Re: Wiki best practices

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

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.

--
David Neary
bolsh gimp org