P2P Foundation Wiki Taxonomy Top Level Category Discussion

Alex

Do you think that we need to have "P2P Theory" and "Theory"?

Background: Wikipedia assumes you know nothing. Do we make the same assumption?

With our wiki there's a chance to look at an article and pick out the "P2P Perspective" but this isn't always clear, and it is by no means systematic across 10,000 pages.

Let's use hyperbole to talk about a test case.

Let's say I hear about a new initiative of the United States' National Rife Association. The organization has heard from some gun owners that the group has created a train-you-neighbor program, free, and that you can train anyone after looking at the website for 5 minutes. When you finish, you go online and sign a petition.

So, this program obviously has a P2P Perspective. Gun owners training neighbors...neighbors as peers, everyone helping everyone to better wield a firearm.

When I put this on the wiki I can put the stub into a few different categories.

Here's what I'm thinking:

Category:Articles Category:Training Category:P2P Training

Do you sense any difference between Training and P2P Training?

I think we need both.

There's a new initiative of the United States' National Rife Association. The organization has created a free training program. Just sign up on the website and in 5 minutes you are certified. You can sign a petition that you completed the program and that you support looser gun laws.

If this went on the wiki it would go in:

Category:Articles Category:Training

So, I think we need both, and there's a place for curating the Category pages for the P2P Foo categories to specify and differentiate.

This hyperbolic example does beg a question, though: Why would the second article be on the wiki? Ideas?

Your thoughts are valuable. Please do let me know what you think.

One of the impacts of this is in regards to the structured taxonomy for the site. Our category system has exploded, and to no great end it would seem. 50 categories have all the links, and the rest are flying solo.

Custom pages here and there are working as directories, but they can't keep up with the number of growing links. In general then, our categories need to support or high traffic sections and, if possible, aid navigation down into those sections with subcategories. Wikis, ugh. But possible!

This also means that "Top Level" pages like "Manufacturing" and "Design" do need to understand their important place in things as driving all the traffic for a particular category and also serving as a set of directions for how to add additional content. Like my NRA story, there may be cases where an article decidedly doesn't belong because it doesn't link. But, then, what if it can't be categorized? I'm not a deletionist, don't get me wrong.

If there are three design categories: Design, Open Design and P2P Design, then I would tell you that my bet would be on the P2P Design category as containing the 'stuff' most well-curated on the wiki, but this is not the case.

In addition to this particular subject, I would add that most changes I'm making are non-volatile. Redirects where need, lots of useful additive categorization. Generally we should see a traffic increase as things move on. The greatest benefit, though, will be a clearer way of linking your content on the wiki, and feeling confident about how to add links to categories like design so that they get properly showcased.

Michel

All our articles have/should have a p2p perspective, or they should not be included in our wiki.

This is why our 10,000 articles have simple tags, and are found by over 12m viewers through google, because they are sprinkled with the p2p and peer like words, but competing on these terms is useless because of the competition with filesharing, which dwarfs interests in our understanding of p2p

I do use specific peer tags, only 3, peerproduction, peergovernance, peerproperty, to focus very narrowly on what happens within p2p communities proper,not just the broad societal issues that are adapting to peer to peer,

for example Pull Economy, which means users/consumers are leading, is broad, but FLOSS Foundations is narrow, because they are specific to p2p communities

A change that would require changing 10,000 articles would be counterproductive ..

Michel

Sam Rose

I would recommend not changing the ontology, nor redirecting. This ontology has an established history, and many are used to the "P2P-" meaning this is associated with P2P foundation work. We were actually developing code that does ontology mapping based on this...

Alex Rollin

Category:P2P Foundation is the new top of the site for categories. I have created redirects for most of the categories in resource collections, and begun a process of creating original, explicit perspectives at P2PStack.