Re: [xwiki-devs] [Brainstorming] "Child/sibling/descendant page" vs "subpage"

IMO the "sibling", "parent", "child", "leaf" terminology is too distracting since they are metaphors and, due to its real-world signification, some users might focus too much on that instead of simply focusing on the hierarchy aspect which is very simply communicated by the sub prefix. E.g. of a possible misinterpretation: A user wants to create a document under (sub) the structure of another document, he does not want to have his documents start giving "birth" to little baby (child) documents, and then those documents could have little baby brothers or sisters (siblings) and so on (descendants), thus creating a "dynasty" of documents, instead of a structure/hierarchy. Yes, that sounds weird, but that`s how it would sound like, IMO, to an English native speaker. As an exercise, try translating that terminology in another language (your native language preferably) and you will get a relatively similar result which is not really compatible IMO with "documents". The tree structure by itself is an extremely generic structure and could easily be mapped in certain implementations to these "dynasty" metaphors, however documents are pretty specific (not much room for interpretation and they are not living things) so using the "dynasty" approach feels a bit off. There is also the "child vs descendant" issue that I don`t think we want to start dealing with (differentiating) in our UIs. Just my concern or maybe I am being too picky, but it probably comes down to what we want to choose to ignore, as long as it is our intentional choice to do that.

Thanks, Eduard On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 3:10 PM, vincent(a)massol.net wrote: > > > > > > On 17 Sep 2015 at 13:32:28, Eduard Moraru (enygma2002(a)gmail.com(mailto: > enygma2002(a)gmail.com)) wrote: > > > With the introduction of Nested Spaces / Nested Documents, we find > > ourselves having to expand our terminology to accommodate the tree-like > > structure of spaces/documents that we are managing. > > > > IMO, we have started going in the wrong direction with using standard > tree > > terminology directly in XWiki's UI, introducing new terms that simple > users > > could be easily confused by or overwhelmed (this adding to the already > > existing ones). > > > > The specific issue I have in mind is how do we refer child entities for > > each concept (wiki, space, page) and how does this scale when the > hierarchy > > increases. > > > > What I propose is that we Keep It SSimple (*™*) :) and just use the "sub" > > prefix for the concept at hand. > > > > Examples: > > * wiki -> subwiki (here we can continue using "wiki", as discussed > > previously [1], since we don`t actually support nested wikis yet, but if > > "subwiki" is used in a conversation it still makes perfect sense) > > * space -> subspace [2] > > * page -> subpage [3] > > > > The problem with the term "child", as pointed out by Marius in an offline > > chat, has indeed the issue that it can only be applied correctly for > first > > level descendants, after which it becomes inaccurate, since starting with > > the second level the term "descendant" is more appropriate. > > I’m not sure about this. I think Children could be used generically to > mean any level of Children but would need to be checked. > > > > All of this becomes unnecessarily complicated and, IMO, we should avoid > > dealing with it by using the "sub" prefix which is much easier to grasp > and > > accept. > > > > On a similar note, I also find the term "nested" to be a bit > unnecessarily > > complicated, specially for non-technical and non-english native users. > > > > WDYT? > > I don’t like the “Sub" terminology because it’s incomplete. It’s not > complete because you still need words for Parents, Siblings, Root, etc. > > I'd much prefer to use a standard Tree terminology: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_(data_structure)#Terminologies_used_in_T… > > BTW Terminal Page could be replaced by Leaf Page if we wanted too but > maybe that’s too technical? > > I’d be ok to replace subwiki by Child Wiki/Children Wikis to be consistent. > > So overall I find Child/Children, Parent, and Siblings very easy to > understand by any simple user. I find that using Sub, Parent, Siblings is > not better (and it would certainly not replace Sibling). > > WDYT? > > Thanks > -Vincent > > > Thanks, > > Eduard > > > > ---------- > > [1] http://markmail.org/message/cehvpds5qmljq5f7 > > [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subspace > > [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpage