Request: Wiki category support

I have kind of a thing about data organization and presentation, so I've been looking at ways to improve the wiki.

Honestly, as a new player, the wiki is kind of a pain in the rear end to navigate for several reasons. I often find myself having to hunt through several pages of links to find things as the search function is slow and tends to not return what I'm looking for. Even if I have a pretty good idea of the page title. Even if it does return what I'm searching for, it also ussually returns a great deal of unrelated stuff as well (do a search for 'skills' to see a good example of this).

One thing that I think would help with this is if the wiki had category support. I'm not sure if dokuwiki has a plugin for categories or not (if it doesn't, then I'm not sure if the pain of migrating wiki software would be worth it), but it would make organization and navigation a lot easier.

Pages could be categorized very easily without any major restructuring of the wiki or more than a small time investment and would net a huge measurable gain in ease of navigation.

Zonr_0, can you disambiguate categories from namespaces?

We have name spaces for characters, items, companies, nations, etc.

How is this different? I'm not attacking you, I just want you to provide the benefits in a way the less technically minded members of the admin-staff might understand so the benefit of implementing this will help champion your cause.

Sure, no offense taken!

There are multiple benefits, but to start, you can put an article in multiple categories versus only one namespace, and categories aren't at all tied to the address of the article.

The Type 30 nekovalkyrja service pistol is located in the stararmy: namespace. If you ever wanted to recategorize it, any references to it would be broken, or at the very least would end up linking to a redirect page.

Furthermore, there is no easy way to simply look up all stararmy related articles without manually creating a page that links to all of the relevant pages or drilling through the sitemap which is awful and bad*.

With categories, putting something in the 'Weapons' category creates a link at the bottom of the page taking you to the weapons category page which is a page that automatically adds and alphabetizes all pages that are in the weapons category. Additionally, you can put something in multiple categories: in the example above you could put it in a weapons category, a Star Army category, and a category for the year it was first introduced. Even better, you can create subcategories, so it could also be tagged as a side-arm, and a military weapon.

This leads to a system that greatly enhances the ease of navigation on the wiki and reduces maintenance by obsoleting pages like this.

Combined with templates (if those were added as well), you can do some really powerful stuff. For an example of this in action, check out the wikipedia article on the GURPS roleplaying system. The bars on the right and the bottom are templates which if you view the wiki code are added with only "{{RPG}}" and "{{RPG systems}}". Below that, past the "This role-playing game related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it." text is the category bar. You'll notice it has the categories of "Role playing Games" and "Role playing game stubs". The first of which was added with only the code "[[Category:Role-playing game systems| ]]". The stub category was added as part of a template, and I won't get into it.

Now, if you click on the roleplaying game system categories, you get taken to a big list of alphabetized articles relating to roleplaying game systems, including some sub-categories. This list is automagically updated without any human intervention as pages are placed in or removed from categories.

*This is for a variety of reasons, but ideally, you don't want to have a billion namespaces either.

Perhaps we can get tags set up.

Related discussion: Categories vs Tags @ Dokuwiki

The more I read about dokuwiki, the more I think it's ill suited to the size and scope of the SARP wiki, but I digress.

The tag plugin looks like it would work pretty well, it's missing some of the features and convenience of mediawiki categories (most notably it seems to have poor sub-tagging support), but I think it would still be very useful.