JamesAnderson wrote:Before the forum was created, I had mentioned this on a talk page for a user group meeting, maybe preferring the descending order for the purpose of allowing 'drilling down' to the needed article.
The portal system does this 'drill down' navigation pretty well. There is not really a wikimedia feature to see structure otherwise, except for subpages. Subpages use slashes, and are ugly.
To be fair, on Wikipedia, I can do a search for a county, but I couldn't get to the county from the state page. I think that is a failing of their infoboxes / templates, not a failing of portals in general.
'Drilling down' i think is a good concept, but the difficulty of predicting a name causes problems. If you wanted NYC, would that article exist in the NY County tree? Would you want Kings CO (Brooklyn) information? What county is Sacramento in?
I agree with Thomas, we need a structure so that we can build a framework for people to add information. I would be really cool if we could auto-copy a template into a non-existing page when a user clicked on the link for it, and then have them fill in the pertinent info.
If all this works, then the portal system would be easy to fill, and users would have a good place to put their content. Exceptions like major cities and boundary changes could be handled case-by-case.
If you look at the US_Structure page, you will see I am a big proponent of drill-down, but I have moved away from it a bit as I see the portal system get built out.
The Earl