Improving Wiki's organisation to make finding pages easier

[ak19]

The wiki search requires great accuracy on the part of the user in knowing what topic they are searching on.

If the searching cannot be improved at all, we could make up for it by having even better organisation of the content pages. Need to make documents easier to find, and have more interlinking.

Mr John Rose wrote: "In practice, the Wiki is now so massive and cluttered that it is extremely difficult to get out a required detail (although easier if it happens to be in one of the tutorials). I'm wondering why this is so, when, for example the Wikipedia is not so daunting. I'm wondering whether some manual protocols to better organise the information could help."

Katherine Don wrote: "Yes, I agree that a better organisation would be helpful. Currently there are several starting pages so its difficult to know where to start from. If we had one starting page for the docs, then a hierarchical index on top of all the info pages, then it would be more useful I think.

I'd like to get rid of the FAQ, as there are lots of pages that don't really fit into the 'freq asked questions' theme. and I think thats why we have ended up with a hard to follow structure.

An easy to navigate index is what we need."

"There are indeed vast amounts of information in the wiki (possibly nearly all that could be wished for), but indeed the problem is how to get it out. If you know the page, then you would not need the wiki, this would be using it as simply a linear array of pages. In general when I search I get a reply that there is no page on this, and then a list of many hits on many pages. If you click on one, you don't go to the hit, but only to the page, so then you have to search in the page, then try another hit, etc. If there were a way of doing a more refined search and getting directly to the concerned information, then great. Another possibility would be to better organise the information in a hierarchical, non-redundant manner (or with more internal links) to that the user would have a better chance of getting efficiently to the needed information. Maybe other members of the team could comment?"