that a reader can go from one
page about say PDFs to another page about PDFs.
Please note that a page can belong to several categories. You might also think
of categories as tags or labels. Another way is to think of this as building an
index (of categories) which I'll then make it so that we can browse.
This might sound complicated, but how you actually do it is much easier:
1. Look at a page and come up with one, two or three categories you
think that page should be associated with. Let's say you think the
page in question is related to PDF and publishing online.
2. Now edit the page and add the following to the (end of the) page
[[!PDF]], [[!Publishing online]]
That's it. (Ok, step 1. is a bit tricky ;-)
The result is that '[[!PDF]]' will become a link to the following page
http://wiki.lyx.org/Category/PDF
If you go to that page you will see a list of all pages that have been
categorized as 'PDF'. This then allows you to read other pages that are related
to PDFs. If we like we can even edit the page Category/PDF and add description
about what this category is about. We don't have to though.
The only difficulty here is coming up with categories for a page. I suggest the
following inital approach:
1. Let's categorize lots of pages without thinking too much about how.
** Place categories last on each wiki page
** Use singular form of category names when possible
2. Then we study the list of categories that we got and prune away
duplicates
3. If necessary we change some of the names of the categories.
You might have noticed the text "Please categorize this page" that shows up on
most pages right now. Once the page belongs to one or more categories this text
will be replaced with a list of the categories.
Finally I should also say that in order to "encourage" categorizing, I've made
it so that it is no longer possible to save a page that doesn't have a
category... I'll remove this restriction if people find it too annoying and
protests.
/Christian
Some links:
* Main category page in the wiki
http://wiki.lyx.org/Category
It will eventually let us browse the categories
* Original PmWiki documentation on categories
http://pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/Categories
Here is an excerpt from that page:
Coming Up With Good Category Schemes
The hard part about using categories is choosing a good vocabulary. Site
content managers may wish to follow the Guidelines for the establishment and
development of monolingual thesauri (ISO 2788-1986) and the Guidelines for the
establishment and development of multilingual thesauri (ISO 5964-1985).
Questions to think about include:
* whether a scheme already exists and can be reused
* number of levels in a multilevel scheme (not too shallow, not too deep
-- e.g. 3)
* number of categories per page (not too many, not too few -- e.g. 3)
* consistent use of singular ([[Mercury]] is a [[!planet]]) or plural
([[Mercury]] is in the [[!planets]] category)
* disambiguation and use of phrases ([[!musical instruments]] and
[[!medical instruments]])
Or you can just let people use whatever category terms they find meaningful. A
vocabulary (or "folksonomy") will emerge over time.
--
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44 http://www.md.kth.se/~chr
