Wikis that are intensively used quickly become unstructured and chaotic. While you can, of course, have ILIAS inform you about new or changed/edited pages, how do these pages relate to each other? Unlike Learning Modules, which have content that is structured like the chapters in a book, the pages of a wiki are merely connected somehow or other with each other via links. Up until now, to order the pages in a wiki thematically and make it easier to find your way around, it has been necessary to laboriously create lists by hand and to continuously update them. Thanks to Custom Metadata and automatic page lists, this is now much easier in ILIAS 5.0

The basic principle behind Custom Metadata can be easily explained. As an administrator you can create metadata sets as you see fit and assign these to a wiki. These metadata sets can then be found on each individual wiki page as separate blocks in the right hand column. All users with write/edit permission in a wiki can then add metadata to any page or hide a metadata block if it isn't needed on a page.

Pages that have metadata assigned to them can then be shown by ILIAS in automatically maintained lists. For this you will find the new Element 'Page List' in the page editor of your wiki. Insert this Element into any part of your wiki that you want and select which metadata a page needs to have in order to appear in the the list. A page can include multiple Page Lists with different metadata or combinations of metadata. ILIAS will then fill and keep all such Page Lists current. Simple, reliable and always up to date. The only thing that you have to do yourself is enter the metadata information on the actual wiki pages.

An example of Custom Metadata in use is the Feature Wiki on ilias.de. Up until now, the over 2000 pages in the wiki were structured using laboriously maintained overview pages. These overviews showed, for example, all Features that were released with ILIAS 5.0 or all Features that had been recommended or implemented for course management. That these lists were not always up to date, was to be expected - and having to adjust multiple pages every time a change was made also meant a lot of work.