On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 00:21:14 -0400, Chris Phoenix cphoenix@crnano.org wrote:
I propose that if a link like [[foo]] is processed for output, and article foo doesn't exist but category foo does, then the link should be treated like [[:Category:foo|foo]]. The former is a lot easier to write.
This will make it hard to create an article foo if category foo already exists. I'm not sure that's a bad thing. If someone does manage to do that, then all [[foo]] links will switch from category to article. But these are the only drawbacks I can see.
I think this would be a *very* bad idea; categories are often named very similarly to valid articles, and while a policy could be made of not doing so ([[Category:History topics]] not [[Category:History]]; [[Category:Types of toy]] not [[Category:Toys]]) this seems like a rather dubious thing to enshrine in the software. Having links that magically change target (and thus don't show up as non-existent) would *only* be a good idea if the plain target was *never* going to be a desired name. I don't think [[Category:Foo]] vs [[Foo]] gives such a guarantee.