Hierarchy and you (actually me)
November 22nd, 2004
Like every implementation of Cornucopt (or at least, so I imagine), the seekrit projekt (Codename: Sleeping Princess) will be a mix of actual, formal changes to Cornucopt (that is, pagetypes and libraries that will be part of the distribution) and custom code that remains specific to the project (that is, ugly-ass hacks). The information architecture of Codename:SP is pretty much done, although I’m sure we will make changes once we have a running prototype; what’s in question is which of those IA features are appropriate to be generalized into the CoCo codebase. And, as I alluded in the previous post, a lot of those features have to do with hierarchy.
Hierarchy in wikis takes a lot of forms. The most popular is probably simple categories, which aren’t technically hierarchic at all, but are more like plain old metadata or keywords - what the Flickr folks call tags. While the tags in Flickr and del.icio.us got folks excited about what’s being called folksonomies by some, and simply “aggregated wisdom” by others, the ur-Wiki’s categories arguably got there first. (Why the excitement now, then? A little interface goes a long way.)
Besides a soft user interface, wiki categories are a soft form of hierarchy, and sometimes it’s advantageous to have something harder. Some wikis have implemented what they call namespaces, a familiar-looking way of writing hierarchy right into the title of a page (that is, with slashes: “ParentPage/ChildPage”) and having it happen magically. I am not sure why this has always sort of turned me off; maybe because it seems important to handle hierarchy with a lot of transparency and consistency. Also because this kind of hierarchy is not really a change from flat wikilinking. Which is fine, unless you want to do something like auto-generated nav, or an auto site map, and have it provide any meaningful context to the user. Most wikis have nothing that resembles a site map, and hierarchy makes this feel more important. A dedicated wikismith can of course maintain something that at least looks like an exhaustive site map, on the front page or elsewhere… but, again with the doing it yourself versus software doing it for you.
Since the very early days of Cornucopt design, before I’d written any code and back when the whole project was both more and less like a wiki, I have wanted it to have buttons named “Create Down” and “Create Sideways.” The idea being that an individual hapless web-slave, charged with creating a corporate website or just a personal one with a mix of traditional and weblog/wiki flavors, could construct the kind of tabbed, menu’d page structure we see so often without having to work at it much, or at all. I think this is what simple hierarchy in Corny is going to look like. Ideally, I’d like to leave to the HTML and CSS templates the matter of how hierarchy is displayed. That way, the difference between a chaptered-and-paged documentation look and a top-of-page nav bar with dropdown menus could just be a matter of a few clicks.
The firmest hierarchical form of all wiki forms is the sub-wiki, in which wikis contain whole other wikis. These contained wikis may or may not make pages contained in other sub-wikis, or the master wiki, linkable, searchable, or even visible. You see this most often on so-called wiki farms, Blogspot-esque services that provide free or semi-free wikis. The surrounding stuff is non-wiki in these cases - you can’t nest isolated wikis within each other like Russian dolls. But mightn’t it be neat if you could? I don’t know what such functionality would be good for, but I can’t think of a reason to disallow it either. If we want the uses of Cornucopt to surprise us, and we do, we have to add this sort of capability.
However, for the moment, the thought of integrating sub-wikis into CoCo in a flexible, removable way - including constraining search to one sub-wiki unless the admin doesn’t want it constrained, constraining links similarly, maybe doing so on a sub-wiki by sub-wiki basis instead of a global preference, and on and on - makes me want to grow a long beard and wander around muttering “doom, doom, doom.” So I think it will remain a hack for now.
2 Comments
1. ouroboros | November 23rd, 2004 at 7:06 pm
Consider four simple relations on a chessboard: forward/back, side, diagonal, knight’s move. And perhaps the long-knight’s move of (+-3,+-1) for a fifth.
2. misuba | November 23rd, 2004 at 9:33 pm
Spatial relationships like these are interesting to me in the context of social software, and they’re underexplored, but I think they’re orthogonal (ahem) to the question of hierarchy.
You might look into Cathy Marshall’s hypertext research at Xerox PARC, particularly the VIKI project (although you have to give it up for a female IA researcher with the metaphorical stones to name two consecutive other projects AQUANET and VO5).