WikiVoyage has a small but clever extension to do quicker lookup of
pages in additional content namespaces if no namespace prefix is
provided. So if we used this for Commons, and configured "Category:"
as an extra lookup namespace, you could type "Low quality chemical
diagrams" and it'd pull up the category of that name immediately
without the full-text search being loaded. This appears to basically
be another solution to
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11380
The drawback is that it doesn't play nice with autocompletion and
other API consumers yet. Ideally I suspect you'd want autcompletion to
do lookup in multiple namespaces as well, and provide subtle namespace
hinting (as oposed to prefixing) in the dropdown, like so (where
CATEGORY would be in a smaller font).
[ Low ]
Low quality chemical diagrams CATEGORY
Lower Saxony
Thoughts? Would this be a useful improvement for Commons in
particular, even without autocompletion? I suspect it could help
reduce some of the category/gallery pain.
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
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