From: Magnus Manske on Friday, December 12, 2003 3:59 AM To: Wikimedia developers Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Categories simplified
Toby Bartels wrote:
Your idea of letting the software interpret [[List of ...]] as in [[List of biology topics]] is interesting, although Magnus' category code is much further along. Also, [[List of actors]] is a rather different page; it's encyclopedic, whereas [[List of biology topics]], by listing pages in Wikipedia, is /about/ Wikipedia. (By rights, it should be [[Wikipedia:List of biology topics]].) So the [[Category:]] plan can replace [[List of biology topics]] but should leave [[List of actors]] as it is.
Which in no way hinders us to take one (existing) list or the other (e.g., [[List of biology topics]]), and run a bot (once) adding "[[Category:Biology]]" on all pages listed there. The [[List of
biology
topics]] will then be obsolete and can be redirected to [[Category:Biology]].
How does this deal with, say, [[list of sports]] which is not just a alphabetical list?
The Cunctator wrote:
From: Magnus Manske on Friday, December 12, 2003 3:59 AM
Which in no way hinders us to take one (existing) list or the other (e.g., [[List of biology topics]]), and run a bot (once) adding "[[Category:Biology]]" on all pages listed there. The [[List of
biology
topics]] will then be obsolete and can be redirected to [[Category:Biology]].
How does this deal with, say, [[list of sports]] which is not just a alphabetical list?
I am aware that not all the "list of" things can be dumped into a bot like that. I looked at [[list of sports]], and several of the "groups" already have their own article (e.g., [[gymnastics]]). So, what I'd do is, mark *all* the articles on [[list of sports]] as [[Category:sport]], and then some also as [[Category:Extreme sports]] etc., with [[Category:Extreme sports]] marked as [[Category:sport]].
That will result in a *long* alphabetical list on [[Category:sport]], but that page will also show links to its immediate subcategories, [[Category:Extreme sports]] among them. There, you can find that section.
We can work on the display details, though: On a category page with more than 100 articles and more than 5 subcategories, we could skip the list of articles by default and present only the links to the sub-categories, as well as a link "show all articles in this category". That will save rendering and bandwith.
Magnus
Magnus Manske wrote in part:
The Cunctator wrote:
Magnus Manske wrote:
Which in no way hinders us to take one (existing) list or the other (e.g., [[List of biology topics]]), and run a bot (once) adding "[[Category:Biology]]" on all pages listed there. The [[List of biology topics]] will then be obsolete and can be redirected to [[Category:Biology]].
How does this deal with, say, [[list of sports]] which is not just a alphabetical list?
I am aware that not all the "list of" things can be dumped into a bot like that. I looked at [[list of sports]], and several of the "groups" already have their own article (e.g., [[gymnastics]]). So, what I'd do is, mark *all* the articles on [[list of sports]] as [[Category:sport]], and then some also as [[Category:Extreme sports]] etc., with [[Category:Extreme sports]] marked as [[Category:sport]].
And you would ''not'' redirect [[List of sports]] at all, right? That's a fine article for an encyclopedia as it is, and not quite the same thing as [[List of sport topics]]. [[Category:Sport]] should more closely resemble [[List of sport topics]] (which has additional entries such as [[Sport medicine]]). Granted, [[List of sport topics]] doesn't actually exist currently, but it might have done; and if so, it would be different.
In fact, we might ''start'' running a bot, set to create redirects, on pages of the form [[List of ... topics]] (with human confirmation). Then we can set up a bot for other [[List of ...]] articles that does ''not'' create redirects -- but this one will require a great deal more help from the human operator.
-- Toby
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