How do we best organize information?
Existing tools
- Categories
- Includes categories transcluded from templates, such as organization or user interest tags.
- Portals
- Wikilinks
- Search - standard MediaWiki search
Tools we definitely want
- Semantic MediaWiki
- Google site search option, with cross-wiki search options, and results within the Appropedia site and skin.
Other ideas
- Does Yahoo's Design Pattern Library give us any ideas?
- Harness the power of folksonomy: how can casual readers add a tag? (Drupal would do this better?) Note this should be kept separate to the regular categorization, but could inform that categorization, plus give users another tool in browsing & editing.
- Card sorting - getting people from the target audience to arrange a set of cards (yes, the physical objects) with topics etc, how they think the material fits together logically. Especially for occasional, intensive rethinks, but also do on a regular basis to help tweak? See Card sorting - A definitive guide and Card Sorting: How Many Users to Test. (More background in Card-based classification evaluation). Do this at the Open Sustainability Network Conference 2008?