Being able to specify categories in the wiki, the way you can in MediaWiki (Wikipedia), would make it a whole lot easier to organize material in there, and should be fairly easy to implement from a coding point of view.
Well, you can kind of fake it now with links everywhere, but categories would make it a whole lot easier to maintain.
For an example, let's say you're like me, running a Forgotten Realms campaign. I write up an article on a village in the High Forest, and I put in something like "Category:High Forest". Well, that's in "Category:Northern Faerun", and that's in "Category:Locations". So now I can put a link to "Category:Locations" from my wiki front page, which lists all these subtopics of geographical regions, which breaks down to specific areas, and in each of those, a list of articles for the specific locations in those areas. You can use it like tags on characters, only you can establish relationships between the tags, so "fighter" is always a sub-class of "melee character", for instance. The end result is:
1. A better organized wiki so you can find similar pages from the page you're on,
2. A navigable index that makes it easy to find pages in the wiki you might be interested in.
I'll be the first to admit that the wiki is not up to MediaWiki (or most others) standards. I did a barebones implementation of the absolute necessities and then went on to other things from there.
One possibility that I've been toying with is free-tagging of the wiki pages, similar to the NPCs. It's essentially the same as choosing a category, except that you get to create and assign as many as you like.
Would that be sufficient? I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to work on it, but more tagging site-wide (blog posts, wiki pages, campaigns as a whole, etc.) and more tag based filtering is something I'm definitely looking at.
Tags would be better than nothing, but the ability to nest categories is one of their chief benefits. You don't really get that with tags, and that makes them a lot less useful for making a nice index of wiki contents.
Comments
For an example, let's say you're like me, running a Forgotten Realms campaign. I write up an article on a village in the High Forest, and I put in something like "Category:High Forest". Well, that's in "Category:Northern Faerun", and that's in "Category:Locations". So now I can put a link to "Category:Locations" from my wiki front page, which lists all these subtopics of geographical regions, which breaks down to specific areas, and in each of those, a list of articles for the specific locations in those areas. You can use it like tags on characters, only you can establish relationships between the tags, so "fighter" is always a sub-class of "melee character", for instance. The end result is:
1. A better organized wiki so you can find similar pages from the page you're on,
2. A navigable index that makes it easy to find pages in the wiki you might be interested in.
One possibility that I've been toying with is free-tagging of the wiki pages, similar to the NPCs. It's essentially the same as choosing a category, except that you get to create and assign as many as you like.
Would that be sufficient? I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to work on it, but more tagging site-wide (blog posts, wiki pages, campaigns as a whole, etc.) and more tag based filtering is something I'm definitely looking at.