Page Hierarchy

Page Hierarchy is something which is implemented in ZwiKi - see http://zwiki.org/PageHierarchy for the author's explanation of it.

I am interested here to discuss the way in which it makes the experience of wiki building quite different. I have been doing quite a lot of wiki refactoring just lately and I am used to thinking about what links I wish to add in a given section of wiki, knowing that all pages in wiki are equal unless linked. The hierarchy has to be constructed.

ZwiKi is different. The page where a new page is first started becomes its parent. This relationship is shown by the fact that the parent and grandparent etc links are shown above the page title like this:

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• GrandparentLink
  • ParentLink
    • PageName

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The children of the page are shown at the bottom of the page like this:

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Subtopics

• Child
  • Grandchild
• AnotherChild

etc

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There is still freedom to mention pages in any way the author wishes, on a page where it is not either the child or the parent, but the links that are there anyway can come to make up quite a large part of the page. Pages can be reparented. I moved some pages to a different folder and lost all the structure, which was quite easily rebuilt.

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All this makes quite a large difference to the page structure.

• These links are going to be there anyway and they cannot (as far as I know) be annotated on the line.
  • This means that the main reason for content on the page is to explain what the links which will follow are, in the case that this is not obvious from the page title.
  • If this is followed through then the freedom to format the pages any way that is wished has been considerably changed.

What interests me is that it also leads to a change in the focus of thinking while building the wiki. I need to think about the structure of the information as I am working, rather than just the links. It may be that this thinking will help with understanding the relationships in the data.

It is interesting that there was no page on this topic here until I started this.

I think there is a relationship to the problem I am wrestling with, which is how to make use of the ResourceDescriptionFramework, WebOntologyLanguage etc, to be able to find the structure in my data.

-- JohnFletcher

Hello John, anticipating the time, where zillions of people will organize their work as a collaboration on their wiki-pages as ExtremeOpenBusiness, it might be practical to have under each Wiki Homepage their EOB-subpages. -- FridemarPache

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CategoryWikiStructure CategoryHierarchy