[Mediawiki-l] Content filtering?

Sun Jan 23 03:07:01 UTC 2005

I'm working (mentally) on a modification to wiki, that allows filtering of 
content, whether of content within articles and/or with certain articles 
themselves. It's a messy concept, and most would probably abandon the idea 
as unworkable, and indeed I just might. However, not without a fight.

To explain, let's use wikiPedia as a familiar example. Imagine that a user 
could select (and optionally save) a set of filter options from a 
predefined set, say "Prostate cancer", "European history", and "Opera". And 
let's say there were a way to tag articles to match the filtering options, 
and even content within articles. For example, the article on cancer and 
cancer treatments could have tags in the text to mark the beginning and 
ending of text that fit certain categories. Possibly even various levels of 
filters.
<Filter:Cancer|Prostrate,Colon,Bladder>Various surgical methods are the 
usual first treatment.</Filter:Cancer|Prostrate,Colon,Bladder>

I've thought of the similarity to the methods used for multiple languages, 
but that's not the GUI that I'm after.
And I've considered building on the Category system for the whole-article 
filtering, but haven't given it a thorough consideration yet.

An alternative to the embedded filter tags, would be to sidebar filterable 
material to the main article. That is, perhaps put a template tag in the 
main article, and then use extensions in the template article to decide 
which (if any) sub-articles to display, based on the filter settings.

Is this similar to anything anyone else has mulled over? Any alternate 
approaches come to mind?
TIA,

James Birkholz
admin, Posen-L mailing list and website
http://www.Posen-L.com