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 Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list Commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <javascript:;> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l

On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 2:29 AM, Andrew Gray &lt;andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk&gt; wrote: It's already in the default search mask, so categories and other default search namespaces will come up in fulltext search (your own user preferences may be different, but that's the behavior for new or logged out users) -- but the instant lookup (what used to be the "Go" button) only works on the main namespace, or if you provide the namespace prefix/alias.

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. […] 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. This sounds like a very good addition, yes.