Magnus Manske wrote:
Categories are my implementation of the filtering issue, something that would be quite difficult with lists. It could also work to tag images as "GFDL", "public domain" or "fair use". It can also replace the lists. So, if we implement a filtering option anyway, why not use the opportunity?
Magnus
Magnus,
My comments were not meant to criticise categories, or your attempts to make an implementation. I'm a proponent of categories: I think they can serve useful purposes. I'm also grateful you are actually exploring the problem space, instead of just talking about it like the rest of us.
I think the [[List of XXX topics]] categories are very useful, and having a pointer from the category list to the article is the natural way to do it: it also handles the case of making a category for a non-existent article.
But it would also be nice to flag an article for membership in a category list by adding a back-link.
The huge maths topics article shows that the "flat article" approach does not scale well for very large lists: there are two possible routes to making this better: either
i: fixing the scaling problem for articles with very large lists of links, or ii: a special implementation for category lists
Neil