More About Contents

: Is it possible to generate an index of everything there is on WikiWikiWeb?
: It gets harder and harder to find your way around as it grows and grows.
: Just alphabetical would be great.

Sure. But I'd like to understand better how the title index would be helpful before I build it into WikiWikiWeb directly. In the meantime, here's a script that will give you a list of titles.

http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wikiNames

Use the list to ...

look for pages you may have missed
see the variety of naming conventions
find old pages that no longer have references

On one hand

This could be improved (at some cost in simplicity) by adding a bit more information about how the pages link together. Something like this:

    AardvarkMangling? (from DoingThingsWithAnimals?)
    DesignPatterns (from VisitorPattern and 533 others)
    MisterBlobby? (unreferenced)

Even nicer (and even more expensive to compute) would be a sort of hierarchical site map -- the script could try to guess which pages were "highest level", preferring to put referring pages above referred-to pages, etc.

On the other hand

But that's exactly what Wiki is not about, Wiki is a network of pages, not a tree structure! It's this free flow that makes it so great. Why bother adding the complexity when it's not needed?

(numerous pages admonish the mad categorizers as messing up the "pure wikiness" of hyperlinks as the sole navigation.)

The Google way...

Isn't there that experimental search engine that works by identifying pages that are "authorities" (the target of many links), and, erm, "hubs" I think it is (the origin of many links)?

''http://www.google.com - A site's value is based upon the number of links to it and the value of the sites linking to it. Works great.'' -- WayneConrad

''This sounds suspiciously like a graph balancing/pretty-printing problem that has been solved by a billion zillion third party libraries. There was an article on one technique in a DDJ not too long back, come to think of it.

See: GoogleMyWiki

Some taxonomy is good...

WikiCategories are an effective way to organize content. You can even visit these like a composite structure. List of categories, to alphabetized index of pages in this category.

CategoryWiki