The following was sent to me by Nikola Smolenski (thank you very much!).
I'm forwarding it to this list hopeing that someone can suggest the
proper way to get this into the CVS.
thanks, daniel.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Advancing the concept of categories
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 11:08:50 +0200
From: Nikola Smolenski <smolensk(a)eunet.yu>
To: Daniel Kinzler <daniel(a)brightbyte.de>
References: <20040824053338.75B8519503A4(a)mail.wikimedia.org>
<412B7282.30307(a)brightbyte.de>
Hi David!
On Tuesday 24 August 2004 18:53, Daniel Kinzler wrote:
In the german WP, we have massive problems devising a
consistent and
useful pattern for categorisation. After some trying and discussiong, it
seems that the software laks some features that would make categories a
truly powerful tool of structuring the WP. So my question is how hard it
would be to implement those features. Here are the once I personally
(and quite a few others, too) feel are the most important:
* Search over cross-sections of categories, an a sensible syntax for
linking to such sections.
I have made a patch which does this, and Timwi did some improvement on
it, but
it is not commited for reasons unknown to me. See "Multiple categories"
thread at
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-July/thread.html
The patch makes cross-sections by separating categories with / , for
example
Category:City/Germany gives a list of all cities in Germany. Someone
reported
that there are several (about 10 on all Wikipedias) categories which have /
in the name so perhaps there should be a vote on Meta about this (should
these categories be renamed or should some other separator be used and
which
one; Timwi suggested // ).
I really don't know how to convince someone with CVS access to commit this
patch. Perhaps a feature request should be made at wikizilla and voted for.
* a concept of implicite membership in categories,
such that members of
a sub-categorie are automatically members of the parent-categorie(s)
(transitive covers). For category-display, this should be optional. For
cross sections, this should be the default behaviour.
* A disctinction between a categorie being a subcategory, or just
belonging to another categorie, just as Articles do.
would it be feasable to put this features into the software? What would
be the problems? how soom could we have such features?
It could probably be done, and I could do it, but I surely won't before the
first one is implemented.