I like the idea of organizing nodes by their topic (chapter) as opposed to just the type of post (question, discussion, etc). I am not convinced that there is value in adding complementary content to link nodes together, however, or in ordering them relative to one another within a section.

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.

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