Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 8:12 PM, David Gerard
<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The last time will be when there's a feature
end-users can use without
going off to the toolserver.
With a JS hack I had my tool integrated to the site. The AJAX calls
went to the toolserver, but as far as the users could see it was
running on the site. No one cared: It didn't produce useful results
because of how categories are used, and when I suggested changing
people just waved their arms at me "just make it walk the tree".
Its sort of a cycle we're stuck in. There's not much interest in
developing a good category intersection tool for core because the
category system on the larger Wikimedia wikis won't really work well
with it. If we develop it there's the risk of the response being the
same as to yours, basically: "Why should we change all the categories?
Just change the tool."
And there's no incentive to change the category system until we actually
have a category intersection tool in core. If people actually do it
there's the risk that an intersection tool is still a long way off and
we're stuck with less-useful categories (though I personally find the
current system, at least on enwiki, to be mostly useless).
--
Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)