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Currently I'm building the housing for a repository of WordPress code. It will be an open source project where the foundation will be housed on GitHub and participation on building the "curated library of code" will happen there as well.

Now, as this is something that is close to what a wiki does:

  1. giving contributors tools to collaborate on content creation with the lowest entry barrier possible.
  2. giving researchers tools to quickly examine data they need.

I already know (pretty much) what tools I need to give contributors, but I'm really stuck with researchers. I looked at how existing Wiki-Systems do it. Aside from linked words, there's not much. But as I'm building a repository that contains code, it's not too useful. So here are some ideas:

  • A list of Categories > Subcategories > Titles
  • Full text search
  • A tag cloud that would be filterable by a search box

I don't want to offer a lot of fancy stuff. As a starting point there should just be a convenient way to search for code "related to task X".

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I'd place my bets, all of them, on full text search. I implemented such a system which had 500'000 documents, and nothing but folder structure to work on. So we implemented search on that server to make everything discoverable.

We implemented filters based on type of document (file extension) which could be transferred to code syntax in your issue. We made filter on date, author, organization (if any) and mapped metadata.

We predefined metadata and had it mapped in the search index by certain rules. There are a lot of things you can do with search, if you want to. But it takes time, and you need to analyze querys against search results and users choice. That way you can fine tune your search engine to be better over time.

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  • Yep, that's the current and common way to do it - aside from directly linking articles in text. Still I hope that there will come someone along and have that genius idea that ends that area and finds a better way than just evaluating a topic and just fine tuning a search engine based on empiric data.
    – kaiser
    Jan 7, 2014 at 21:01
  • @kaiser Like Gandalf doing his magic with the wand?! :-)
    – Benny Skogberg
    Jan 7, 2014 at 21:39
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    More like Tom when he catches Jerry.
    – kaiser
    Jan 8, 2014 at 0:57

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