On Tuesday 22 December 2009 20:43:27 Mike Gentry wrote:
Thanks for the comprehensive answer. As I said, I haven't used wikis much, so this is an attempt to understand, rather than to criticise. You're close enough to convincing me that I'll take your word for it. ;)
As you mentioned few times it is matter of balance between readability, simplicity and maintainability. One level subpage is not a problem, specially if the purpose is related to its root page and no other pages. In all other cases it is counter productive. For example, you want to refer in your text to "YaST development" by creating link to that topic with [[YaST development]], but "YaST/development" is actual article title. Your nice [[YaST development]] will be red, in other words it will point to non existing article. No surprise as Mediawiki software doesn't consider / as blank space, like it considers underscore. Now you have to search for the article, find out that it is "YaST/development" and use different form of the link [[YaST/development|YaST development]], because you don't want your readers to think that / in the middle of the text is typo. Three and more levels of subpages are salt on the wound, it will worsen readability, make linking to other topics adventure for user, like in example with Standards and Libzyp, and present maintenance nightmare. Simple article renaming, which is in Mediwiki done by moving article to new one, with new title, and leaving redirect on original, so that links from web (other sites, forums and mail lists) don't break, creates flare of links at the top of the page. BTW, similar problem with linking is with capitalization. Titles in the Mediawiki software are case sensitive, with exception of the first character. If we want to refer to article about "Kernel development", we can write [[kernel development]] in the middle of the sentence, or [[Kernel development]] on the beginning and it will point to the same article "Kernel development". In a case that we use book style capitalization the article is "Kernel Development" and previous simple link will not work, we have to use [[Kernel Development|kernel development]] on each and every place we need link. Book style doubles effort to link other articles in you text. -- Regards Rajko, openSUSE Wiki Team: http://en.opensuse.org/Wiki_Team People of openSUSE: http://en.opensuse.org/People_of_openSUSE/About -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+help@opensuse.org