Simetrical wrote:
Since
we've also been discussing
the problems of implementing "Category Intersection", an interim
solution could be repopulating parent categories and "hiding"
intersection categories. Fully populated parent categories are the norm
in some projects like German Wikipedia and they also appear sometimes in
English Wikipedia (eg. Category:Operas). I have a proposal posted
currently about fully populating "Index" categories at en:Wikipedia
talk:Categorization, and it would be much improved if the intersection
categories could be hidden. The primary reason we have been deleting
intersection categories is because they clutter articles. If they
didn't clutter articles, they wouldn't be a problem.
A very reasonable idea, that can be implemented Right Now with little
effort on the user level. Important or interesting intersections can
be manually populated, or populated in batches with bots. It's not as
good as a real solution, but it should work well enough.
Fabulous! Can we do it? The ability to hide categories from pages will
have a huge effect on categories. One that will be quite positive, I
think. The current discussion started because a bot was set to
repopulate categories, so the bots are ready. If this is going to
happen, we need to start discussions about guidelines beforehand and get
people on board, so please give us some warning in advance. If it
literally can happen "right now", I'd actually prefer it be left turned
off until us category wonks can generate a plan.
...
There would need to be a naming convention for
the automatically
generated categories, perhaps using a double colon -- so the
intersection of Category:Mozart and Category:Operas would generate
Category:Mozart::Operas. . . .
By this point, the feature you describe would be more difficult to
implement than just implementing real and properly efficient category
intersection with Lucene or something. When you realize that to get
your hack working properly, you need to implement so many workarounds
than the real feature would be easier, it's time to discard the idea
of a hack.
Forget I ever mentioned it. I'll wait for the real thing. With the
first step of making hidden categories we can set to work on
repopulating categories. This will make the transition to Category
Intersection much smoother.
--Samuel Wantman
[en:User:Sam]