Re: Wiki best practices

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

I tend to use these deeper pages to tack less-interesting stuff on to
more interesting stuff, to avoid cluttering the interesting stuff.

I tend to feel that the advantage of the wiki is that it's editable, and
I'm not so worried about the links being easy to write. I hate wikiwords
and I use human-readable link names wherever possible.

I'll try to limit it, but I don't think it's a big problem so far.
 
On Wed, 2005-07-20 at 13:10 +0200, Dave Neary wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Murray Cumming a �it :
> > 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.
> 
-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com