Categories on the new wiki

[Craig Box]

> Let's discuss this a bit here on the list. I was also thinking about
> this recently, and I wonder if categorising pages in this way is
> necessary where we have well managed sub-index pages which do the
> same job already.   
> 
> What do people think? Is there a distinct role to be played by
> categories in this instance? 

Very early in the history of the Waikato Linux Users Group wiki (mid 2002)
we settled on using categories, because it was easier to ensure all pages
were "linked" to each other via categories, rather than having to create a
link

In a well maintained wiki, no page should ever be orphaned (not linked to
from anywhere).  The original idea of wikis was that a page would be created
by EnteringCamelCase on an existing page and then clicking on the "create
page" link, ensuring continuous linking.  However, people just started
typing http://www.wlug.org.nz/PageName.  For the wiki gnomes, the options
were "find somewhere this is relevant and link it" (hard) or "find a
category it relates to" (easier).  Technically, a page that only has
backlinks is still an orphan, but at least it's linked into the mesh of
pages somehow.

As for h.u.c, I assume lots of people have said "I want to create a page on
running Barzaquok on Ubuntu", and created BarzaquokHowto, expecting it to be
linked from forums and found by Google, and not much else.

So, to summarize, categories are good, and easy to do, but don't have to be
the only way of navigating through a wiki.  

As to the other point, is there a "next page" plugin for Moinmoin that lets
you walk a tree of subpages?

Craig