On 30/01/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Unless I find huge opposition here, I'm going to begin changing the commons instruction pages to reflect this use of categories rather than our historic use.
Hold up just a tiny bit. You are not paying attention to the reason that narrow categories developed in the first place. It's because the support for working with categories is incredibly poor. Categories with over 200 items find half their subcats go missing (from the first page) because subcat paging is not separate to article(/media) paging.(bug 1211)
Narrow categories developed because there was no means to perform category intersections. They are manual category intersections. I wouldn't suggest changing that at least until this category intersection thing is implemented and we can see its utility.
Secondly, is this category intersection thing really not going to include an option to automatically search subcats as well? (a la http://tools.wikimedia.de/~daniel/WikiSense/CategoryIntersect.php?&wikil... see "depth=3") That seems like a pretty vital basic functionality that will be needed, even if we switch to using broad cats.
Thirdly, your proposal is going to massively increase the average number of categories for each file. (Although they will typically have shorter names.) How far "up" the tree do you propose it will be reasonable to go? For a portrait of a woman, we should put [[category:women]] [[category:homo]] [[category:Hominidae]] [[category:primates]] [[category:Mammalia]] [[Category:Vertebrata]] [[Category:Chordata]] [[Category:Animalia]] [[Category:Eukaryota]] ? They're all true, are they not?
Instead of doing that, I think it would be more sensible to continue the tradition of only putting the most specific cat that applies, and adjusting the software to have an option to display subcategory items into the current category (like "flatten" I think) when desired. (bug 2725)
regards Brianna user:pfctdayelise