Here we explore some requirements for pages organised (hierarchically?) under categories.
Being intrinsically federal, wiki is wonderful for assembling multiple elements, linked in multiple ways to constitute a distributed network; and mapping the emergent order. At times though, there's a reason to link sets of elements together within categories, forming hierarchies. wiki isn't equipped for this, and we wonder whether such tooling ought to be added to the repertoire.
We have two cases that prompt us in this direction.
**Handbook** One is a handbook. We're engaged in documenting a complex web of practices - actually, a commons - in the form of a handbook that may be used in discussing, evolving and mobilising a repertoire of protocols for practice in the commons. The classic handbook format seems helpful: - An intro with some subtopics - Several sections, oriented to distinct aspects of the web of practices, each with subtopics - Some appendices of auxiliary material.
Keeping these in one document (wiki) seems helpful, rather than breaking them out into separate topic-wikis. Even then, within any given topic, there may be a rationale for offering the reader a sequence of reading. Of course this can be done by listing pages in a 'guide' page. But isn't it also helpful to have some visualisation of the structure - either as a graph, or as a nested-indented hierarchy in a text format; or both?
**Pattern language** The other case is presentation of a pattern language. To be helpfully used - and even, to make sense as an approach to the world - a pattern language needs a top-level structure: a system of categories. Perhaps it's an ontology. It's helpful then to have a visualisation of that structure. Pattern languages vary greatly, in how seriously they take this structure, some seem to want to be entirely flat, some have a forceful nested hierarchy, etc.
A pattern language need not have only one hierarchy of categories. Indeed a 'weave' of plural systems of categorisation seems likely to better engage any really complex object of engagement - like the practices of a commons, for example: back to the same problem as above?
But within any given hierarchy (category) there will be a need for some ordering of the elements that have been placed here: for expository or reference purposes, for logical reasons, etc. The completely flat world of fully string-searchable autonomous items has become a norm which, while powerful, will not serve some of the purposes of assisted sense-making, and skilful assembly or co-marshalling of elements.
How may wiki handle - specifically, visually display - plural systems of categorisation, with hierarchical nesting, while remaining in some sense essentially 'flat', open and mutually federated at the page level?
And how may such visualisations be generated automatically by a page, plugin or paragraph, out of the content of the included pages themselves - in effect, out of a system of tags embedded within the page?
Ward Cunningham has retrieved historical discoveries and decisions in wiki, which contribute to literacy in how to narratively organise large evolving bodies of pages, but have not yet produced specific tooling or 'best practice'. Supplemental structure
--- This might be a red herring . . But there may be echoes here of the 'contexts' in DCI - Data, context, interaction: a programmimg frame from Reenskaug and Coplien.
DOT FROM preview-next-diagram STATIC strict digraph { rankdir=LR node [style=filled fillcolor=lightyellow] "Categories in pattern language" node [style=filled fillcolor=lightblue] node [style=filled fillcolor=white] "Categories in pattern language" -> "Category elements within a pattern" "Categories in pattern language" -> "Categories in a system of patterns" "Category elements within a pattern" "Category elements within a pattern" -> "Nested categories in a handbook" "Categories in a system of patterns" "Categories in a system of patterns" -> "Some pattern languages" "Categories in a system of patterns" -> "Warp - Zones of reach and the scope of an activist life" "Categories in a system of patterns" -> "Categories in a pattern weave"}