on 4/10/07 10:02 AM, charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com at charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com wrote: And have them in my face as the first thing I see!?! PASS! :-) As you can see from the last days' posts, so much for my pledge! I'd be headed for rehab. but I don't have the celebrity for admission ;-). Seriously, folks, thank you for all of your truly intelligent, insightful and very helpful input about this. Perhaps we need to get back to a basic question: What was the original intention in creating the WP Category System? What was its original purpose? Marc

On 10/04/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote: The Wikipedia system followed from the WikiWikiWeb category system, which was developed in 1996 to categorize pages on that wiki. For historical context, see http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CategoriesDiscussion , and some of the pages linked from this archived page: http://web.archive.org/web/19961129234150/http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AboutCateg… , followed by http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_category_schemes and its associated talk page. -- Earle Martin http://downlode.org/ http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/

The issue I have with the "categories should be more like tags" comment that is posted almost identically every few weeks is that it assumes that if tags "happen", they'll be able to easily display results for combinations of tags... but assumes that categories can't display their subcontents, when the latter is probably easier than the former. The thing about articles being sorted out of their main categories is that for categories like People, American people, Writers, etc., they're ludicrously huge. If articles were in all relevant categories with the current software, it'd be unworkable. What I'd like to see technically is: 1) subcategories not being pushed to later pages by articles in the category. If a category contains two subcategories: "A" and "Z" and 200 articles starting with letters A-Y, Z appears on the second page. This makes article-full categories unnavigable. All the subcategories should come before any of the articles. 2) By default, categories only display articles which are not in any of their subcategories, but have a "show all articles in this category" link (which'd probably amount to a "&show=all" link). Using this would require a little better "hierarchy hygiene", though... whether subcategories are really /sub/categories... but we need that anyway. 3) If 2 were implemented, a "would be nice" option, that I fear might be more work on the server, would be to have a button/link next to each subcategory (like the tree [+]/[-] there now) that would add the articles in that subcategory to the displayed list of articles in the category. -- Jake Nelson [[en:User:Jake Nelson]]

Marc Riddell wrote: I note that in the Classic skin the categories are wrapped in <p class='catlinks'></p> when displayed but that #catlinks {display: none;} in my standard.css doesn't make it disappear like I was able to do with #stub {display:none;} Stubs are wrapped in <div class="notice metadata" id="stub"></div>. How easy would it be to add a similar div to the category links? That way people who really hate categories and find them nothing but clutter can make them go away.