What's this strange dotted line ?
It's a very compact automatic site map generated from the top level of the wiki's page hierarchy. Imagine turning the contents view on its side and shrinking it greatly and you'll see where it comes from.
Each segment of the line represents a major section of the wiki, ie a top-level topic, and its length indicates the number of pages below that topic page. Mouse over the line segments to get tooltips showing their names or to jump there. The black box above the line indicates the position of the page you are viewing, like "you are here" in contents view. You can mouse over and click this too. You'll see it jump to another part of the wiki when you reparent a page. The position is only approximate.
I'm experimenting with making zwiki.org and wikis in general more approachable by presenting the (complex, interlinked) content as a simple linear trail. A wikiline is like a timeline, except it runs through the space of pages in the wiki. It could be detailed or just a high-level summary; made by hand or automated. Like a book, you know that you could in theory start at the beginning and follow it to the end and you would have seen everything, in some recommended order. I think that displaying it along with the you-are-here dot may provide a sense of orientation and stability.
Examples
- If you mouse over the line above, you'll see that this wiki (at the time of writing) contains three large sections (a giant issue tracker taking up about half the wiki, a set of people pages, and ZWiki docs); a number of smaller topic areas (about this site, misc, wiki and zope); and a relatively large sandbox & test area. Also there are about 2000 pages and this one is towards the end, in the Zwiki section.
- Similarly, at zopewiki.org we can see there's an about section, a books section inflated by many zope book chapter pages, small configuring, installing, people and sites sections, and three large sections: general topics, zope development and product notes. We can see there are about 500 pages. We find the front page is unexpectedly at the end of the hierarchy (Zwiki doesn't allow reordering of root topics yet.) We'd expect the picture to change as better organizations are found and pages get moved around.
Feedback
Too much gimmickry ? Useful only to wiki gardeners ?
Simplify and enhance -- Mon, 01 Aug 2005 09:19:38 -0700 reply
- Use standard colors. For example, default would always be zzz color, issue tracker would always be xxx color, Frontpage yyy color, etc. Of course, defined in some reference table so they could be changed by the user.
- Ditch the black position square. Instead, use a "taller" graphic for the currently active topic / segment. Then for the position, put a black bar at the top of the graphic.
- The cost? A bunch of graphic files of various colors. Short bars, tall bars, tall bars with black on top.
Cool feature, great ides, just like sparklines --JózsefJároli, Tue, 02 Aug 2005 02:13:19 -0700 reply
I like it, and it reminds my of Sparklines .
An enrichment - depth is nice -- Tue, 02 Aug 2005 12:37:13 -0700 reply
ZWiki is plain, clear, simple. Add this feature and there's also a bit of hidden mystery. That definitely appears to me. I hope you keep and develop this feature. Make it an option if you want, but make it available!
What's the point? -- Fri, 19 Aug 2005 09:13:58 -0700 reply
It's funky and flash and new, but what's the point? It's highly impractical to carefully poisition the mouse over the tiny dots when I might as well visit the Contents page.
Personally I think it's utterly useless to 99% of users and the confusing it can cause can ruin the whole user experience as complex/advanced/difficult. So it should be off by default but available maybe to "wiki gardeners".
How would it scale for big sites like wikipedia?
Keep experimenting!! Don't let my negativism stop you from playing around.
thanks --simon, Sun, 28 Aug 2005 18:16:23 -0700 reply
..for the feedback. I'm leaning towards dropping this, for now, as I don't think it carries it's weight, especially on zopewiki. I think it's a good direction to explore, but I haven't had time to make it fast and monitor for problems.
Here is the prototype code. Cover your eyes!:
<!-- http://zwiki.org/WikiLine linear position indicator --> <div metal:define-macro="wikiline" omit-tag="" tal:condition="python:1"> <div class="dimtext" align="center" tal:define=" pagecount here/pageCount; pageindex python:here.wikiOutline().flat().index(here.pageName())+1; percent python:int(pageindex*100/pagecount); flat python:here.wikiOutline().flat(); rootidxs python:map(lambda x:(flat.index(x)+1,x),here.wikiOutline().roots()); rootpcs python:[(int(i/(len(flat)/100.0)), n) for i,n in rootidxs]; uniqpcs python:[]; dummy python:[uniqpcs.append(i) for i in rootpcs if not i in uniqpcs]; intervals python:[(uniqpcs[uniqpcs.index(v)+1][0]-v[0],v[1]) for v in uniqpcs[:-1]]; "> <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr tal:condition="nothing"> <td></td> <td align="center" nowrap> page <span tal:replace="pageindex" /> of <span tal:replace="pagecount" /> </td> <td></td> </tr> <tr style="background-color:/*#dddddd*/;"> <td tal:attributes="width python:'%s%%' % percent;"></td> <td width="1%" align="center"><a tal:attributes="href here/contentsUrl"><img tal:attributes="title python:'you are here (page %d of %d)' % (pageindex,pagecount)" src="/p_/sp" width="6" height="6" border="0" style="background-color:#000000;" /></a></td> <td tal:attributes="width python:'%s%%' % (100-percent-1);"></td> </tr> </table> <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="3" border=0> <tr> <td tal:repeat="item intervals" tal:attributes="width python:'%s%%' % item[0];" ><a tal:attributes="href python:here.pageWithName(item[1]).pageUrl()"><img src="/p_/sp" width="1" height="3" border="0" style="background-color:#aaaaaa; width:100%;" tal:attributes="title python:'%s (~%d pages)' % (item[1],int(len(flat)/100.0*item[0]) or 1);" /></a></td> </tr> </table> <div align="right" class="shade1"><a class="otherlinks" href="http://zwiki.org/WikiLine">about the line</a></div> </div> </div>