From: <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org> Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2006 22:17:05 +0000 To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Hello Puppy wrote I have occasionally wanted this feature: flatten out all subcategories of something into a list. I hope we see it. That does not mean that I want [[Category:Mathematics]] to consist of 15000 pages. How would that help anyone? I have actually done work, on [[Category:Set theory]] (where I was thanked) and [[Category:Fluid dynamics]] (perhaps unnoticed) on getting useful subcategories; which then can sit inside two or more higher-level categories. This all adds to the convenience of the user. It is quite a good idea, in many cases, to consider splitting categories which have gone 'over the page'. Charles ----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.ntlworld.com Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software Visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Purely and simply, categories are useful for many things they weren't designed for or intended to do. Remember, they were a cute hack invented by Magnus a couple of years ago in the face of some pretty serious skepticism.

charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com wrote: This seems to be an extremely widespread and popular fallacy. "/I/ can't think of any use for it, therefore we mustn't have it." Could you all please think about this for 1 second and realise that it's a total fallacy?

From: Timwi <timwi(a)gmx.net> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org> Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2006 17:43:34 +0000 To: wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Hello Ray Saintonge wrote: You appear to be comparing Google search results with a Category page, which do not compare at all because Google search results are not organised and don't have subcategories. The current situation is something like this: Category X has no articles and 20 sub-categories, all the articles that "are an X" are in one of those sub-categories. The proposed change is: Category X contains all the articles that "are an X", while also containing the 20 sub-categories, listed prominently at the top of the page. I don't think anyone can reasonably deny that this is strictly an improvement, no matter how little. Someone who *really wants* the entire list of X'es can now have it, and someone who doesn't can still browse the sub-categories as before. Nothing has been taken away. Timwi _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

From: "Steve Bennett" <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org> Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2006 10:29:01 +1100 To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Hello Yes, this would be good. But better navigation for categories with large numbers of items would be good. Thousands per page if necessary... Steve _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l