On 8/14/07, Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
Sorry to re-invent parts of your wheel :-)
Gads don't apologise. It's just evidence that I'm not alone in my instanity. Your proposal is distinct from my prior rants and I was glad to see 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 ;-)
[snip]
Adding new categories to a page is easy enough, altering/removing them programmatically is when your hair starts to fall out ;-)
So I know this pain... it was a driving reason why on enwp we changed the policy so that all templates signifying non-free media both had to begin with "Non-free" and could never be applyed to the page indirectly through another template which did not begin with the words 'Non-free'. (I.e. the image description page must match the regexp "{{[Nn]on-free" if any of those templates are displayed on the page)
Months of work and a million edits later, its done http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3APrefixindex&from=Non... and the tools work much better now. ;)
In the case of image categories, I think the inability to remove a template applied category via the pretty interface would not be a big deal. Taking categories external to the wikitext would leave us a problem of figuring out how to revision control their changes, which I'm pretty confident is a mandatory feature. The obvious way to revision control them would be to append them to the Wikitext, which would put us back to where we are mostly but with some fancy sugar to hide the internals. ;)