Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 8:12 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
The last time will be when there's a feature end-users can use without going off to the toolserver.
With a JS hack I had my tool integrated to the site. The AJAX calls went to the toolserver, but as far as the users could see it was running on the site. No one cared: It didn't produce useful results because of how categories are used, and when I suggested changing people just waved their arms at me "just make it walk the tree".
Its sort of a cycle we're stuck in. There's not much interest in developing a good category intersection tool for core because the category system on the larger Wikimedia wikis won't really work well with it. If we develop it there's the risk of the response being the same as to yours, basically: "Why should we change all the categories? Just change the tool."
And there's no incentive to change the category system until we actually have a category intersection tool in core. If people actually do it there's the risk that an intersection tool is still a long way off and we're stuck with less-useful categories (though I personally find the current system, at least on enwiki, to be mostly useless).