Magnus, this is done because categories (as well as all other lists) are potentially huge in size, and might require paging. You do not want to be in a situation where you asked for many titles, but only retrieved some of the data for just the first - because then you will have to continue from that point, plus re-submit all other items.

Now imagine that a generator made that list - so every time the generator will have to remake that list, just so that the query may continue from the parts of the first item.

All this may create extremely in-efficient execution. Hence, it is easier for the client to make one request to get a list of categories, and more requests to get info for each category.

On 7/16/07, Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:

Hi,

I want use the api to list all pages that are in any of the categories which are in Category:Category_redirects on commons. So I tried

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&generator=categoryme...

but apparently it's not that easy...

IMHO "list=categorymembers" should not insist on "cmcategory", but rather try to fall back to the generator list.

Additionally, the 500 limit could be imposed on the actual output; as the generator is internal, it could have 5000 or unlimited (depending on context).

Cheers, Magnus

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