On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 10:59 AM, Daniel Schwen <lists(a)schwen.de> wrote:
So how does this take care of deep indexing non-atomic
categories?
=>How will this extension be even remotely useful for let's say commons?
That's a social problem, and so of secondary importance. Once a
technical mechanism exists for solving the problem given a particular
type of categories, recategorization will happen, sooner or later. If
you think people will flat-out refuse to move to a new, better system,
I think you're mistaken: look at the completeness of the move from
lists to categories, for instance, when categories were first
introduced. (Lists are still used, but in most cases only where they
do things that categories currently cannot.) The same goes for all
the other useful technical innovations that get introduced. All it
would take is running some bots for a while to switch to the better
system, not a big cost for a large wiki like Commons with plenty of
bot operators.
On a technical level, dealing with non-atomic categories is a much
bigger pain than dealing with atomic ones. On a social level, on the
other hand, they're equally doable, as dewiki shows. There will be
transition costs for wikis that have a large body of non-atomic
categories, but those will be one-time only.