-----Original Message----- From: openguides-london-bounces@openguides.org [mailto:openguides-london-bounces@openguides.org]On Behalf Of Earle Martin Sent: 17 May 2004 00:00 To: openguides-dev@openguides.org Cc: openguides-london@openguides.org Subject: [OpenGuides-London] Habituation is bad.
... How to remedy this situation, as far as I can see:
- Warn the users.
- Change the code so that nodes no longer have "Category" or "Locale" prepended to their names.
- Find all the pages that fit the pattern of "Fred" and
"Category Fred" and merge the latter into the former - automatically for cases where the former contains only a redirect, and manually for everything else (not many cases, hopefully). 4) Munge all links pointing to "Category X"/"Locale Y". 5) Erm, that's it? Did I miss anything?
I am in favour in principle of what you are suggesting. However, we need to be very careful. Consider an extreme case. Suppose we have a contributor called Victoria, working on the guide. Does she have to share her home node with the description of the place of the same name? Other related entries are distinguished in the node title: Queen_Victoria, Victoria_Station, (category) Victorian.
I think we need a metadata field called node type. This can take the following values for starters:
- Person - Category - Place - Locale
Note: a place has a pinpoint location, whereas a locale has an area.
If we put this in place, we could have different templates for each node type. Also, we could distinguish between Victoria(Place) and Victoria(Person).
My £0.02
Ivor.
On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 05:14:46AM -0400, IvorW wrote:
... Suppose we have a contributor called Victoria, working on the guide. Does she have to share her home node with the description of the place of the same name? ... I think we need a metadata field called node type.
Personally speaking, I'm wary of adding complexity of this kind, and I think node names should be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis. In exceptional cases, such as your example, the user might have to yield their name. I think accurate naming will generally stave off name conflicts, and we won't have to take the Wikipedia approach of "disambiguation" (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria ).
I think the existing category system does this already.
Note: a place has a pinpoint location, whereas a locale has an area.
There are lots of meanings for "place", unfortunately. A certain stretch of pavement, a restaurant, a tunnel under the river. I'd hesitate to try and define it too narrowly in terms of a pinpoint location. (A shop might have one - but what about a sprawling market?)
If we put this in place, we could have different templates for each node type. Also, we could distinguish between Victoria(Place) and Victoria(Person).
In theory, different templates for different things could be cool. I think the category system as it stands could be used to accomplish that, though, rather than adding another layer to the system.
On Monday 17 May 2004 04:14 am, IvorW wrote:
I am in favour in principle of what you are suggesting. However, we need to be very careful. Consider an extreme case. Suppose we have a contributor called Victoria, working on the guide. Does she have to share her home node with the description of the place of the same name? Other related entries are distinguished in the node title: Queen_Victoria, Victoria_Station, (category) Victorian.
This is something that would need to be assesed and constrained by the social rules. Which is to say one that shouldn't be constrained by software. Figure out what is the simplest solution now and let tomorrows bridges burn on their own. (I like my metaphores shaken not stirred.)
I think we need a metadata field called node type. This can take the following values for starters:
- Person
- Category
- Place
- Locale
Note: a place has a pinpoint location, whereas a locale has an area.
If we put this in place, we could have different templates for each node type. Also, we could distinguish between Victoria(Place) and Victoria(Person).
I've been ready to impliment something like this for a different CGI::Wiki based website for several weeks now. For just this reason actually, I have a need to differentiate User/Item nodes from basic nodes. I just haven't had the energy to finish it off yet. I was going to pattern it off of CGI::Wiki::Plugin::Categorizer because as Earl points out further down this thread it's basically the same concept. You're grouping kinds of things by metadata. If someone beats me to implimenting this, I'll be happy to bug test and roll it out, otherwise I'll have something working when I can.
-Chris
openguides-dev@lists.openguides.org
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Chris Prather -
Earle Martin -
IvorW