Quim Gil wrote:
On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 3:23 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
The proposed concept called "collections,"
Now the project has a different working name: Gather
Thanks, good to know.
doesn't really leverage the fact that we already have shared lists of pages called categories.
I wonder how would someone create a list of pages "My Favourite Music Albums" using MediaWiki categories.
Perhaps some kind of prefixing scheme. For example, we could have a category named "User:Example/My Favourite Music Albums". Or we could have "Example's favourite music albums"; why not?
MediaWiki categories already support the idea of "user-facing" categories and "hidden" categories (e.g., article maintenance categories are typically hidden on the English Wikipedia). We could extend this model or redo it to be more flexible. This would be closer to iterative development.
How would thousands of users gather thousands of pages using MediaWiki categories.
Erm, probably in the same way thousands of users already gather thousands of pages into categories? :-) Wikimedia has a pretty large collection of categories, some of which contain hundreds of thousands of items. We scale!
How would these categories be private, how would their owners avoid other users messing with them.
The end result of a personal selection of pages might look similar to a MediaWiki category, but they are essentially different.
The watchlist model is probably broken, so I'm not sure that it's is sensible to use it as a guide for future development. Though arguably the same could easily be said about categories.
As for other users messing with category membership, we value openness around here. Think about the way we treat user pages: we don't prevent other users from improving them, even though they have somebody else's name on them. If you make a list called "1990s pop bands", wouldn't it be great if others could update it? That's basically the current category system. And if we also had "Example's 1990s pop bands," others probably wouldn't update it because they're not Example, but they might occasionally add or remove a page and you might really enjoy that.
The category system is deficient. We have one of the clunkiest systems to manage categories. HotCat and VisualEditor make adding a category vaguely easier, but the software shouldn't be so crippled out of the box. And even a decent input system doesn't resolve wanting to, for example, rename a category in MediaWiki. Or track category membership over time. And each challenge that categories face, this new product (Gather or Collections or whatever) will face almost exactly the same issues.
There's so much room for improvement in the category system and it seems like the mobile team really wants lists of pages, which MediaWiki core already has in the form of categories. It seems like a win-win.
MZMcBride