Wiki Patterns

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====== Labels and Key Words ======

When creating a Wiki, aside from allocating pages of information based on parent-children relationships, labels and key words also play a vital role towards grouping information that may not necessarily be about the same topic, but the information is related in some way or another. Then, once you have enough labels throughout your wiki, you can create an interactive list of labels (sorted alphabetical of course) that can serve as common terms. This is similar to sites where they have 'most searched for phrase' or 'most used key words' functionality, however by listing the labels available in a site, a user would be able to be aware of what content is in fact available, and through a simple click, they're given a list of all pages of information that were tagged with that label or key word. Whats even better, the list of pages will be displayed in a method similar to how the user would view search results had they searched for that label of key word themselves.

===== Benefits =====

Aside from the above mentioned benefits, a major benefit this creates is eliminating the process of synonyms and guess work when users search for information. Does a user search for "car", "cars", "autos", or "automobiles"; or how about the exact name of a car? By having "CARS" listed as a label, users with their different interpretations of the word car will automatically agree that the label "CARS" will suffice for their search. In the end, the user is presented with a larger number of results had they search for "automobiles" instead.

===== Difficulty in Implementation =====

One difficult situation that you'll find yourself in is naming the label or key word appropriately. Should it be "CARS", or should the label in fact be "AUTOMOBILES"? This example is fairly easy to come to a conclusion for, but when information strays into the realm of terminology where very different words meaning very different things can essentially both be used to label the same piece of content.

A short solution to this would be to label the piece of content with several labels or key words. However, the number that 'several' indicates should be determined by the author(s). Its best to not have more labels/key words about a piece of information that words in the information itself.

===== Example =====

FIXME example needed