Introduction

MeatballWiki is a large, open ended and very loosely structured wiki. While such a lack of structure has some inherent advantages, a more rigid and defined structure could lead to greater or wider usefulness of the wiki for it's users. This page could also be used as a discussion of structure in communities generally which is an important part of community functionality.

Consequences of Structure

Pros

• Easier navigation because page you are interested in is simpler to find and lead to related pages.
• Faster navigation for the same reason.
• More appealing to newcomers and the infrequent contributor.
• More reader utility for TheAudience

Cons

• Disrupts natural creative flow which is not normally well structured.
• Would discourage wider exploration and discovery of content.

Useful Structural Elements

Here we explore structural elements to decide which ones are suitable for use in MeatballWiki

• HierarchicLinking - Involves a structural method based on parent-child hierarchical links.
• CategoryCategory - Categorisation is one of the most fundamental structural elements used by human minds.
• RecentChanges - The bleeding edge of creation and destruction in MeatballWiki, is currently the defacto structure.
• OptimalSearching - A way to find specific pages (besides Google). The current search facility is also a defacto structural element.
• IndexingScheme
• an area for newcomers - can include here the tour bus, visitor pages like the RecentVisitors guestbook and SandBox and wiki flavour elements like UseRealNames
• MeatballWiki- the main page would be the incoming page especially for casual visitors. Probably include newcomer area link prominently or possibly incorporate it directly as is done currently.
• We also need to integrate the multiple languages better. Atm we have only one, which is French but thanks to generous contribution the extent of French content is considerable. Random Page might be best in separated languages and if?? it is one way flow of English translation to French this might cause loss or discouragement of contributions in the French language.
• InterMap - An important part of interwiki collaboration.
• External bookmarking and Tagging - the emergence of communities that engage in these practices has produced capabilities we can use too.

Proposed MeatballWiki Elements

Here we put structural elements the community agrees are acceptable.

Discussion

Well hopefully this is a decent starting point. Nothing here is new, merely collated but that's what structure is about, collating information to reach it better. Feel free to edit heavily. -- AaronPoeze