This is a continuation of a discussion started in the "Introductions" thread: Should this wiki use namespaces to organize pages?
Pros: Structures the content for clear navigation, makes it easy to collect similar pages together for 'index' pages.
Cons: Makes creating links unintuitive, enforces particular conventions, doesn't account for pages that are more general or multifaceted.
I think, however, I have found an easy solution: Tags.
ListPages
Wikidot has an awesome module: ListPages. This does one simple thing with tags that I have longed for on DOZENS of other wiki engines: Allow list of tagged pages with and/or/not.
Basic "OR" usage:
[[module ListPages tags="game level-generation"]]Basic "AND" usage:
[[module ListPages tags="+game +level-generation"]]Basic "NOT" usage:
[[module ListPages tags="game -level-generation"]]How this can be useful:
Consider a game that uses a cellular automata for fire propogation. It could be taged with: "game rpg cellular-automata fire-propogation". And also an article that discusses this method: "article cellular-automata fire-propogation".
From this we could create several interesting automatic indexes:
Games that use CA: tags="+game +cellular-automata"
Articles about fire: tags="+article +fire-propogation"
All CA pages that aren't about fire: tags="+cellular-automata -fire-propogation" (Not sure if this is hugely useful, but hey, it's there!)
And then, of course, obvious things like All Articles: tags="article".
Why?
Tags are very natural to create, trivial to edit and mash around, fairly easy to maintain. This way also all pages can be in a flat structure, making linking more straighforward, obvious, and constant. As well, the complexity of the system can grow (or shrink) as needs change.
Thoughts?
