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