I think the addition of a topic/chapter nodelet could be a solution to this. I see it as a series of checkboxes with the names of various topics, from the Q&A sections of arrays and regexes to turnstep's discussion sections like voting and customization. People over a certain level would have the option of putting a post in to a topic, or of removing it. Editors would have the option of adding new topics. This would only be applicable to root-level nodes--other nodes would inherit from their parents (which means any changes to the root node's section would require cascading changes through the thread, or else some information to be stored about an entire thread rather than just a node). Naturally, these would then be searchable categories.

It would also be nice to be able to explicitly list nodes which are not categorized, so that people scouring the archives to use up votes can also sort the old posts while they're at it. ;)

Update I was thinking of the keyword nodelet when I wrote this post but commented out my thoughts on that because I couldn't think of how to tie it in. So here it is, out of comments:

Better yet, let it replace the keywords nodelet! The keywords nodelet is pretty much useless. People just add random stuff that in no way helps with searching. But even if quality content was the norm, I think the keyword nodelet would be of minimal use as a searching mechanism. Supersearch already looks for words found in the node body, and any words which aren't found in the node but would be good search terms can be included in comments, which are also searched.

Of course, such books would be very nice. But I don't think we could write 'books' in the same, cooparative matter that we do so succesfully when writing nodes/node-trees. That's why one person should be responsible for one 'book'. Moreover, these 'books' would also serve as high-quality indici to the site. And these indici are badly needed, as a lot of high quality nodes are hard to find, unless you spent quite some time @perlmonks. In the latter case you now them and you'll probably have them in your personal nodelet already.

But to serve as indici/books to a certain subject, you need only a few of these subjects, otherwise you need to index the indici... So I would opt for a few of these 'books' aka 'collections', and make a list of wanted subjects. Persons than can subscribe (to prevent double work) to these subjects and make the collection, asking for help from others if necessary.

These 'books' should be of such a quality that they deserve their own section in the monestary. Maybe they can even make it to print at a certain stage.

Such a system would require a lot of work from the hand of the 'authors/editors'. Ppl however tend to spend a lot of time at the monestary, so I expect ppl are willing to invest time in this kind of editing (like epoptai when it comes to CB clients, or jcwren for the stats and more).

Monks mostly are specialized in one kind of subject more or less, so the books should be composed by the 'experts' on the subject.

One subject I would add to larsen's list:

• Coding: Methods and approaches

Jeroen
"We are not alone"(FZ)

That will make it far easier to turn some of these ideas into reality without undue work on vroom's part...

I envision having listsings like:

eval(34,789) - 12334(3), 56789(23), ....

where eval is our word, the first number is the total amount of times it was found, then node_ids where it was found are listed one by one, with the number of times it was found on them. Maybe one could even make that index searchable so that you could weed out certian words to have a very short list of things to go through. Perhaps we could even have a separate index for just node titles and there there would be a count of how many times the word appears in the title and the body...

just the first thing that came to me reading this one =)

"A man's maturity -- consists in having found again the
seriousness one had as a child, at play."   --Nietzsche
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