Information Systems:uniKB Project Notes

Content Organization

Mediawiki is an unstructured wiki, meaning that pages are stored at the same level in the database. While the wiki is functionally unstructured, presentation of content (navigating through the wiki) is left to user. One option is to create pages (i.e. articles) and subpages that purely contain links and impose structure that way (i.e. you can only travel down the roads you see in front of you). However, this leads to static navigation pages that don't adapt to changes. For example:

• Drugs
  • Over-the-counter drugs
    • Tylenol
  • Prescription drugs
    • Xanax
    • Sildenafil

If you then wanted to create a new navigation page Generic drugs under Prescription drugs, you would have to move all the links manually.

The smarter way is to use categories.

Developing best practices for categorization

Note: This is written in an instructive tone with the intent that if a manager or content administrator is simply to follow these rules, the process of categorization will become self-explaining/self-guiding. The emphasis should be to input content first and categorize after.

• Think of categories as topics or tags and devise some initial categories to get you started
• Categories are non-hierarchical
• Categories can and should be nested i.e. you can sub-categorize
• Use detailed page names
• Your department is a category
• Do not categorize content articles with