Like Pages

Here is a power tool for surfing wiki. Starting from any wiki page, the like script finds similarly named pages based on the first and last word of the page's title. Try these to get the idea...

There is a LikePages link at the bottom of every page which will do this search for the page you are reading.

This works for proper names too.

These power names score big here because they are at the core of what we talk about.

But a few other names don't score at all since they compound a different way.

The WikiWiki LikePages database updates nightly. You can also use the MetaWikiSearchEngine against yesterday's WikiList if you want. For example

Navigating the result set results in another like-search. If you'd actually like to look at a page, as opposed to just marveling at the diversity of wiki, click its name when it appears in the explanatory text.

Why not make the number displayed to the left of the page name be a link to the page itself?

Pages created just today won't be visible to this search until tomorrow.

The search tries to be smart about the article "The" and plurals made with "s".

Want to really take the tour? Try selecting names from alternate columns. See how far you can go without repeating or getting stuck.

JeroenMostert first made the name structure observation and suggested it as a means of hierarchically organizing pages. He built a trial implementation which was pretty cool. See this page on StrikiWiki, http://ch.twi.tudelft.nl/~mostert/striki/teststriki.pl?RelatedPages, http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiNameSpaceViewer, or his brief discussion in WikiWikiSuggestions.

Nice, Ward. That's really cool and useful. -- BillKelly

Kudos go to Jeroen, whose insight inspired this work. -- WardCunningham

I really like the approach you have taken, with an excerpt and the two columns (first + last). My trial implementation tries to combine the two columns into a single tree and also shows more levels at once. This somewhat complicates things (especially my code) and I'm not yet sure what (if any) advantages it has. For some of the power names my trial returns a more specific set of names, mostly because it uses not just the first or last word but the whole name. My trail script sometimes also returns names not returned by LikePages.

For an example, see http://ch.twi.tudelft.nl/~mostert/striki/namestruct.pl?MetaModel.

DataModelPatterns (coming from DataModel from Model) is returned which does not have the search word as first or last.

-- JeroenMostert

Why are the excerpts not formatted? This would especially be useful for those see xxx pages. -- JeroenMostert

That story got bumped to the next iteration. Currently, I open a copy of the db optimized for search, not formatting. -- WardCunningham

Simple feature request: could you link the LikePages on the bottom of the EditPage form for otherwise non-existent pages?

I'm thinking of the link I just made to RedBlackTree. Maybe it doesn't exist because the topic is called RedBlackTrees? or BalancedTree? (I'm not an algorithm expert, so forgive me if I've conflated the two. They serve to illustrate my point here and under EditingPieMenus, at least.)

Thanks. Feel free to nuke this section when it is done or WontFix?'ed.

''Ah, I had just come back here to make the same (or similar) request. I note the above comment is not signed and I'm 98% sure I wrote it... JFTR. -- MatthewAstley