Category talk:Discussions of a general nature

Could the discussion pages link to information on the specific cases of the articles of discussion, otherwise where does one start? Some do, but some are regarding news items which I've not yet heard and hence have NFI what's going on.

needz moar info plz thnx bai

Dr. Boy

Also, it appears all of the discussions will be put under G in alphabetical order as they all start with the word General.

Dr. Boy

Grood idea. It should be possible to include a direct link to the website with the news article. Should remedy people suffering from NFI and prevent Mondayitis.

I'd change it myself but I can't quite work out what black magic Tristan has yielded to achieve the automatic insertion of the RSS feed name.

"General Discussion" is the current 'namespace' of the general discussion articles. You can go here http://wiki.mindcloud.org/wiki/Special:Allpages and navigate through a list of articles in the 'General Discussion' namespace without having to see 'general discussion' in the title, although it doesen't do a very nice job of listing them. It seems to list them horizontally in alphabetically order, which isn't particularly pleasing to the eyes.

I see what you mean though about everything starting with 'general discussion' in the "discussions of a general nature" page. It also seems to list them horizontally and alphabetically there too. Maybe there's a way to make it list them vertically in columns. And maybe there's also a way to make it exclude the "general discussion" namespace when listing.

The idea behind the General Discussion namespace and the general nature category was a way for us to better use the wiki like a forum. Since we don't have a forum now in the traditional sense, we've been trying to figure out ways to implement some of the things that tend to happen in conventional forums, like the sorting of discussions into threads and posts.

For example, in a forum you may have a 'general discussion' forum, with thread's in them on various topics, and posts on those individual threads which are more or less about the topic of the thread and / or forum.

So we have a hierarchy:

COMMUNITY

- - FORUM (eg. general discussion)
       - - THREAD (eg. teh news)
          - POST
          - POST
          - POST
          - POST

       - - THREAD (eg. hats)
          - POST
          - POST
          - POST
          - POST

       - - THREAD (eg. what i had for dinner)
          - POST
          - POST
          - POST
          - POST

- - FORUM (eg. bewbies)
       - - THREAD (eg. nice bewbies)
          - POST
          - POST
          - POST
          - POST

       - - THREAD (eg. fake bewbies)
          - POST
          - POST
          - POST
          - POST

       - - THREAD (eg. cyborg bewbies)
          - POST
          - POST
          - POST
          - POST

This kind of hierarchy doesn't really exist in the wiki. As far as I know the only really way to sort pages is with namespaces and categories. Both more or less function like tags, with the namespace tag existing in the name of the page itself, and the category tag exisiting inside the article.

We tried to create a bit of a hierarchy of our own to try and manage discussion so we could have forum-like discussion threads with the "general discussion" namespace and the 'general nature' category. Perhaps though the RSS feed articles should be in name space entitled "RSS Feeds" or "news". Either way though we still don't get around the issue of ugly naming of pages when it comes to navigating the namespaces.

This brings us to another issue. The mediawiki seems to lack complex tools for navigating and browsing pages. This is probably because we're trying to use mediawiki in a considerably different way than most people use it.

For example, when you go to wikipedia, you usually know precisely what you're looking for, like information about hats. So what you'll do is type in "hat" in the search bar and be taken to a page about "hats". An extraordinarily complex system of navigation, as you can see.

When one goes to the mindcloud wiki though, one generally has no idea of what one is looking for, unless you're one of us who regularly checks the Recent Updates page for what's new. The immediate drawbacks with this is that it can let you forget about older pages you've read previously or pages that you do not know about because they were created well before you started to use the wiki.

What's needed is a decent tool to browse through the pages and explore the wiki better.

Tristan and I have a grand vision of a tool which sits on one page of the wiki and allows users to browse or search through the wiki in a meaningful manner. This tool might consist of some sort of Category Hierarchy, which lists all the categories of pages in the wiki, allows you to sort the categories by alphabetical order, reverse alphabetical order, date of creation, date of last modification and user contributions to the category and so forth.

This tool though would go even further though, as it would also allow you to then browse through the articles in a particular category and sort them in ways like i've listed above.

I think a tool like this would be very useful as it would allow first time users to see overall what kind of things are in the wiki by peering at the list of categories, and then allow them to explore through them in a meaningful way. I think it would also be useful to regular users, as we can monitor our favourite categories better for new material and updates. For example, a user X's favourite categories may be "Films" and "The Future Wars". User X could look at the category of "Films" in the category browser and sort all the pages in it in descending order of 'date of creation' or something, and this would list the newest pages at the top and allow user X to quickly and easily see what's new in the "Films" category.

So there we go. This has been an incredibly long reply and I very much feel like I have been lecturing you. I've mostly been trying to go through my thought process of my ideas on this topic.

Cheers,

blokey357 16:18, 20 May 2007 (GMT)