User:Anthony Salvagno/Notebook/Research/2009/02/23/Categories For Notebook Organizing

Andy Maloney 00:06, 24 February 2009 (EST):

I think you've got it in this notebook entry when it comes to organizational categories. Such as It's a shame that OWW doesn't have subcategories. If it did, then it would make organization easier in my mind. But, I guess that one can work around sub categorizing things on OWW. You could make pages that are categories, such as optical tweezers, and then have the "sub" categories, such as beam path design, listed only on the category page. I think I like this idea and I might implement it in my notebook.
 * Shotgun DNA
 * RNA Pol II
 * Optical tweezers construction
 * Kinesin

You could make Genomic DNA Insertions a category and then list Cutting as a "sub" category. Or if Genomic DNA Insertions is a sub category of another category, you could just nest Cutting as a page in the Genomic DNA Insertions page. I don't know if this is making sense, but I'm thinking of it like nesting a file in a bunch of folders. We can talk tomorrow about this.
 * Steve Koch 01:37, 24 February 2009 (EST): I think MediaWiki does support sub-categories, but I remember reading somewhere that the founders of OWW recommended a single-level categorization. I don't know where I stand on this issue.  I know that using MediaWiki commons for my photos, the category hierarchy was pretty confusing.  But in my personal files, I am obsessed with hierarchies.  What I have done on the private wiki is to use "dynamic page listing" to list categorized pages, and I think that is the way to go.  E.g., I'll tag a page as "2009" and "DARPA" and "Funding".  This has the effect of allowing you to use DPL to treat it as a hierarchy of "2009->DARPA" and / or "Funding->DARPA" and / or "2009->Funding" and / or "Funding->2009."  Based on my musings here, I think the way OWW is setup is fine or possibly superior.  The way you'd do what you're describing above is to add every category in the hierarchy to your page.  This can be made easier by creating templates which add a bunch of categories with one label.
 * E.g., a template such as could add a bunch of categories such as "DNA" "genomics" "single-molecule" "DNA unzipping" "DNA mapping" "Shotgun DNA Mapping" etc.

Category List

 * SDM
 * Optical Tweezer
 * Protocols
 * RNA Pol II