Organization of Files on the Wiki

I'm sort of neuritic about file organization. I think this might explain some of my own perspectives in information management more than I'm entirely comfortable with. In any case, as I've gotten started organizing and writing the "seed" content of the wiki, I've laid out the file organization in a certain way that might require some explanation. Additionally, the way the wiki engine creates links, partially influences my thinking in this direction, so I've included a brief explanation of this topic.

File Organization

In an attempt to find a balance between "structure" with hierarchical organization and the flexibility and freedom of the wiki format; in the root level of the wiki, I've created a number of pages and directories that cover all of the major subdivisions of topics that are relevant to the topic at hand. people/ for contributors to the wiki; contribute/ for meta information about contributing to the wiki; opensource/ for discussion of software development methodologies and free software; systems/ for discussion of computing practices; tools/ for discussion of software/hardware/modalities useful/relevant to information/cyborg practice; desktop/ for the discussion of desktop environments, window managers, and desktop integration issues; emacs/ for discussion of and commentary regarding the emacs text editor/platform.

These are the topics that I hope to explore in some detail before the launch. They're not exhaustive, I fully expect other major subdivisions to crop up almost instantly: information management and cyborg issues are incredibly rich and opinions and expertise vary greatly.

Beneath the major divisions I don't expect there to be a great deal of hierarchy. For example, under desktop/ there doesn't seem to be much utility in having "categories" for window managers, task switchers, theming engines, etc; where as there does seem to be utility to differentiate between task switching in the context of desktop environments, and a higher level of task management in systems.

There will be overlap between the topics and cross linking, of course, and that's easy, but having gross categories I think will give us the possibility to specialize productively and have a larger document that will be intelligible as we accumulate hundreds and thousands of pages.

Practically, however, the organization of the wiki is something that's flexible, and something that we'll be able to change with (relative) ease. The more important message of the page is the pragmatic one about what to do with file organization information when creating links.

Linking

No matter how you create a link (more on that in a moment) the wiki generates links in a specific way. Every link starts at the location of the file it's currently in, and then looks "higher up" in the directory tree for a matching page. Here are some quick examples:

• If I link to the syntax page from this (in the contribute/ folder) page, the link will first point to contribute/syntax. If that page didn't exist it would then look for a syntax page in the root of the wiki.

• If I link to the syntax page, from a page in the emacs/ folder, it will first look for emacs/syntax and then to syntax in the root level, and without some help (see syntax below) will never find contribute/syntax.

• If I link to ?emacs from this page, it will link to the emacs page in the top level of the wiki. If I later go in and add a contribute/emacs for some reason, the link on this page will point to the new page rather than the older page.

• Ikiwiki's documentation covers this in ?LinkingRules

There are a number of different ways to generate links in the wiki:

• ?WikiLinks (using ?CamelCase) generates a link with now additional syntax or assistance from you. These pages will be created in the "current" directory by default.

• The double bracket form `[[]] provides the ability to make wiki links without using camel case, to link to other pages <span class="selflink">fileorganization</span> for instance, creates a link to this page from another major division of the wiki.

• If you don't want to use the page name in the link (for purposes of grammatical vanity, say) the following format <span class="selflink">about file organization and linking</span> creates a link with the text "about file organization and linking" to this page (from any page in the wiki.)

And that about covers it.

-- tychoish