The need for tools to help organize ideas goes beyond wiki.
If anybody says to you, "We need special tools for organizing pages in wiki," you can safely say:
- "You're right."
- "But, then again, we need special tools for organizing complex ideas period."
For example:
- Programmers need to organize their functions, which are embodiments of ideas.
- WikiCommunities need to organize their pages, describing large, complex, and interrelated ideas.
- Individuals need tools to organize their collected thoughts.
Further: Organizing ideas is hard and complicated work, period. Just on it's own. You have to noodle around a lot of decisions in your head.
We can tell some things about the tools:
- They need to be interactive. Just seeing a machine rendering of exiting content alone is not good enough.
- They probably need to be spatial. People arrange things before they have names for them in their heads. When they arrange things, they tend to arrange them into clumps. Clumps are generally positioned spatially.
- They probably need to support HyperLinks? of some sort.
Organizing ideas is a great way of MakingUsWiser.
CategoryInformationManagement
Discussion
I need to go, prematurely, but, there were things I wanted to add:
- "We can consider tools that already exist to help us organize our things."
- Link to how I organize my ideas; The spatial technique I used in my notebook system.
- Mind mapping software.
- SebPaquet issued a good challenge: A URL link organizer.
- I understand MurrayAltheim has some work going on, organizing references.
- Refactoringbrowsers are worth mentioning, for programmers.
- I believe that if we can make a general (re)organizing tool, we might be able to hook it up to wiki pages, and issue diffs that can be performed, reverted, and redesigned.