On 8/14/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Your suggestion is simmlar to what I've been
advocating for a while.
Perhaps your particular version will gain the traction mine have
failed to gain.
Sorry to re-invent parts of your wheel :-)
Perhaps instead of 'implications' being hard
hard assignment they were
used in a way users can reject 'implications' which don't apply. This
could be accomplished through a kind of negative entry like
[[-Category:foo]]. Obviously the correct this to do would be to only
use implications in the right places, but there are always
exceptions... it would be a shame to introduce something which
couldn't handle them.
Hmmm... [[Category:-foo]] sounds better, and wouldn't involve special
syntax, only magic for categories starting with "-", which shouldn't
affect any existing categories.
It seems your suggestion includes the concept of
creating a new kind
of thing, while I've previously proposed that we just repurpose
categories for this application.
I don't much care if the solution uses categories, or some new syntax
and foolinks table. ... it's just that categories are readily
available for this purpose. Really it's all the same to me.
The only compelling reason I can see to use something other than
categories for this is that we don't currently have real category
redirects, which would be useful to allow a single unique tag to have
representations in multiple languages. If providing yet another
syntax is what it takes to get adoption then I'm all for it.
I was thinking along the lines of a system /not/ based on the wiki
text, as categories are. Something that can be handled without editing
the page. For example, I wrote a JavaScript that allows for
adding/editing categories visually separate from text editing (well,
almost). However, this breaks as soon as a category is transcluded
through a template. There lies a source of potential coding nightmares
;-)
I have an existing local tool which recommends
categories based on the
parent categories on the image as well as the categories which are on
images which are also in the existing categories or on gallery pages
common to the image it is suggesting for. It would be pretty easy to
convert that into a webapp, possibly even an ajax popup that inserts
the new selections directly into the site.
Adding new categories to a page is easy enough, altering/removing them
programmatically is when your hair starts to fall out ;-)
Magnus