Talk:Wikilink use-cases

refactor to category

one day i would love to see an easy, drag-n-drop method for refactoring a link or set of links in a selected text area to simultaneously edit those linked-to pages to be added to a category, instead of having to move back and forth between the source page and the target pages, editing each one by one. Refactoring tools on a wiki are something that to date, hardly exist.

(unsigned edit 2011-04-07T03:03:19 User:Infomaniac)

Tags and categories

The article should probably offer more of a definition of "tag" because of the varied meanings of the word on this wiki and elsewhere. (Search for "tags" to see the variety.)

When the sort of tag being discussed is defined and then compared and contrasted with categories, there could be more use of examples. Template:Tag, for example, could be better explained. I used "What links here" to see it in use: the two most recent pages showed no evidence of its use; maybe we should be told what to look for.

Working my way down the page, I seem to agree with everything up to the middle bullet discussing links:

"# the link is only unidirectional; there is no easy mechanism for a backlink from the target to the source"

I guess you mean that there's no easy way to see the link or links when coming back from the target page using "What links here"? But at least you can easily (unless a huge number link to that target) get back to the page, then search if necessary, if you really want to. Would you really need to see exactly where the source page has links to the target? If a backlink is meaningful, surely it should be to a whole section rather than an isolated word; so you put an appropriate tag or link on the target page to lead to that section.

Under "See also..." I diverge from you a bit:

"the list of links are not in context (or only in the general context of the entire page, basically what a link-to-category is for)"

true, they are not in context, because (if the author is writing properly) all the links that could go from a particular context will do so, leaving a list of "see also" that have no specific text to link from. And unless there are appropriate categories for a "link-to-category" such references to other pages will have nowhere else to sit. They refer to pages covering related matters (which pages may be in the same category themselves and therefore discoverable from looking at it) and are a shortcut to those related pages.

"the links are unidirectional"

See above.

Categories:

"Category links are practically invisible - they are displayed at the bottom of the article and not easily noticed."

That depends on your skin. Cologne Blue puts them fairly prominently at top right. If you want them at the top for most skins, it's easy enough to copy them to the top of the page and insert colons where required. You could probably even train a bot to do that.

"Thus, category links are not in context"

Normally, no, because they should apply to the whole page; but you could put them in context if you wanted to, in the same way as you could put them at the top (as noted above).

"no matter how huge the page becomes or what content qualifies the page to belong to a category " - AND - "Over time categories can become disconnected from the content that introduced the need for it "

Those are possible developments, probably showing a lack of author care. If the content continues to belong under the page name, there should be nothing wrong with leaving a page in an appropriate category.

Wikis, like most websites, unlike printed publications, seldom need huge pages, because it is so easy to create a separate reciprocally-linked page for what might otherwise be a section of a huge page. That's one of the main uses of Wikipedia:Template:Main. Each section of a potentially huge page can have a brief summary and a link to its "main" article. The "main" sectional articles can each refer back to the potentially huge article and can link to the "main" articles for other sections and, rather importantly, can be in their own more specific categories. If they are structurally subpages of the potentially huge page, they will all be listed tidily after it in any overall category it belongs to.

"Lots of categories for a single page introduces verbosity "

No different from tags in that respect!

Final heading (at present): "Tags (link to category)". Some points there have been partly commented on, above. Further comments:

"tag links create a list of related pages, just the same way categories do"

That surely depends on how they are coded. Standard MediaWiki automatically displays a list of categories in the order in which they appear in the code. Doubtless a tag coding could do the same, but let's see it producing this list you speak of

"however, tags are in context and tightly coupled with the content that generates the need for a category"

As you can see from above, I don't think "however" is a suitable word there. Categories too can be in context; we've not really seen how your proposed tags will do that while producing the lists you mention.

"using tags inline reduces redundancy and code verbosity"

How does being inline reduce anything?

"using tags inline allows one to focus on content rather than the distraction of verifying the existence of categories"

What sort of distraction? Why bother to verify the existence of categories? If they don't exist yet, that will be apparent whether you have an inline category or an inline tag.

"consistent use of tags emerges a bi-directional, many-to-many structure"

How does the bi-directional bit work? Don't we still have your problem of finding which section of a page has the link or tag or category markup that targets another page?

"pages can participate in more than one network of tags in fine-grained context "

Needs a lot of definition. How is a network of tags determined? Wouldn't you be just merging two of them into one if a page participated in two? And "fine-grained context" was touched on above, in my discussion of huge pages.

Conclusion

You'll see that I'm generally with you on this one, while being a bit critical of some of the implied advantages of tags. Once you get them working, preferably so that they are "available on other platforms", tags as envisaged here can be a great addition to the mechanisms for linking ideas that are close or overlap but are not related in the inclusive way needed for categorization. But I don't see you reducing verbosity!

You're welcome to incorporate adaptations of any of the above in further development of your article.

Robin Patterson 06:04, 17 April 2011 (PDT)