Creating new Wiki topics requires some kind of thought to find the proper WikiWord referring to it. I reckon, a WikiWord should be descriptive and non-ambiguous. Of course, different people would name a topic in different ways.

Let´s say, you want to create a topic about a WebServer, will you name the topic HttpServer or ApaChe or what? And if someone else also writes something about a HttpDaemon, will he hit your Wiki topic? Inserting loads of WikiWords only helps linking if an already existing topic name is found easily.

Therefore:
Wouldn´t it be good if one could define some alias to a Wiki topic to increase the hit rate?

-- DanielKabs - 22 Feb 2001

An alias feature would allow you to jump directly to a topic. It could be defined for example like this for the sample WebServer topic:

• Set ALIAS = HttpServer, HttpDaemon, ApacheServer

Not sure if the added complexity justifies this feature.

Tthe current system support a similar functionality. Topics frequently contain a "See also" or "related topics" list that allows you to jump to related topics. Hyper-linking topics to a high degree is the goal, but of course this depends on the contributors.

Another related item is TWikiCategoryTable. Classifying topics helps also to organize topics.

-- PeterThoeny - 24 Feb 2001

This kind of aliasing would be very fine, indeed but of course I was suggesting the feature disregarding the complexity of its implementation.

My suggestion is based on the simple fact that in the beginning of a Wikiweb there are little number of pages and the hyper-linking-rate is low. Aliasing would increase it, e.g. aliasing WebServer to ApacheServer (to recycle the above example).

When the Wikiweb has grown, one can reduce the alias list and thus create more specific pages e.g. ApacheServer gets its own page.

Regarding the goal of a high hyper-linking degree I think, aliasing would help a youg Wikiweb to mature faster, as the users get a higher "hit-rate" and this is a positive feedback to them.

-- DanielKabs - 01 Mar 2001

what might be an alternative to this is to have a 'wiki glossary' page containing all wiki words (topics) created. It would also make a great "go to" or table of contents or index of topics

-- DavidLeBlanc - 10 Mar 2001

Great idea. The glossary is not just an alternative but a seperate feature one could put to good use. -- DanielKabs - 12 Mar 2001

TopicClassification:

FeatureBrainstorming